As frame after frame of black-and-white film whirled through the camera, the lens stayed locked on a Volkswagen bug parked at the end of a residential driveway.
Without content, the vehicle was nothing special. But viewers who saw the stark image on their television screens in 1967 knew why the camera lingered on this seemingly innocuous scene.
The car had belonged to Grandville Anthony “Tony” Jones, a young Charlottesville soldier killed in action in Vietnam on Dec. 5, 1965. Two years later when the National Education Television network made the documentary film “Home Front 1967” the forlorn Volkswagen became one of the program’s most poignant and powerful images.