Curating the Jim Guy Tucker Audiovisual Collection

Curating the Jim Guy Tucker Audiovisual Collection

Hi. This is Bridget Wood. I’m the graduate assistant processing the audiovisual materials of the Jim Guy Tucker Collection. When I began this project I had little experience with audiovisual materials and had never worked in an archives before. Since then, I have learned about digitizing, writing metadata, and about Arkansas politics from the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Typical items found in the Jim Guy Tucker Audiovisual Collection include political advertisements, campaign speeches and interviews, news reports, town meetings, and welfare and energy hearings. In addition to typical items in the collection, the audio and video collections each have their own series.

Audio has Dialogue with Your Congressman, and video has Arkansas Ask, Arkansas Week, and Capital for a Day town meetings. I found a number of duplicates of these programs and political advertisements. In the audio collection alone there are over seventy-three duplicates! Popular topics discussed in these programs include crime in Arkansas, prisoner punishment, education, medical care, highway systems, and jobs.

In addition to the above mentioned typical items and programs, the Jim Guy Tucker collection also contains a handful of irrelevant items. These include:

    • Two instructive videos on interior design
    • A five-hour documentary on Soviet Russia
    • Clips of The Oprah Winfrey Show with guests Donald and Ivana Trump, the 1980 movie The Diary of Anne Frank, an introduction to Family Ties, and Western genre scenes set in Mexico as part of the soap opera One Life to Live

Even amongst campaign rallies and politically-pertinent news reports, many unexpected and funny pieces appear:

    • Dance performances at political rallies
    • People holding up political signs in front of the camera—obstructing the speakers the cameramen were trying to film
    • Funny eighties outfits and hairstyles
    • Ridiculous television commercials from the early nineties
    • Programs such as the Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and Roseanne

The Political Soundtrack

The audio collection includes a number of songs tacked onto political discussions. As an appreciator of music—even that from the 80s and 90s—finding one of these songs would brighten my digitizing day. Songs found in the audio collection include:

    • “I’ll Still Be Loving You” by Restless Heart
    • “Dim All the Lights” by Donna Summer
    • “Heaven Must be Missing an Angel” as performed by Tavares

A Prank on Jim Guy Tucker

The audio collection also contains an item entitled The Best of Craig O’Neill, featuring Craig O’Neill, a Little Rock disk jockey who made prank phone calls to local citizens for his radio program. These calls are entertaining and concern two political figures:

    • In the first, Craig O’Neill calls a Little Rock U-Haul location offering a fine impersonation of Bill Clinton wanting to rent a U-Haul to move things out of the Governor’s Mansion and into the White House.
    • In the second, Craig O’Neill calls Jim Guy Tucker pretending to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, who outside of the prank was to meet with Jim Guy Tucker later that same day. In this prank call, O’Neill/Schwarzenegger, with a heavy accent, asks Jim Guy Tucker if he works out and if he would like to exercise together after the day’s meetings.

O’Neill always reveals himself at the end of his prank calls, and all who he pranks on the tape handle it well and laugh. I think these Craig O’Neill prank calls make a great addition to the Jim Guy Tucker audiovisual materials, revealing more about the era and of Jim Guy Tucker’s personality.

Besides Jim Guy Tucker’s politics, we learn tidbits about him throughout the collection. We learned that Jim Guy exercises from the Craig O’Neill tape. Three videocassette tapes of stock footage and family interviews were some of the last items digitized. They offer more insight into the man that is Jim Guy Tucker.

In these videos Jim Guy Tucker discusses hobbies like flying airplanes and trout fishing, and footage shows him working at his desk and standing in a creek duck hunting. One video, featuring footage of a 1992 political campaign, shows Jim Guy Tucker singing and playing guitar to the songs “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Jambalaya.”

Bloopers

Jim Guy Tucker proves himself a good speaker and rarely looks silly. The only videos that could be considered bloopers are when Jim Guy finds himself locked out of his car when filming stock footage—likely for a commercial—and in another situation when he forgets song lyrics when playing guitar and singing “Jambalaya.”

The Jim Guy Tucker Audiovisual Collection contains a variety of content and highlights issues faced by all regions of Arkansas, particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s. Not only does the collection give a glimpse of politics of the time, but also social aspects by the songs and entertainment programs included in the collection.

The extent of all physical items, including duplicates, takes up roughly nineteen Paige boxes. The digital files of videos take up over four terabytes and reside on multiple hard drives.

Over the next school year I will continue processing the Jim Guy Tucker Audiovisual Collection. I’m scheduled to create a web exhibit of materials and plan to post highlights to Facebook.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more updates!

-BW