Saturday Matinee at the Movies, Part 1

There were six movie theaters in downtown Kokomo when I was growing up. The Indiana theater was on Main Street, two blocks north of the courthouse . The Isis, also on Main, was a block south of the town square. The Fox, and the Sipe, sat a block off the square. The Wood and Colonial were right on it. Mom and Dad said there used to be a least one more in the south part of town. They’re all gone now.

Cinema was probably even more popular than it is today. We had radio and comic books, but there was no TV, computers or Internet, so the movie house was magnetic to us kids. The Sipe was the premier theater. First run shows came there, and it was about the only theater in town to have a balcony. Adults paid 35 cents to see a film at the Sipe while us kids paid 20.
I remember debating the ticket lady in 1951 trying to convince her that I was still eleven even though I was born in 1939. According to her logic 51 minus 39 equaled 12, and thus I owed an adult’s token, but I persisted, arguing my point until she grew fatigued and waved me in.

The theaters offered a free Saturday morning movie that showed at either the Indiana or the Sipe. We kids favored the Sipe because it had a balcony. The place would be jammed with kids on those Saturdays, and the staff gave each of us a small box of gum candy as we entered. The candy was stale and rock hard. A battle would soon be instigate between the balcony and the main floor. Those in the balcony were usually the aggressors as the targets below proved too tempting - besides, the stuff was only good for throwing. Candy rained down onto the main floor in a hail storm of red, green, and yellow pellets, and was promptly sent back. After the battle subsided we would settle down and watch the movie.

There were only few categories of flicks worth seeing as far as us boys were concerned: comedy, westerns, war, and monster movies. There was plenty of each to choose from, but westerns proved to be the easy winner, B-Westerns as they were called, B&W films, extremely low budget, and produced by the wagon load. Technicolor films were rare in those days.

A herd of cowboy heroes starred in a plethora of these horse operas: Hopalong Cassidy, Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tim Holt, Red Ryder, and the Lone Ranger to name a few. Almost all the Westerns played at the Fox, and you could take in a double feature for a mere 14 cents - half the kids in town were there.

Now that I’m older and able to reflect with unbiased judgment upon these specters of my past, I have to admit to some oddities in their circumstance that escaped me in my youth. For one thing, not a single western character seemed to have a home; they were all drifters, constantly moving from one town to the next. The evening scene would find them huddled around a camp fire. They slept on open ground with nothing more that a thin blanket for cover and a saddle to lay their head - never needing a tent because the night was always starry.

When they got to town the first stop was invariably the nearest saloon, for a shot of whiskey or sarsaparilla (i.e. root beer ), then to ask where they could put up their horse, and finally, to get directions to a boarding house for a steak and a hot bath. Our heroes were seldom able to depart the saloon without getting involved in a fistfight where at least one ruffian was thrown out a window or propelled through the swinging doors.
GO TO: Part 2, Saturday Matinee at the Movies