Leo Beachy: A Legacy Nearly Lost has been nominated for two Mid-Atlantic Emmy® Awards in the categories of:
• Outstanding Historic/Cultural Feature
(David Solomon, writer/producer; Paul Ruggieri, photographer/editor)
• Outstanding Program Writer
(David Solomon)
The nominated work is a follow-up to a previously-acclaimed WQED story on Beachy’s life. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences will announce this year’s Emmy® winners September 24, 2011 at a ceremony in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Leo Beachy was a teacher turned photographer in the early 1900s who took pictures of life in the Appalachian region of Western Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. After his death in 1927, most of Beachy’s glass plate negatives were destroyed. Decades later, some of the plates miraculously found their way back to his niece, Maxine Beachy Broadwater of Grantsville, MD. And so began her tireless efforts to preserve the negatives and share the unforgettable, historic images.
WQED writer/producer David Solomon and photographer/editor Paul Ruggieri first told the Beachy story in a short 2008 OnQ feature. The story was a viewer favorite, won a 2008 Mid-Atlantic Emmy® Award, and caught the attention of the Naylor Foundation, which in turn awarded the Garrett County Historical Society a $40,000 grant to preserve the priceless negatives and make them available world-wide for educational purposes.
In 2011, Solomon and Ruggieri expanded the 2008 story into documentary form on the WQED program, EXPERIENCE, showing the intricacy of the preservation process and revealing newly-printed photos. Included in the updated story are memorable interviews with Mrs. Broadwater, photo archivist Chris Schwer, Grantsville resident Mabel Stanton, Grantsville pharmacist Gerald Beachy and Bob Boal of the Garrett County Historical Society. The new segment resulted in the two Emmy® nominations this month.
EXPERIENCE is a half-hour, locally-produced documentary series that airs on WQED-TV Mondays at 7:30 p.m. EXPERIENCE will return on Mondays at 7:30 p.m. this fall on WQED-TV with encore broadcasts on Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. Additional episode information, links and past episodes of EXPERIENCE may be found online at wqed.org/experience. For updates on EXPERIENCE viewers may “Like” the show’s fan page on Facebook.
