I drove by the old movie house this afternoon. They're making it into shops.... glass open front,

[3Hotdogs]

new windows on the second floor. I was an usher there for about two years. Easy job. Low pay but all the popcorn you could eat and get to take your girl to see the double feature, free.

The movie house was a building that brought the community together. Saturday afternoon was for the kids. .When I was in elementary school, .25 got you in the door.... 10 cartoons, a serial with a punch card that if you got all the holes punched, the last episode was free admission.... News reels narrated by Ed Herlihy. Maybe a Lowell Thomas travelog about some place you were never going to be able to afford to go to. Egypt, Great Wall, Sao Palo, Montreal ( I did finally get to Montreal three years ago, summer before covid.)

And the features... could be Tarzan with Buster Crabbe or Gene or Roy or Tex or others that I can't recall. The serials-- Superman, with George Reeves. I remember a Flash Gordon serial where the space ships were pie plates, jiggled on strings with sparklers attached to the bottom. But Dale Arden, she was hot.

The movies were where you tried to get to hold hands with Doris, the prettiest girl in the 5th grade. You could also trade baseball cards before the lights went out. I traded a Duke Snyder for a Yogi once. But all my cards became victim to my mother's urge for a clean house.

Once or twice, the movie house would be where scores would be settled. "...see ya in the alleyway after the movie."

Friday nights were date nights for the older kids. I wasn't much good looking so I didn't get too many dates in the balcony. The same way Doris wouldn't hold hands with me. But that's water under that old bridge. The bridge in town that can't hold the water back much any more. The downtown flooded twice in the last 25 years.

Saturday night was for adults but my father took me to see any John Wayne movie that came out. Funny thing -- he looked a lot like John Wayne. People said he did and looking at the pictures of him, yeah, he did. We saw Shane and The African Queen. It was about 15 years ago that I learned the African Queen was based on a real event in the Boer War. Still, even today I figure, Kathrine Hepburn or not, if I was Charlie and Rose emptied my gin in the river, Rose would'a been in the water, right behind the gin bottles.

It seems funny. There are a few vacant stores in town that nobody wants to rent. And here the owners of the movie house are trying to turn the building into more stores that some probably won't be rented.

There are other parts of being a kid that I recall, wishing they were still as they were: ice skating in the park. There used to be a hundred people or so skating on the pond. Now, no more than 10 or 15 show up with their skates.

The town parades were important. There was a drug store that had two entrances. When the football team won, (the football field was dirt. Not grass) the marching band would march to the drug store, enter single file, in one door and out the other, then march through the rest of the town. And people would be on the sidewalk to stop and watch the parade.


It's these things that I remember but it is the movie house that is on my mind today.

[regnaD kciN]

1. I know the feeling...

It sounds like you’re a few years older than me, but, a few years ago, I looked at a website with a compendium of the histories of movie theatres in the U.S., and discovered that pretty much every single place I’d seen a film before I turned twenty-one, with the exception of Graumann’s Chinese, was now gone. The one I probably spent the most time at was, much like in your story, converted to retail, with an Applebees taking over part of the front.

[moniss]

2. For me it was

drive-in theaters. We had lots of them around. All gone now. People who never knew don't know what they missed. Hours and hours of movies on a Saturday night under the stars on a giant screen. Wake Up Little Susie and all the rest.