We didn’t get a television set until 1951. By that time I was out and running. The power of television wasn’t strong enough to keep me in the house. Before TV, the avenues to entertainment had been the radio and the movies. We listened to the radio in much the same way coming generations would sit in front of the TV. But we went out to the movies, and we did so as often as we could. And just as later with television, what we watched didn’t even have to be good. We would watch anything; Charlie Chan, short films featuring parakeets in hats and tiny suits, cheesy serials, even the cheap, grainy Republic westerns from the nineteen-thirties.
There were four movie houses within walking distance of our street, and features usually changed three times a week. The regular rotation would be a big first run movie on Friday and Saturday, an “On the Waterfront” with a Brando an “Anna and the King of Siam” with Rex Harrison and Deborah Kerr. First run was actually a misnomer. If you couldn’t wait for a new movie to make it to the neighborhood, then you had to go downtown, to one of the big, pricey picture palaces on Market Street where new movies stayed, often for weeks and weeks, before being distributed to neighborhood theaters.
Sunday and Monday would be a double feature, “B” movies, Tom Conway in one of “The Falcon” detective pictures and maybe a Randolph Scott western. Or the double feature might be a Bowery Boys – Sherlock Holmes combination. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday would be something in between, a musical with Jane Powell, an Esther Williams Technicolor swimmer, or the latest from Abbot and Costello. The classic Saturday afternoon matinee would deliver a couple of shorts, Joe McDoak’s “Behind the Eight Ball,” maybe an Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol “Brothers-in-Law” short. There’d be two or three of the Warner Brothers cartoons I loved, coming attractions and a double feature that included a couple of low budget westerns or possibly an awful Gene Autry or Roy Rogers singing cowboy color movie. Saturday matinee bills also might include a Johnny Weismuller “Tarzan” movie backed by one of Hollywood’s comic strip spin-offs; a “Blondie” with Penny Singleton and Arthur Lake and/or a “Joe Palooka” with Roscoe Kearns as Knobby Walsh.
In the six years between 1945 and 1951, the years of my childhood movie going, I saw repeated silvery black and white opening scenes of the Manhattan skyline, each accompanied by a rising hurly-burly of symphonic jazz proclaiming and celebrating New York as the center of the world. And there were the hurtling, steaming locomotives, rivers of newspapers and headlines spewing from presses, calendar leaves flying, clock hands and seasons turning. Every time Tarzan dove into the water, the camera would cut to the same terrible crocodiles sliding down the same muddy riverbanks. By the time I reached the age of twelve, I had become an unconscious expert on most of the conventions and clichés of movie making.
Of the four theaters in the neighborhood, the Lindley at Fifth and Rockland was the oldest and the least attractive. Surviving somewhere near the bottom of the theatrical food chain, the Lindley rarely offered anything that made me want to go there. The place had grown threadbare and rump sprung. One blistering August day, probably because everyone else was going, I made my plaintive pitch for a dime to go see some awful movie at the non-air-conditioned Lindley. My mother’s reaction began with the expected “Mother of God,” and went on to “ I wouldn’t go in the Lindley on a day like today if they were giving away one of Astor’s pet horses with every ticket.” I didn’t know what my mother would have done with a horse, but I got the idea.
The Felton Theater on the other side of the Boulevard on Rising Sun Avenue was just a little too far for regular attendance. Around 1950 the Felton resumed showing German language films, a practice interrupted by the events of 1941-1945. I had walked to the Felton on an autumn Saturday afternoon in 1946, lured by the promise of an all cartoon matinee. Following the show when the theater doors all flew open, I was part of the pack of over-stimulated kids bursting out into the glaring sunlight when someone shouted, “there’s one. There’s one.” The “one” referred to a brand new Studebaker. The 1947 Studebaker was the first major postwar departure in automobile design, sleek and low, with hood and trunk sloping down to its bumpers. Accustomed as everyone was to the lumpy, bumpy designs of the early 40’s, the new Studebaker provoked the half-joking question, “which way’s it going?” We picked up that chant as we crowded around the car, unaware that we were looking at the concepts that would dominate auto design for the next thirty or more years, design concepts that would outlast the Studebaker brand itself.
