Image: A film still of the Foster children enjoying carnival food (SPRA 449.01.10, Fonds 449: Foster Family fonds)
Movie Monday highlights videos from the Archives’ film collection. Every week, an archival film will be featured on our YouTube channel and here on our blog. The Movie Monday project is made possible with the generous funding support of Swan City Rotary Club of Grande Prairie
Welcome back to Movie Monday! Today’s film will not take us as far from home as last week’s, but it will have an exotic feel nonetheless. We are traveling with the Foster family once again – this time to Arizona!
The Fosters visited Arizona in 1956, this time with four children in tow. Over the course of their trip, they visited many attractions in the Phoenix area, such as Montezuma Castle, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and the Tumacacori Spanish missions complex, established in 1691. Though the landscape seems dry and unforgiving in many scenes, we also see the family admiring flower fields in full bloom and picking luscious fruit along the way. The heat did not keep the Fosters from enjoying themselves as they embarked on hikes and picnics and attended a local carnival and parade. The parade would have felt quite familiar to the children, as parades were popular community events back home as well (and were often considered a spectacle worth filming). Like Grande Prairie parades, the one in Arizona included marching bands, floats, and people on horseback.
Ruth, the youngest of the Foster children, has not appeared in the other travel films we have featured from the Foster family fonds (having not yet been born), but in this video she is seen taking in the sights together with her siblings, and particularly enjoying the time spent playing in the water.