Glimpse Back At What We Won't Get Back

Where Carolina Showgoing Had A Glow On

Seems to me that the older generation felt way more intensely about movies than we ever could. Photos like these suggest reasons why. First off, let’s agree that they simply had it better. Never mind if films then were superior to ones of a past fifty years, an argument to run in circles so long as there are minds to differ. But can we stipulate that going to theatres was a richer experience? Sampling here is 'nuff to neutralize argument to the contrary. I have a friend, now nearing ninety, who told of The Black Swan plus Marine recruits in stage drill, plus live swing, plus vaude acts of infinite range --- to which I pathetically propose The Gorgon with Curse Of The Mummy’s Tomb among my treasured moments. Want to be humbled? Go visit what’s left of fans that grew up in the forties or early fifties. I’m drifting off specific topic of these photos, all from Cabarrus County in North Carolina. Cabarrus is home to Concord and Kannapolis, satellite towns increasingly drawn into force field that is rapid-expanding Charlotte. They were small bergs with large showman spirit, as is vivid here. Every day was eventful for these sites. Want to sell The Ghost of Frankenstein by mobile means? Put a dummy on a bike and let your ersatz Groucho peddle him about town, preferably by schools as they’re letting out. Where’s the sense of Grouch as chauffeur to the F monster? None I’d guess, unless the costume was left over from previously-promoted The Big Store. Small matter, for look who’s coming soon, and in person. To bicycle owners as parked out front, there was no bigger name than Bill Elliot. They would rather have seen him than Ty Power, Robert Taylor, and Paul Muni in tandem. I met several exhibitors that hosted Wild Bill at NC venues. A nicer guy never was, according to all (not so Ken Maynard, but we’ll pass that). But who, you’ll ask, were the Rodrick Twins, performing in support of Elliot? Might be locals, however way I found no online reference to them.

Here was an era when aluminum scraps could buy your way into brought-back The Blue Bird, once only at 3:30, time enough to race home from your red brick schoolhouse, gather admission from Dad’s (or someone else’s) tool shed, and make fleet way to air-conditioned comfort where what would otherwise be junk is now ticket to Shirley Temple and Bob Hope, assuming management doesn’t clear seats after The Blue Bird. Youth was encouraged by all media to help in the war effort. Junior armies sprung from everywhere. We’ve forgotten what aluminum translated to on battlefields, but I bet then-boys knew. It’s been told/retold how theatres were community centers, especially in wartime. Something intense going on all the time. Is that a truck backed up on the left to receive the first offering? The photographer waited until the crate was full up before snapping. Onlookers appear as though this was routine occurrence … still, they’d congregate at theatre fronts because something was always happening there. Just the people in and out was enough to engage, and who knew what nutty stunt might roll out the front entrance and take to streets.

Again with the bicycles, only now it’s 1959. And Concord kids still trust neighbors with their bicycles. When did it become necessary to put locks on bikes? May we date cultural collapse to such turning point? Leaving anything today on a public street that can be carried off is assurance that it will be carried off. Not so then, or at least we like to think not so. Was 1959 really such an Eden? I’d say it was at least for Kiddie Shows still a weekly ritual in small towns and large. Serials and short comedies were kept in service through the fifties, and well into the sixties at many venues. Greensboro’s “Circle K” club at the Carolina Theatre was using Republic chapter-plays right through 1966, despite no new ones being produced over the decade prior to that. Note the time: 9:30 to 12:00, “Every Saturday.” This was where children were parked, warehoused, whatever, for much of a weekend when they might otherwise annoy elders. Two-and-a-half hours could expand to nightfall if staff didn’t mind moppets staying to see Five Gates To Hell two or three times. Not to be forgot is theatres as social mecca --- youth equivalent of lodge meetings or the corner bar. Can we wonder at intense feeling they had in retrospect? B-west conventions went decades longer than I dreamed they could (all gone now). Anyone wanting to make sense of that phenomenon need only look at captures like these to know the paradise they lost, and we never found.