At the far north end of the neighborhood, across from the great trees fronting Fisher’s Park was the Fern Rock. I was never comfortable in the Fern Rock. It wasn’t just the low, horizontal art deco atmosphere of the place, it was more that the Fern Rock, while the newest of the neighborhood theaters, had a stuffy, overly respectable quality to it. As a connoisseur of cartoons, Warner Brothers cartoons of course, I was put off both by the Fern Rock’s miserly allocations of cartoons, usually one cartoon, two at most. And worse, they were always “nice” cartoons, that is unfunny cartoons, Walter Lantz’ Woody Woodpecker drivel or Tom and Jerry, or Mighty Mouse, crap that no serious cartoon aficionado could take seriously. The only thing worse were Walt Disney cartoons, cutesy cartoon humor by adults for cutesy kids. Warner Brothers never made that mistake, not with Bugs, Sylvester or Daffy. At the Fern Rock, I never felt I was getting the bang for my dime. You got a newsreel, one cartoon, coming attractions and a feature that may or may not have been screened with a kids matinee in mind. The Fern Rock, like the Lindley was a movie house of last resort.
The movie theater of my childhood, my home away from home, was the Colney. Just north of the intersection of Fifth and Olney, the Colney Theater was the neighborhood’s true center of gravity. It was neither a little hole in the wall like the Regal on Oxford Circle, nor was it one of the more opulent regional houses like the Circle in Frankford or the Orpheum in Germantown. Like the Baby Bear’s bed and breakfast, it wasn’t too big and it wasn’t too small; it was just right.
On Sunday afternoons, The Colney box office opened at twelve-thirty for the one-o-clock double feature. The reasoning eludes me, but we operated under an imperative to be there and be in line before tickets went on sale, something to do with getting a good seat. I don’t ever remember a Colney matinee turning anyone away.
On a winter Sunday afternoon when I was a sixth grader and standing in a line that stretched down along the front of the large grocery store next to the theater, I watched Gerry Flynn conduct a scientific demonstration of the effects of sympathetic vibration. In 1948, Philadelphia’s Blue Laws were still in effect, and the grocery market like all stores, was closed. Movies on Sundays had been allowed only since the beginning of the war, ostensibly to permit war workers entertainment on their day off.
Putting both of his hands on the market’s display window, Gerry began to gently pulse his palms against the heavy plate glass. As the speed of his hand movements increased, the entire window began to vibrate. As we watched, the motion transferred itself to the pyramids of canned goods stacked against the glass for support. When the first stack collapsed backwards onto the floor of the store, a cheer went up from the long line of kids waiting to get into the Colney. Through the thick glass, we could hear the cans hitting the floor inside the closed store. We watched approvingly as a dozen or more cans went rolling in every direction. Without slowing down his moving hands, Gerry looked up and indicated that we hadn’t seen anything yet. Keeping the motion going, he moved along the window taking down one stack of cans after another. Only the opening of the ticket window distracted the crowd from this amazing feat.
The following Saturday, emboldened by his success or just oblivious to the fact that the market was open for business, Gerry attempted to put on a repeat performance. Caught in the act by the store’s manager, Gerry was grabbed by the ear, taken inside and made to restack every fallen can to the store manager’s satisfaction. Gerry was so shaken by the manager’s threat to call the police on him that he went straight home without seeing the matinee.
The Colney shared the art-deco look that characterized most of the movie houses built in the 1930s to accommodate the new talkies. The dominant color scheme of the Colney Theater was a dark burgundy, accented with stainless steel and lots of mirrored glass. The outer lobby behind the glassed-in box office sloped gently up to a row of wood framed glass doors. Usually the door on the far right was propped open, and there an usher would stand taking tickets, tearing them in half, and returning one portion just in case you might ever have to prove purchase of entry. My mother maintained that you always kept your ticket stub in case the theater caught fire and you had to leave before seeing the entire picture. “As long as you have that stub,” she would say, her voice rising to indicate certainty, “they have to let you back inside after they put out the fire.”
To encourage consumer planning, the walls of the lobby were lined with framed, glass-covered posters for the coming attractions. While the outer lobby was all hard edges, glossy metals, marbled floors, and bright with diffused, indirect light from rows of elegant sconces, the inner lobby was soft, fuzzy and dark.
