The Rialto

In the 1950s  Sunbury had two theaters, the Rialto and the Strand.  For kids, there was only the Rialto because they had Saturday afternoon matinees that featured Movietone News, a cartoon, a serial, and a short along with the feature, which was always either a cowboy or a WW II movie.  The place was always packed because it gave mothers all over town 3 ½ hours of relief for a measly 20¢.  Going to the “Rat Hole” was the recurring miracle of summer.  My older brother Fred and Ronnie Beaver went every week.  I was dragged along because it was the price my brother had to pay for Mom footing the bill.

We’d gather in our back yard, walk to the sidewalk at the top of a high wall that ran west along the south side of Market Street, and start down the hill.  From the top, you could see all the way down Market Street, over the Horn railroad to Cameron Park just past the Pennsy double track railroad.  Kids are both superstitious and prone to bizarre rituals.  For us, it started by avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk from the top of the hill to the theater just past Fifth Street.  The mantra was, “Step on a crack and break your mother’s back.”  Where THAT came from is lost to time.  Maybe it goes back to the invention of sidewalks.  It didn’t take long to realize that it offered little challenge.  Being younger, I was just fine with it, so I wasn’t very happy with its evolution to trying to get as far as we could without walking on the sidewalk at all.  My short legs were a distinct disadvantage, especially navigating down the hill to Tenth Street. So I was taken out of the competition early-on and was basically ignored over the entire obstacle course, the running of which went Saturday after Saturday from early June to the end of August.

When we were in front of the theater, my brother surrendered my quarter, which I was not allowed to carry for fear of losing it.  In the 1950s, there was still an enclosure that protruded from between the two sets of double doors.  The sides and front were glass with the one in front sporting a metal circle with louvers for communication and a cutout at the bottom over the metal dish thing used for pushing money inside and sliding tickets outside. At the very beginning of kid-dom, I wasn’t tall enough to reach the metal dish.  But at least I got to hold a whole quarter for the entire time it took my brother to pay for and get his ticket.  He’d then pay my bill, give me the ticket along with the nickel change.   Right inside the second set of double doors stood Mr. Conrad, ancient even then with white hair.  He took the tickets and put them in this tall square hopper that stood on the floor.  Directly in front of us across the tiny lobby was the concession stand which we could look at but which we never approached.  All that soda pop, popcorn, countless candy bars.  You could smell the sugar, and the salivating was automatic.  But it wasn’t for us.  My brother would always lead me over to the left to a solitary candy machine.  He’d ask what I wanted, I’d point, and he’d put my nickel in the slot and pull out the appropriate knob.  For me, there was only one choice:  “Sourballs.”  It was the measure of my brother that his favorite was “Good ‘n Plenty.”  Ugh.  I can still smell them.

The Rialto before it burned down, a sad, ghostly shadow of its glory days of the early 1950s Saturday matinees.

If we were lucky, there were seats in the very back row.  That row was more prized than fifth row center at the symphony.  We’d sit in the middle and take in the “Rialto Smell.”  There was nothing like it in the world.  It was unique, comforting like your mother’s To A Wild Rose Avon perfume, and tied-in with every pleasant memory of being able to go to the movies without parents.   That blended in with surveying the crowd.  The bullies from the Third Ward always sat way down front. The kids never sat together en masse.  Friends would sit together, but these small clumps were scattered all over the place in a strange pattern.  It was a gross breach of etiquette to sit directly in front of anybody, so the clump and empty seat sequence alternated with each row so that everybody had a clear view.  It’s one of life’s mysteries as to how stuff like this evolves.  Long ago, was there a seat choreographer? Maybe it was the same thermodynamics that leads to closest packing of crystals like table salt.

