Recently, as my wife and I tried unsuccessfully to find a non-animated movie in which the “F” word is used less than a dozen times and more than two people survive in the end, I reflected on how old movies had a special meaning during my more than seven decades.
I slept with the photo of Shirley Temple under my pillow at the age of five. No child star has been sweeter or more talented.
I remember the almost excruciating wait while saving a penny a week for five weeks so I could see the most expensive and most advertised movie of its time, “Tarzan the Ape Man”, more than two years in the making! It was a cinematic adventure that I rarely got over again for myself.
Later, I daydreamed in class about hanging out with Becky from the “Tom Sawyer” classic.
In 1939, I was dumbfounded when Clark Gable said he didn’t give a damn about Miss O’Hara in such a long movie that I had to ask him if Roosevelt was still president when I finally got out. Then came “Raging Bull,” about the life of boxer Jake LaMotta. One critic wrote that minus the “F” word, it could have been a silent movie.
To avoid a bully in sixth grade, I would often skip school and go to the movies in Iowa City with my earnings from long hours selling Liberty, Look, and Life magazines. It is not as easy as the current allowances of $ 20 to $ 30 that parents spend to do household chores one hour a week. And who really cares what the rating is if it’s a must-see movie?
The only time my father took me to the movies before the divorce, we saw “Frankenstein.” (I was traumatized for a long time and didn’t scream again in a theater until I saw “Psycho” with my own children.
Outside of an Iowa theater, I experienced a moment frozen in time. While lining up to see an Abbott and Costello movie on Sunday, December 7, 1941, the horrible news spread that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. The end of the world was coming!
Two years later, I put on a tux and became a doorman at the same theater, my first white-collar job in the summer. I bought a trench coat like Robert Mitchum’s and decided I’d be a foreign correspondent and maybe marry Rita Hayworth. It didn’t work out that way, but I broke up with my teenage girlfriend for passing out for Frank Sinatra and attending his latest movie eight times.
I took my now wife, Lovae, to a movie theater in Washington, DC for fifty dollars on our first date. As part of the subsequent show, a “mentalist” named Daas displayed his famous psychic abilities by “reading” the minds and futures of clients. Choosing me, he said that he would go west and write a successful book someday in the distant future.
I moved with my family to San Diego in 1959, where I started a new career in public relations, more than 20 years at the San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld.
At 75 I published my first book. This and my second book, Memories of the Zoo Years, won first-place awards in their categories from the San Diego Book Awards Committee.
I have often wondered what happened to the seer who was so forthright with the young man in the audience that night half a century ago. He had placed a question in that locked box in the lobby, which was never opened before he picked me up from the mini crystal ball he was holding for support.
My girlfriend and I still go to the theaters here, hoping to see another “Cuckoo’s Nest” or “Shane” or “Cool Hand Luke” or “The Way We Were” or even “The Graduate.”
But oh how we miss the spacious, ornate, single screen palaces. And the 50 cent popcorn. And a dialogue as sharp as “All about Eva”.
Maybe write my own script now that the books are going well.