When we passed the bored teen-aged usher taking tickets and entered the inner sanctum of the Colney, we were still on an uphill grade. But now the floor was thickly carpeted. The rising floor peaked at the partition separating the lobby from the seating area that sloped down toward the stage and the big screen. The darkness of the inner lobby was barely broken by dim light fixtures high up on the walls. Your eyes would immediately move toward a single island of brilliant but isolated light, the candy counter. There on display behind lit glass were row upon desirable row of nickel candies; Clark Bars, Paydays, Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, Caramel Creams, a wonderful array of all that was good about life. And there was popcorn of course, at ten cents a box. Soft drinks were not yet sold or permitted inside movie theaters. For Saturday matinees, I was usually given a dime for candy in addition to the dime needed to get in. If I wanted to go again on Sunday, I was on my own. Children’s admission rose to an exorbitant sixteen-cents during my final year of eligibility. My mother was outraged at what she regarded as price gouging. Several times, in an experiment to make my dime last, I didn’t purchase the two five-cent boxes of Jujy-Fruits I so loved. Instead, it was ten, penny-each, pretzel rods, the same kind we bought at school at recess. A great idea in principle, the sheer bulk of the pretzel rods seemed the way to maximize the buying power of my dime. But by the fifth or sixth dry, salty pretzel rod, I felt like I was eating sticks of plaster board, and I had to make repeated trips back up the aisle to the water fountain. The experiment in economics concluded, I went back to Jujy-Fruits.
It was my love of Jujy-Fruits that brought me to one of my earliest moral dilemmas. In the back of the Colney along the wall near the men’s room door was a mechanical candy machine. The handle would turn when a nickel was inserted, and you could then select the pull-lever beneath the displayed candy of your choice. One Saturday afternoon as I cranked the handle and pulled the knob to allow a box of Jujy-fruits to drop into the bin, Eddie Lesh said to me, “wanna get one for free.” Sure, I said without thinking. “Here’s what you do,” said Eddie, not looking at all like the serpent. “Take most of the candy out of your box. Close it back up and then stick it back up inside the machine.” With a proprietary smile, he concluded his little lesson in larceny saying, “then when somebody comes along and puts in a nickel, your box, the one that’s almost empty, drops down. You go over and pick up the full one that comes down behind it. I do it every week,” he said. “It always works. If they get pissed about getting screwed, they complain to the manager. But by then you’re watching the movie and eating your candy.”
The simplicity of the plan appealed to me. I dumped most of the Jujy-Fruits out of the box and into my knickers pocket, the pocket without the hole in it, and proceeded. Three or four kids came along and used the machine, but nobody pulled the Jujy-Fruit lever until a girl I recognized from the Incarnation schoolyard stopped at the machine. When she picked up her purchase and ran after her friends I saw the bright yellow box lying in the machine’s bin. As quickly and as casually as I could, I moved past the machine and with a single motion scooped up my prize, a full box of Jujy-Fruits, for free.
Ill-gotten though it was, the candy lost none of its sweetness. I left the movies that afternoon without a thought of my evil deed, running down Fifth Street with the rest of the kids, re-enacting whatever action sequences we’d seen on the screen. The problem began in the schoolyard Monday or Tuesday of the following week whenever I walked past the girl whose candy I had stolen. I felt like she was looking at me. All morning, I kept waiting for the classroom door to open with a messenger sent to summon me to Mother Superior’s office. The day passed. But all that week, I kept crossing paths with the candy girl. I had the feeling that everyone was on the cusp of knowing what I had done.
The following Saturday afternoon, a repeat of my now unspeakable crime was out of the question. I avoided Eddie Lesh like he had ringworm, and I spent my dime on a Milky Way and a box of Mason Dots. I couldn’t face a Jujy-Fruit. When the kids’ matinee ended, I kept on going down Fifth Street right past our street until I got to Lindley Avenue and the Incarnation Church. Confessions were heard every Saturday until six. I got five Our Fathers, ten Hail Marys, and was instructed by a disembodied voice, it was Father Glenn, to make restitution. I couldn’t and I never did. While I recognize the venial nature of my candy machine offense, I still get that ever-so-slight wincing sensation at the sight of the yellow and red Jujy-Fruit logo. It never stopped me from eating them. I still do. That little dose of guilt, the price for having cheated an nine-year old girl out of her full share of gummy candies, just might have helped me decline other more serious temptations, things that could have left me feeling a whole lot worse about myself.
