This is a video that I’ve been wanted to do for years. It is my re-creation of Pathways to Progress; The Pageant of Rochester. It was given in the summer of 1934 to celebrate the centennial of the City of Rochester.

Back in January of 2018 I went to the Local History Division of the Rochester Public Library and scanned the photos that they have from the pageant.

There is a partial script from the pageant in Centennial History of Rochester (Vol IV, 1934). That script and the general director of the pageant was Edward Hungerford. He had written a couple of pageants about railroads before this centennial pageant in Rochester. He would write another railroad pageant for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. The whole text for the prologue and the last scene were in the book but not the complete text for other scenes. If anyone knows where the whole text is, then I would be willing to re-edit the video.

The original pageant was narrated by a man and a woman. So for years I was going to record the male voice but I couldn’t figure out what to do about the female voice. I had thought I might record it myself and alter it to sound female. Instead, I found that there were lots of apps online in that I could type text and then it would create a voice recording (called text to speech). Being a cheapskate, I looked for one that was free. Google has one that would do the job but it sounded like a robot voice. I ended up using the text to speech app from IBM Watson. In the end, the narration sounds pretty good. IBM did have trouble pronouncing “Genesee” but I eventually got the two voices to almost say “Genesee” correctly.

I do make an announcement at the end of the video about coming events. I got the events from this flyer showing what was happening on Aug. 24th 1934. Then I added a background sound of a crowd from the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.). That was also free.

Toward the end of the pageant they brought out some new immigrant to the stage. In their place I included photos of immigrants that came through Ellis Island that are online at the website of the New York Public Library.

The original pageant lasted about an hour and a half. My video is only  14 minutes because I only stayed on each photo for just a few seconds. You can pause the video if you want a longer look.

This video has captions created by You Tube. I had to go through the captions and make some corrections. I had to correct “Genesee” every time. You can turn captions on or off.