Please excuse me for some nostalgic moments :O) I grew up in a town of five “Shows” (that’s what we called them) when I was five. The one nearest our hotel (three blocks) was called “The Peoples” theater. It was small and it only cost me a nickel to get in. because I went there nearly every afternoon they usually let me in free. My single mom was busy running her little café so “The Peeps” was a fine babysitter.
The first show I remember was called “Stars In My Crown”. It was a cowboy film (most were) and the title was based on a hymn, which I knew nothing about. I think the star was Joel McCrae. I do remember silently shooting the bad guys with my little toy pistol. The only other movie I remember was called “The OX Bow Incident”. It too was a cowboy film, something about the rustlers getting hanged. I probably shot them all.
By the time I was six we had moved to another hotel, nearer to The Grand Theater and my mom’s café. I went to The Grand a couple of times a week to see such stars as Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Gene Autry, The Cisco Kid, and The Lone Ranger. Here, too, I shot all the bad guys regularly, and here too I often got in free. Sometimes I had an extra nickel for popcorn. The Grand was right across the street from my mom’s café so I usually went directly from there to my mom’s café for dinner. We lived directly above the little café.
After the start of World War Two (1941) all five of our movie theaters carried a lot of war movies and I probably saw most of them, although going to school slowed me up a bit. The movie I remember the most clearly was called “Purple Heart” and was about some pilots who got shot down and taken captive by the Japanese. They were all eventually shot, but only after a trial, etc. The star of the film was Dana Andrews. I’ll always remember that the film closed with the music of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
John Wayne was of course the star of many of the war movies I saw during that four-year period. He fought mostly in the Pacific and killed a lot of Japanese. Another film I especially remember was called “They Were Expendable”, about the sailors on Navy PT boats who often ran very dangerously close to the enemy and paid the price for doing so. I must have seen two or three war movies a week.
Another was called “The O’Sullivans” and was about a family who had five sons in the Navy, all five of whom were killed in the war, several on PT Boats. After that event the Government no longer allowed all the sons of a family to serve in the war. At these movies we always sang patriotic songs and pledged our allegiance to the American flag.
After the war the content of the movies shifted to happier things, mostly romantic musicals. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Danny Kaye were the male stars who sang and danced with female stars like Rita Hayworth, Betty Gable, and Doris Day. There were also mystery shows starring Humphry Bogart, Alan Ladd, and James Cagney. Katherine Hepburn, Veronica Lake, and Claudet Colbert were the main “leading ladies”. Some films were murder mysteries with Charlie Chan, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lowrie. I still went to the movies once or twice a week during my junior and high school years, largely because mom and I still lived downtown. I must admit that I sometimes snuck into the movies without paying. It was easy.
Not only were the “shows” my main source of entertainment, they (provided my main babysitters, along with stimulation to my own creative imagination. This was especially the case when the newsreels would show clips from important sporting events. There were even movies about the lives of sports stars, such as Jim Thorpe the great Native American athlete (played by yikes Bert Lancaster) and Babe Ruth (played by William Bendix, yikes again). I often imagined myself as being one of them when i grew up. Didn’t quite make it :O)