Buddy, My Buddy,
Your Buddies Will Miss You

Personal remembrances on the retirement of
Buddy Morgan from MPL Media and as videographer for SFA.

Carroll Guitar, SFA video coordinator:
Buddy was not only delightful to work with while we were shooting in various locations but also did an outstanding job in coaching the professors and directing them in sometimes seemingly endless takes to get it just right!

In the studio, Buddy worked tirelessly to knit together video images, audio tracks, graphics, and music for a seamless production. He had humor, Southern charm and a real interest in helping those who stutter.

Buddy Morgan:
I've been in Memphis since 1959, and worked all over the world filming for the National Cotton Council, learning my trade. It was film back then before we converted to video. I've been with MPL for the past 25 years, and converted them to video, too.

What was really nice about working with SFA was that there was always a script: detail was taken care of. It was always fun because the people were so nice and willing to try something new.

I guess I've worked with every one of the professors. I shot them all at one time or another. All the people SFA selected to be in the videos were truly professionals.

I've learned a lot about stuttering over the years. I stuttered myself as a real young child.

Jane Fraser:
I first met Buddy back in the late 1980s or so when we first began to work on reproducing some old films from the '70s: the Van Riper series, the old Hal Starbuck tapes and the early Prevention of Stuttering series.

Thanks to encouragement—and  prodding—by Charles Van Riper, we began to turn our attention to producing a new generation of videotapes, the first of which was directed by Ed Conture, then at Syracuse University.

Buddy and the Motion Picture Lab team came into the picture in "glue-ing" the footage of professors, children, and the narration together into a seamless product. And that of course was only the beginning.

Now some 27 tapes later, there is not a one in which Buddy Morgan didn't play an important role.