David Green is well-qualified to help the Classic Film Society show vintage films to Quad-City audiences.

Green, the society’s co-founder and its secretary-treasurer, knows all about the 16 mm format in which the organization screens films. It launches its fourth season June 13 with “Home in Indiana”(1944), starring Rock Island native June Haver.

Helping to set up the presentations comes naturally to Green, whose father once worked for the Victor Animatograph Co. The Davenport manufacturer produced and sold the very first 16 mm movie cameras and projectors, and it pioneered the concept of showing films outside regular movie theaters.

Green, 67, a retired librarian, grew up with Victor projectors. As a student at Davenport’s Monroe Elementary School, he once surprised his teacher by helping her when she had difficulty operating the school’s Victor projector. As he pursued his career, he never lost his interest in Victor and its legacy, and he has a collected more than 30 Victor projectors.

“It’s something that just stayed with me,” he said.

Much of Green’s fascination with Victor can be attributed to company founder Alexander Victor, a Swedish immigrant and the inventor of the  film and projector system he designed for home use.

He established his company in 1910 in a small frame house at 1545 Rockingham Road. It operated at various locations in Davenport, including a building at 527 W. 4th St. that is occupied today by Tri-City Equipment Co. and where the first 16 mm projector was developed in 1923. At its peak, Victor Animatograph employed 650 people.

In 1946, the company became a division of Curtiss-Wright Corp., which built a $1.5 million plant for its acquisition on Hickory Grove Road. The venture was unsuccessful and the building was sold to Bendix Corp. in 1950. Today, it is occupied by Carlton Life Support Systems.

After that building was sold to Bendix, Victor projectors were manufactured by a Chicago company and later by a Connecticut company until 1989.

Green got hands-on experience with Victor projectors through his father, the late Donald Green, who joined Victor Animatograph in 1944 and stayed on as the Davenport service manager when the projectors were made by the Motiograph Co. of Chicago and the Kalart Corp. of Plainville, Conn. He left the company in 1959.

In an era before television and long before DVDs, Green said there was a magic about movie projectors. His father and his co-workers often presented travelogues and other films at churches and service clubs. “For my father and his colleagues, their work was their hobby. There was something unique about the business,” he said.

In addition to learning the projector business from his father, Green enjoyed attending feature films at the old Sunset Theater at 4th and Cedar streets. His interest in movies was whetted further by his grandfather, Bruce Green, who worked as the doorman at the old Garden Theater in Davenport after he retired as a railroad telegrapher.

Green graduated from Davenport High School, now Central High, in 1959, earned a degree in education at Iowa State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Iowa, and a master’s degree in library science from Dominican University in River Forest, Ill. While studying for his master’s degree, he worked at the University of Chicago library, where he stayed for 10 years.

He spent 15 years as a librarian in Idaho, working for Boise State University, the College of Southern Idaho and the Idaho Supreme Court. He spent another 10 years as head librarian at the Peru (Ill.) Public Library before retiring to the Quad-Cities in 1997.

While pursing his career in Boise, he owned and operated the 250-seat Rex Theater in Vale, Ore., for five years. There he learned to run theater projectors. He also frequently organized screenings of vintage films as a librarian.

After returning to the Quad-Cities, he met Bob King, the editor of Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age. In 2006, they founded the Classic Film Society, a nonprofit organization of volunteers whose mission is to present “the best prints of entertaining films that have been unjustly neglected in recent years.”

Green has researched the history of Victor Animatograph Co. and has a collection of company newsletters in addition to his projectors. A wealth of information on the Victor Animatograph — including newspaper clippings, photos and other documents — survives at the University of Iowa library. The materials were donated by the family of longtime employee Samuel G. Rose. He was instrumental in keeping the company afloat during its later financial struggles.

After the production of Victor projectors ceased in Davenport, Green said, Rose and a core of loyal employees refused to give up on the projectors and found others to make them. “They just didn’t want to see the company fail,” he added.