I wasn’t usually a forgetful kid. But one Saturday afternoon following a Colney matinee, I was halfway down Fifth Street before I realized I didn’t have my hat or mittens. It was a warm winter day in 1948, and I was ten years old. I raced back up to the Colney, explaining myself to the kid taking tickets for the first showing of the Saturday evening feature. The house was already darkened and the all too familiar grainy, brownish national anthem flag clip was just finishing. Making my way down the aisle, looking for where I had been sitting earlier, I noticed that only a half dozen people, all grownups, were in the darkened theater.
Rooting among the seats for my hat and mittens, I could see that the screen looked blank, gray. A low but slowly increasing growling roar began to fill the air of the theater. As I looked again to the screen, I saw rows of white lines against the gray and realized that I was looking at the sky and that the white lines were now connected to black dots; contrails, airplanes, lots of airplanes, formations. My hat and mittens were lying on the empty seat next to where I had been sitting. As the roaring sounds increased and the camera closed in, I sat down. The planes were dense formations of B-17 Flying Fortresses, heavy bombers, and the footage was documentary footage used for the dramatic opening of one of the best war films ever made, “Twelve-O-clock High,” the Gregory Peck/Dean Jagger classic about the Eighth Air Force and the daylight bombing campaign against Nazi Germany. Within seconds, I was hooked, mesmerized.
I sat spellbound as the casualties mounted, as oxygen-masked door gunners in sheepskin insulated suits spun their fifty-calibers to track the attacking ME-109s and FW-190s. Again the action scenes employed footage shot during the actual battles, planes bursting into flame, fighters closing at lightning speeds and skies filled with the harmless-looking but deadly puffs of shrapnel-laden black smoke. It must have been halfway through the movie when I was jolted back to the present. The usher’s flashlight beam was bouncing on me and I heard my father’s voice saying, “that’s him,” and “ thank you.” All the way down a now darkened Fifth Street, I prattled on excitedly about the movie, about the planes, the action and about the arguments as to why we had to accept the losses associated with daylight bombing. When we got into the house, my mother went ballistic.” My father didn’t say a thing until after I had eaten the dinner my mother had kept warmed for me. “You know,” he said. “If you don’t come home when you’re supposed to, you’re going to cause your mother and I a lot of worrying about you.” I’ve since earned a worrywart’s reputation for always calling home, even when I think I might be just a few minutes late.
It was in the last row of seats at the Colney Theater on a rainy Sunday afternoon that I first encountered one of the more inexplicable and enduring mysteries of life. There I was, thirteen years old, kissing and touching a girl who until that afternoon I had never so much as spoken to. Almost overcome with ecstatic surprise, I assumed I had somehow stumbled through into a new and perfect world of unqualified joy.
It had all started in the schoolyard two days earlier at Friday morning recess. Albert Quirk walked over to me and said, “Nancy Green likes you.” Nancy Green was in the eighth-grade girls. I was in the eighth-grade boys. Boys and girls attending the Incarnation parish school were kept separated from each other by a flight of stairs, the best efforts of the Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and most effectively by mutual incomprehension. Other than a few tentative, awkward boy-girl birthday parties of the previous year, social gender segregation remained almost total. I knew about girls, but until this particular moment, they had been a distant, alien species, as relevant to my existence as Buddhist monks, polo ponies or lobsters. That Sunday afternoon in the dark, back row of the Colney when I reached over and put my arm around Nancy Green, I figured that all of that was about to change.
Albert Quirk had delivered the message to me because his twin sister hung around in the same crowd as Nancy Green. I knew Nancy Green. In fact at Patsy Mullins’ twelfth birthday party the previous year, I had even kissed Nancy Green during an adult-supervised game of post office. The experience of kissing girls in a darkened dining room had been one of the transforming events of my life to date. I didn’t know how or why. I just knew that I’d never before experienced anything quite like it. And I wanted to do more of it. Unfortunately I had no idea as to how one went about making friends with girls. A combination of shyness, incompetence and deathly fear of rejection had left me distracted and restless, pulled by undefined, diffused longings.
