The Video Lady

I once heard a story of a lady, who back in the 1950s & 60s, had a passion for video and film in the Church. She was one of the first in her small rural farm town to own a portable home video camera. She even went as far as buying her own film projector & handheld light to carry around.

She was always documenting events, whether family, church or out in the community. She loved to go around to the different ministries at her home church to film all that they were doing. Then she would go home and spend countless hours pouring over film reels, splicing them together and editing stories that she felt fit to be shared.

Then she would return to each of the church ministries, break out her projector, and unfold their visual stories right before their eyes. After years of doing this, she began to earn the nickname “The Video Lady”.

Her name was Mildred Nix, and today, she would have been 94 years old. And she was my grandmother.

After she went Home to be with the Lord, we were going through her house, and i found all of her old film equipment. So now I have it on display in my studio.

The last years of her life were the years that i just started to get into video & film. You can imagine her old mind trying to understand the concepts of VJ-ing, or even how computers and digital images worked in the midst of worship. But she definitely connected to the films we shot overseas, and she loved when i would come home, lay on her bed, get out my laptop, and show her a film i shot in a foreign, distant area of the world… places she had only heard stories of from Pappaw’s time in WWII.

It wasn’t until after she passed away that i heard the story of “The Video Lady”…so you can imagine that was a fairly epic moment for me, realizing that this passion for the visual goes back many generations. Even my mom serves on the media ministry at my hometown church, Wynne Baptist, the same church where Grandma earned her nickname.

But today, she isn’t really remembered as someone who always had a camera with her. People around town remember “Mrs. Nix” as someone who would share her faith to anyone who would listen. It was known that if you worked out on the farm and didn’t know the Lord, it would only be a matter of time. My Pappaw was the same way…so you can imagine that they made one incredible team!

Happy Birthday, Grandma!