Fear and Foolishness

In my youth I was neither fearless nor cowardly, but would describe myself as cautious. I remember Mom was deathly scared of snakes and swimming. I did not much care for snakes myself. I found something revolting about the thought of handling them because I always thought they were slimy until I touched a big Boa in a college class and found its skin to be cool and dry. I learned to swim when I was six or seven. I liked to climb trees and never feared heights.

There was, however, one specific thing that terrorized me. It was a dream. When I was five or six I had a nightmare from which I woke distressed and crying. I had the dream several times and always woke up terrified. They asked me what it was about, but I was never able to describe it. The rhythm and beat of that dream is still with me, but there was little then or now that I could tell you about it. There was no form, no monster, no scene. There was a sense of something expanding and contracting - pulsating. Some sound that rose, than sank in intensity; a menace that was near but could not be seen. If I were superstitious or a believer in the supernatural, I would think that a door briefly opened, and for short time I looked upon pure evil. I had other nightmares after that, but they paled in comparison.

Every time I went to a monster movie, I would swear that I would never go to another, but the next time one came into town, I would find myself sitting with my brother and several other neighborhood kids watching the latest offering. Most of the movies featured either, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi or Lon Chaney. I probably saw every horror film made during the 1940’s and 50’s : Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Werewolf, Dracula. I spent much of each show with my hands covering my eyes, peeking through splayed fingers.

I know of only one other dream I had and it ended with me waking up laughing. I dreamed that I walked into my bedroom. The closet was just to the left as you entered the room. In the dream the closet door had a window in the top half, and I saw Frankenstein sitting in the closet with his back to me. I ran away so fast that a cloud of dust, leaves, other debris rose in my place obscuring everything. I had injected that dust cloud into my dream after having seen a similar scene in a ghost movie in which Jack Benny and Rochester starred. It seemed very funny.

GO TO: Part 2

Saturday Matinee at the Movies, Part 2

Generally the good guys wore white hats while the bad one donned black. Lash LaRue was an exception. A bit of an anti-hero, he dressed entirely in black, talked out of the side of his mouth, and carried a long bullwhip. He was so adept in using it that he could rip a revolver out of a bad guy’s hand at a distance beyond the reach of the whip.

Hopalong also dressed in black, and like the other heroes, traveled with a sidekick. Hopalong’s was called Lucky, Lash LaRue partnered with Fuzzy, Frog traveled with Gene Autry, Gabby Hayes sided with Roy Rogers. Two Indians were sidekicks. Tonto assisted the Lone Ranger, and Little Beaver sided with Red Ryder. Some of the sidekicks were serious, most were comical relief.

On the whole our heroes never killed any bad guys, at least not up close. They shot guns out of their hands, beat them up, and sometimes wounded one (most likely in the arm), but a lot of the villains did bite the dust. Usually they were shot off their horse during a running gun battle where hundreds of rounds were fired back and forth. The “dead” never suffered or bled. Sometimes the hastily edited movies would show the dead guy breathing, or a bus driving by in the distant background, or power lines, or some other anomaly that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was all great fun.

The monster movies were the ones I loved to fear. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf, and the Mummy were the chief staples, and starred Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney. I was the youngest of our gang and found the movies terrifying, and swore at the end of each film that it was going to be my last. I’d have nightmares right afterward, but would find myself sitting with the gang when the next one came in town. I spent most of a movie with my eyes closed during the scariest parts. Either that or I would look through my slightly spayed fingers as I held my hands over my eyes.

The popular comedy movie stars in those days were Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges, Abbott & Costello, Our Gang, The Bowery Boys, The Marx Brothers, and Martin and Lewis.

The war movies were mainly propaganda films made during WWII, most starring John Wayne. They were heroic productions dealing with bravery, honor, and duty, but had little else to do with the reality of war. Dad use to say he wouldn’t walk across the street to see one. I now understand his point, but it seems every generation has to grow up and learn the brutishness of war for itself. People might find war to be the vulgar, and repugnant thing it is if movies depicted its costs in more truthful ways, - then maybe it might go out of fashion.

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