It wasn’t yet consciously about sex. A measure of my innocent oblivion was that during that summer between seventh and eighth grade, I met Louie McCain on Third Street one afternoon. Louie, who was in my class at Inky and who must have assumed that I was among the knowing, couldn’t wait to tell me a dumb joke about masturbation. “O.K.,” he said. “Pretend you got a cat in your lap. Now you got a knife in your hand.” The knowing pause. “Now,” he said, “take the knife and start stabbing the cat!” As I followed his instructions, Louie’s smirking face broke into a “gotcha, gotcha” yelping. I didn’t get it. Louie looked at me in dumbfounded puzzlement. He began to try and explain the joke to me, but stopped, shook his head and walked away. My ignorance didn’t last the week out.
By the start of eighth grade and my thirteenth birthday, I was obsessed with girls. I knew I desperately wanted to be near them, to be able to touch them, just about any one of them would do. The disconnect that would define too much of my future had become manifest. Distracted to despair by the hormonal equivalent of nonstop, amplified white noise screaming inside my brain, I still had to go through the motions of daily life as if nothing had changed. My mother would ask, “do you want banana on your cereal? Is your brother up yet.” I would nod and say just like yesterday, “O.K.,” or “no,” or “whatever.” Inside my head, it was “Banana, banana, cereal? My brother! What brother? Who cares?” I was consumed, caught in a glandular firestorm; absorbed, distracted and stimulated beyond any lasting satiation, trapped between the goofy, noodley kid that so recently had been me and the sordidly driven sex fiend I had become. How can this be happening? Doesn’t anyone else know what’s going on?
I soon learned that the condition was general among the secret society of adolescent boys; that most of my peers also had mutated into tortured obsessives. A fresh class of initiates, going through the motions of life, sitting with their families listening to the radio, watching television, going to school, playing sports, but all the time burning, burning, burning. And then Al Quirk walks up to me in the schoolyard and says, “Nancy Green likes you.”
On the afternoon in question, I was still almost four years away from a real movie date. A real movie date meant asking a girl out in advance, picking her up at her home where her parents would get a look at you, paying her admission, treating her to whatever she wanted from the candy counter. It meant actually watching the movie and after, stopping somewhere for sodas or for something to eat. You then walked the girl home where if things had gone well you might get invited in for some kissing or maybe more. Most likely it would be a kiss goodnight on her front steps. That was a real movie date.
In eighth grade, initial arrangements for what we thought were dates were always arranged by a go-between. Libby Petrone came up to me in the schoolyard and asked if I was going to the Colney on Sunday. I wasn’t sure, but said yes. “Nancy Green wants to meet you inside,” she told me adding. “I’ll be there too, I’m meeting Louie McCain.” Remembering the joke, Louie McCain was the last kid I wanted in on my first date with a girl. That Saturday, I skipped the matinee and made sure my mother knew it. What I didn’t want on Sunday was a “no movies for you today. You went yesterday. Read a book.”
I never went to the movies by myself. I never went anywhere by myself. At thirteen, the pack impulse dominated. That Sunday, I walked up Fifth Street all alone. I was a good six months past the point where I should have been paying for an adult admission and I certainly wouldn’t have tried my “getting in for small” act if I had been with a girl. Spared that, I put my sixteen cents on the marble sill of the ticket booth and was issued a child’s admission. Standing in the back of the Colney were Libbie Petrone and Nancy Green. Louie had gotten hassled at home and never showed. There wasn’t any small talk. Libby took charge and led the way into the very last row of seats. There was no romance on Libby’s radar for that afternoon, but her open pleasure at matchmaking seemed consolation enough.
