Family and friends who were searching for the gathering to honor the passing of David Bourn needed only to follow the lights in the sky.
At a memorial earlier this month for Bourn at Broadway Pizza in north Minneapolis, searchlights were stationed in the parking lot, crisscrossing the skies as a tribute to the Minneapolis man who died March 27 at the age of 77.
The well-illuminated send-off was appropriate for Bourn, who spent his life beaming lights toward the sky as a searchlight operator, lighting the stages of rock stars and illuminating movie stars on the screen as a film projectionist.
According to his family, Bourn was "one of the last carbon-arc searchlight operators in the country."
His lifelong fascination with lighting started when, as a student in Minneapolis, he was picked to run the movie projector. Back then, the projectors used carbon arc lamps to illuminate the images thrown onto the screen.
Carbon arcs also were found in giant searchlights used by anti-aircraft crews during World War II to spot and shoot enemy planes out of the night sky. After the war, the army surplus lights found a peacetime use as a form of advertising, lighting up the heavens to draw attention to a grand opening or a big show.
Those lights attracted Bourn like a moth. As a youth, he would ride his bike to events in the Twin Cities where they were shining and ask if he could get a job, said Bourn's son, Brian Bourn.
Bourn was still in his 20s when he bought his first war-surplus searchlight, a 5-foot-diameter, 800-million-candlepower light that could be seen up to 30 miles away. He went into business in 1964 as Hollywood Premiere Searchlight Advertising.
