As much as I hate to admit it, I am now old enough to nostalgically reflect on the things “kids these days” know nothing about. Dial-up internet, using a friend’s landline to call home, and waiting for the weekly installment of ABC’s TGIF programming all built character and patience. A trip to the video store was another generational wonder that feels utterly lost to time. Scanning the shelves for interesting movie cases, hoping to snag a copy of the hottest new release, or selecting a title without the ability to first watch a preview (the horror!) are all deeply ingrained childhood memories for me. Thankfully, elements of the cultural magic of Moscow’s last video rental store have been preserved and will soon be available through the University of Idaho’s newest digital collection. “Main Street Video: Oral Histories of the Last Video Store in Moscow, Idaho” is part verbal record of an iconic local establishment and part essay collection on the irreplaceable role it played in our community.
Moscow entrepreneur Howard Hughes introduced locals to the concept of renting videos in 1978, only a year after the first VCRs became widely available to the general public. At his Appliance, TV, and Video store, Hughes sold the equipment home movie watchers needed, and saw quickly that renting tapes to customers made good financial sense. He even offered 25 free rentals to anyone who bought a VCR from the store. The Howard Hughes video collection grew year over year, making space for Hollywood blockbusters, standard bearers of cinematic history, foreign language films, and even some certifiable stinkers.
Nearly every former patron interviewed for the oral history project commented on the unique delight of perusing the shelves for new and new-to-them titles. Of course, the ever-expanding nature of a video store did pose some unique challenges. “One thing about a video store, it’s not like buying a piece of fruit and then you replace it with another piece of fruit,” said former store manager Beau Newsome. “It’s just a collection that just grows and grows and grows and grows and grows, so you run out of room really quickly.”
Howard Hughes Video endured ownership changes over the subsequent forty-some years, and eventually moved to a smaller space downtown near the corner of Main and Sixth Streets. The rise of services like Netflix and Redbox, however, made it increasingly difficult for the store to operate. In the 2000s, folks began gravitating towards having DVDs delivered to their mailbox or picking up a Friday night movie from the machine at the grocery store. Then came online streaming with its seemingly infinite choices available at a moment’s notice. These and other factors combined to put Howard Hughes Video on the chopping block in 2015, as the current owners looked to sell or shut it down. The way Moscow locals banded together to save the store from shuttering, and reimagined it as a co-operative venture, is the stuff movies are made of. The Main Street Video Co-op kept the beloved collection together and available to movie enthusiasts until March 2020, when final credits could not be put off any longer.
The store’s approximately 30,000 DVDs and VHS tapes were dispersed widely throughout the community. Part of the collection was given to the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre in order to preserve opportunities for screening important films. The Palouse Cult Film Revival scooped up quite a few of the movies from the store’s famed cult classics section. Members of the public also had a chance to bring home their favorite titles from a sidewalk sale. Finally, what was left was given to the University of Idaho Library’s Special Collections and Archives.
That brings us back to the new digital collection that features oral history interviews with more than thirty former store patrons and staff members. We hope you will join us at the Kenworthy in April for the premier of this project. We will be sharing excerpts from the interviews, screening films from the Howard Hughes Video catalog, and giving away some fun prizes! Mark your calendars for April 10th (The Thing), 17th (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind), and 24th (Office Space). The digital collection can be viewed at lib.udiaho.edu/digitial/mainstreet.
(This piece first appeared in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.)