When I was perhaps 5 or 6 years old, my mother started taking me to the movies. My father did not go to movies. So my mother went occasionally in the afternoons. She would tell me to come home from school a few minutes early. Then, with my younger sister, we would walk about four blocks to the Malco theater, where she would pay a quarter for her admission and a dime each for my sister and me. The movie she chose was usually a romance starring Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Ida Lupino, or their contemporaries. If I had a dime, I would buy a box of popcorn. Otherwise, I would heed her instruction not to spoil my supper. The afternoon showing was over in time for us to walk home and meet my father when he quit work for the day.
By the time I was 9, I began going to movies by myself or with friends. Although it was small, our town had three movie theaters, the Malco, the Orpheum, and the Strand. Only the Malco ran movies on weekday afternoons. The Orpheum showed westerns and adventure movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoon. The Strand ran serials and cartoons all day on Saturday and from noon on Sunday. For a dime, we could go into the Strand in the morning on Saturday and stay much of the day. My father stopped my Saturday indulgence with the comment that I had chores to do on Saturdays.
When I reached 12, I ventured to movies by myself at night. That was the age to pay adult fare. When I wore my new Boy Scout uniform, the cashier knew I had to pay 35 cents. The box of popcorn was 15 cents. Because I had a newspaper delivery route, I could afford to splurge the 50 cents. Occasionally, my mother would give me 50 cents so that I could take my sister. By then, in 1944, the feature movies were all about the war effort. John Wayne defeated Japanese forces in the Pacific, and others showed us the valiant efforts of the British to resist German invasions. Our side was right, and the enemies were malicious and vicious, and lost the struggles as shown on the silver screen.
In those years, we also had horror movies, with Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and others who caused screams among the girls in the audience. When I came out of the theater at night from one of those, I usually ran the whole way home.
When I went away to college, I encountered a new kind of movie. Here were British films, particularly those with Alec Guinness. Also, we saw foreign films with English subtitles. So the several of us would go to the film house, then stop for coffee and discuss what we had seen. Taking a date to a movie was the cheapest form of an evening’s entertainment.
After graduate school, when the army sent me to Chicago, there were plenty of movie theaters in Hyde Park, as well as the big fancy ones in the Loop. But then, something new came along and distracted us from going to movies. It was called television. The airline stewardesses down the hall in my apartment building got the first TV set. When I watched commercial television in their apartment, I found much of it clumsy and boring.
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