The three of us sat like strangers through the news and the coming attractions. About fifteen minutes into “Charlie Chan at the Opera” (1936, starring Warner Oland with Keye Luke as Number One Son), I made my move. As casually as I could, I put my arm around the top of Nancy’s seat and let it slide down around her shoulders. Nothing. After a couple of minutes, my arm began to ache. Decisions, Decisions. This was all new. There were no precedents. As the pain in my left arm spread from my shoulder to my elbow and down into my forearm, I had to do something. Uncharacteristically bold, I shifted my weight, turned and planted a big kiss right on Nancy Green’s lips.
It was grand. She smelled good and we kissed and kissed well into the second feature, a rerun of Errol Flynn in “They Died With Their Boots On.” Until that afternoon, nothing could have kept me from watching a movie like that. Nancy Green and I both came up for air, and I realized that as good as all of this was, there had to be more. Now Nancy Green was a nice girl. In fact all of the girls I got involved with were nice girls. That was the problem. That and the fact that despite urges that had come to dominate my every moment, I was probably still a nice boy.
The hours spent kissing with Nancy Green were a pleasure tempered by frustration and seriously mixed emotions. It was a pleasure that generated a discomfort so acute that it ultimately undermined the very pleasure it initially promised. But it was exciting. It was a thrill beyond anything I had ever known. And I think I decided that very afternoon that given a choice between a pleasure and thrill, I would always go for the thrill. Pleasures you could always get. A thrill like this was of a different order. Nothing else that I might have chosen to do that afternoon could have come even close to sitting in the dark and kissing Nancy Green. I was in love.
For the next four Sunday afternoons, Nancy Green and I were fixtures in the back row of the Colney. We kissed until my lips hurt. My life had become a sweet agony. The idea of Nancy Green filled my every waking moment and many of my dreams. In the schoolyard, I wandered away from my friends and loitered near the invisible line that separated the boys from the girls hoping to catch a glimpse of Nancy Green. I lived for Sunday afternoons.
On one of those Sunday afternoons, I stopped at the candy counter and bought my usual box of Jujy-Fruits plus a box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts for Nancy. I felt that our relationship now warranted that kind of a gesture. I stood at our spot and waited. The national anthem played, the news, the coming attractions and then the opening of the first feature, a Bowery Boys movie. Several times, I checked the last row of seats. No Nancy, but Libby Petrone was there with Denny Walsh. Louie McCain was already history. I slid along the empty seats to ask her if she knew where Nancy was. Libby at first feigned innocence, but she couldn’t wait to tell me that Nancy was at the Lindley with Robert Schmidt.
My life was over. I was devastated. Too old to cry, too young to even begin to know what had happened to me. It was awful. My mother asked, at first charitably, “what’s wrong.” That quickly morphed into, “what in the hell is wrong with you.” It went on for almost a week, a lifetime at thirteen. That Friday after school, serving my papers, Barbara McClosky stopped me on Wellens Avenue and asked me if I was going to the Colney on Sunday. “Because,” she said, “Chrissie Reagan likes you, and she says she’ll meet you inside.” That Sunday afternoon, for the first time, the cashier at the Colney refused to let me in for small.
Tags: "b" movies, 1945-1955, 1947 studebaker, 1951, abbot and costello, Add new tag, anna and the king of siam, art deco, arthur lake, astor's pet horse, b-17 flying fortresse, blondie, blue laws, brando, bugs bunny daffy duck, caramel creames, charlie chan, circle theater, clark bars, colney theater, dean jagger, deborah kerr, edgar kennedy, eighth air force, esther williams, fern rock theater, frankford, fw-190, gene autry, german language films, germantown, goldenberg's peanut chews, goobers, gregory peck, immaculate heart of mary, jane powell, joe mcdoaks, joe palooka, johnny wiesmuller, jujy-fruits, keye luke, knobby walsh, leon earle, lindley theater, mason dots, me-109, memoir, mighty mouse, milky way bars, movies, olney, on the waterfront, orpheum theater, payday bars, penny singleton, philadelphia, pretzel rods, randolph scott, republic westerns, rex harrison, rising sun avenue, roscoe kearns, roy rogers, sex, sherlock holmes, shrapnel, sylvester pussycat, tarzan, the bowery boys, the falcon, the felton theater, tom and jerry, tom conway, twelve-o-clock high, walter lantz, warner brothers cartoons, warner oland, woody woodpecker
