By 
Recently, when my wife and I tried, and failed, to find a non-animated movie in which the “F” word is used fewer than a dozen times and more than two people survive at the end, I reflected on how movies of yesteryear had a special meaning during my more than seven decades.
I slept with the picture of Shirley Temple under my pillow at the age of five. No child star was ever sweeter or more talented.
I remember the almost excruciating wait as I saved ten cents a week for five weeks so I could see the most expensive and most advertised movie of its time, “Tarzan the Ape Man” – over two years in the making! It was a rarely surpassed cinematic adventure for me again.
Later, I daydreamed in class about dating Becky from the classic “Tom Sawyer.”
In 1939, I was moved when Clark Gable said he didn’t give a damn about Miss O’Hara in a movie so long I had to ask if Roosevelt was still president when I finally got out. Then came “Raging Bull,” about the life of boxer Jake LaMotta. One reviewer wrote that without the “F” word, it could have been a silent film.
To avoid a bully in the sixth grade, she often skipped school and went to the movies in Iowa City with the proceeds from the long hours she sold Liberty, Look, and Life magazines. It’s not as easy as the $20 to $30 allowances parents shell out today for doing housework for an 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 in a movie theater again until I saw “Psycho” with my own kids.
Outside an Iowa theater, I experienced a moment frozen in time. While standing in line to see an Abbott and Costello movie on Sunday, December 7, 1941, the horrific news spread that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. The end of the world was coming!
Two years later, I bought myself a tuxedo and became a doorman at the same theater, my first summer administrative job. I bought a trench coat like Robert Mitchum’s and decided that he would 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 swooning over Frank Sinatra and going to his latest movie eight times.
I took my now wife, Lovae, to a movie theater in Washington, DC for $50 on our first date. As part of the after show, a “mentalist” named Daas displayed his famous psychic abilities by “reading” the minds and futures of clients. Choosing me, he said that I would go west and write a successful book someday in the very, very distant future.
I moved my family to San Diego in 1959, where I began a new career in public relations, spending more than 20 years with the San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld.
At the age of 75 I published my first book. This and my second book, Memoirs of the Zoo Years, won first prize in their categories from the San Diego Book Awards Committee.
I have often wondered what happened to the seer who was so on the nose about the young man in the audience that night half a century ago. He had placed a question in that locked box in the hall, which was never opened before he chose me from the mini crystal ball he was holding as a prop.
My girlfriend and I still go to 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 single-screen, spacious and ornate palaces. And the 50 cent popcorn. And dialogue as sharp as “All About Eve.”
Maybe I’ll write my own screenplay now that the books are doing well.