Walters, Glenn R.
Biographical notes:
Glenn R. Walters was born August 24, 1930. He attended Oakwood High School, where he graduated in June 1948. While at Oakwood, he served as senior class president. He was also president of the Oakwood chapter of the National Forensic League and a state champion in the National Forensic League's Humorous Declamation contest, in which he placed second in the national finals. He was also a state champion in the Prince of Peace oratorical contest.
After high school, Glenn attended Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where he graduated with a B.A. in English in June 1952. While at Denison, Glenn was a member of the Dean's List, student government (vice president), Omicron Delta Kappa national leadership honorary society, and Denison Christian Emphasis Association (president). He also served as head resident for freshmen men's residence halls Curtis and Stuart.
Glenn worked as a teaching assistant at Stanford University in 1953. He then took a position as assistant district traffic superintendent for the Ohio Bell Telephone Company in Dayton, from 1953-54. While at Ohio Bell, he managed the outward long distance operations office as well as the Ohio Bell Southwestern Regional Film Library. He also organized and managed the Ohio Bell Dayton area speakers' bureau and Toastmasters Club.
In 1954, Glenn founded Valdhere, a Dayton-based video and film production company.
On the day of the Indianapolis 500 in 1956, Glenn began daily 16mm color film processing services. He provided film services for Dayton's three commercial television stations and provided sports film services for more than 40 high schools and universities.
Also in 1956, he began producing the television series Enterprise, which broadcast live. The documentary series ran for three years on Dayton's WHIO-TV, Channel 7, and received the highest Arbitron ratings of any locally produced program at that time.
In 1959, he produced Venture into Space, a six-week special series on WHIO-TV, Channel 7. This program was the Air Force's first official release of information about their preparation of pilots for space flight. It featured weightlessness flight tests, Zero Gravity blood flow studies on the Wright-Patterson centrifuge, the Human Factors Research Laboratory (now Armstrong Laboratory), space nutrition studies, and America's first communication satellite.
In 1960-61, Glenn built the Valdhere studio facility and incorporated the company as Valdhere Films, Inc.
In 1961, he produced a film for Huffy bicycles, entitled The Singing Wheels . This was the first in a series of more than 40 films he produced for the bicycle industry over a span of 10 years. The Singing Wheels featured the first public media appearance by Dr. Paul Dudley White, cardiologist and personal physician to President Eisenhower, to endorse the health benefits of bicycle riding. The second film in the series, The Magic of the Bicycle, was produced as a 28-1/2 minute free TV time filler, a very widely used genre at that time. It was distributed by Association Films, and in its first six months of release, it set an all-time record for the greatest number of bookings and the highest total television viewership (36 million viewers) of any industrially sponsored documentary film produced up until that time.
This overall series of films produced and distributed during the 1960s and 1970s for the bicycle industry was widely recognized for having a major impact on the industry. In 1960, total U.S. output of bicycles was less than 2 million units per year, and the average retail sale price per bicycle was $65.00. By 1972, the total U.S. output of bicycles was more than 12 million units per year, and the average retail sale price per bicycle was $135.00. There were no significant marketing increases by any U.S. bicycle company during that time; thus, the film series has been credited with affecting such a great change.
In 1970, National Football League team Cincinnati Bengals selected Glenn to serve as their film director and contractor. He set up and managed a crew to film all home and away games and managed a laboratory operation for processing, editing, and printing all the films in order to exchange prints to other league teams and to the league office. In 1972, the Valdhere style of coverage and method of editing were mandated by league rules as the standard for all NFL teams.
In 1980, as a consultant, Glenn designed and installed a corporate video center for Monarch Marking Corporation. This included interviewing, selecting, and training personnel to operate the center.
In 1985, he was selected by the league office and NFL Films to evaluate and refine a proposed format being advanced to replace film for NFL coaching uses. The format was component BetaCam, and after substantial modification during its use in 1985 and 1986, it was adopted. He set up and trained a video crew for the Bengals and retired from the NFL in 1986.
In 1986, Glenn earned his Master's degree in communications at the University of Dayton with the completion of his thesis, "Organizational Identification, Job Satisfaction and Productivity: A Study of Correlations."
In 1987, he worked as a consultant for the University of Dayton's Center for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) to design and manage the installation of the CEBR Usability and Testing Facility in the Anderson Center.
In 1992-93, he developed a video lecture on Orson Welles' 1938 radio production of War of the Worlds, featuring a series of newsreel and radio clips from the 1930s to reveal to students the emotional, cultural, and social environment that made the famous radio play have such a dramatic impact on its audience. A video report on this teaching technique was presented at the 1993 Popular Culture Convention in collaboration with colleague Alan Hueth.
In 1994, Glenn completed the first draft of a multimedia text on the history of electronic media. The text, entitled The First Century, consists of a 25-minute video with numerous clips of historic films and radio and television shows. A CD-ROM reference work accompanies the text.
In 1995, Glenn wrote Visitors, an adaptation of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds . It was produced with student actors and broadcast on April Fool's Day, 1996. The experimental radio play is set in today's world and offers a social commentary on some key issues for the new century.
In 1999, Glenn retired, and Valdhere was acquired by the Cincinnati-based visual communications company Curtis, Inc. Valdhere had provided video production, post-production, and graphics services, as well as the region's only 16mm film reversal processing, printing, and digital film-to-tape transfer.
Glenn Walters is media executive in residence at the University of Dayton and resides in Bellbrook, Ohio.
From the guide to the Glenn R. Walters collection, 1893-1999, 1954-1999, (University of Dayton)
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