Once we surveyed the house, it was time to get serious.  The first order of business was to bounce up and down on your seat to see if it squeaked.  This was important because you could then use the sound to express disgust at the “mush” scenes that always managed to come on right in the middle of the best action sequences.  The next step was to turn you nickel box of candy into a weapon.  First, you had to dump all the candy into you palm and count the pieces.  For Sour Balls, the box had fourteen of them pictured on the sides and end flaps.  But there were ALWAYS only twelve in the box.  It was the same for all the other kinds, even my brother’s God-awful Good ‘n Plenties.   You then had to yell out that you were gypped.  There could be no deviation from the rule, and the louder you yelled, the better.  You next had a choice.  You could throw the waxed paper inner wrapping onto the floor and put all twelve pieces into your mouth or hang on to it as a handy container for the loose candy.  No matter which way you went, you then tore the flaps off one end of the box.

The kids who stuffed their mouths were automatically disqualified for the next part, which started as soon as the curtain opened and the lights went down.  All the “hard candy” kids would put one piece in their mouth, get it good and sticky, pick out somebody way in front, and wing the candy at the back of their head.  It took only moments for the entire theater to be a hornet’s nest of flying, disgustingly sticky candy.  Here’s where sitting all the way in the back was a HUGE advantage. There was nobody behind you to whack you on the head, and the whole theater of kids was in play.  An extra advantage of the back row was that the Third Ward bullies were out of range.  Nobody aimed at them anyway for fear of being torn limb from limb in the dark.  You could hear the ping of errant shots hitting the backs of seats that added a staccato soundtrack of airborne, gooey, artificially flavored sugar bomblets.  The downside was that, if you got too enthused, you soon ran out of missiles and had nothing to gnaw on during the movie.

And there were ushers, all kids either almost out of or just graduated from high school.  They were all dressed up like bell hops complete with jackets and striped pants and a flash light.  They’d start down the aisles at the first sound of candy rattling off the walls and seat backs.  Everything would get immediately quiet and stay quiet until they backed up to the very top of the aisles.  First there’d be one “ping,” then another, then a quick, short barrage that would stop before the ushers could take two steps.  Nobody ever got caught because nobody could afford multiple boxes of candy to keep the battle going for very long.  And you had to save a couple to eat.  Of course, there’d always be one holdout, always an older kid, who would wait for an usher to come charging back down the aisle to quash one rule breaking or another (there were endless rules).  He’d wing his last gooey candy at the back of the usher’s head.  If he scored, the whole theater would erupt with laughter.  They never got caught.

But whether you ate the candy all at once or joined the free-for-all, you still had the empty box.  That was used for serious mush scenes, which were always quiet as couples smooched and groaned on the big screen.  You put your mouth over the open end and blew as hard as you could.  If you had the flap at the other end set just right, the sound was like a blend of a tin whistle, a baby’s squeeze toy, and a high-pitch fart.  When simultaneously executed by dozens of kids seated all over the theater, the sound was exquisite beyond words to tell.  I’d give almost anything to hear that chord again.

Oh, the program itself?  Well, with all the goings-on in the galleries, it was sometimes easy to forget why we were there in the first place.  A typical sequence went as follows:  first, a couple of technicolor ads, usually for Purvin’s Dairy and Schreffler’s Pontiac-Buick-Cadillac.  Second, Movietone News.  Third, a cartoon.  The best were Warner Brothers.  The most tedious were Walt Disney, which always seemed cornball.  Next came the serial.  The best was “Captain Video, Master of the Stratosphere.”  The kids booed the evil Dr. Tobar and Vultura, ruler of the planet Atoma, who somehow later morphed into one of the judges in “Perry Mason.”   Captain Video’s atomic car was always the highlight of the reel.  The last short was either The Three Stooges or a Pete Smith Specialty.  When I was really little, the Stooges were downright scary.  The Pete Smith Specialties never seemed very special.  For the feature, which was usually a western or a war movie, they’d quickly close the curtain and then without a pause open it again.  Who knows why, but it was part of the ritual, and there would’ve been calls for refunds if it wasn’t done on cue.

The final act was walking out from under the marquee into the blinding 3:30 PM sun.  We’d be squinting all the way up Market Street past Shindler’s Studio.  The afternoon was completed by going to the field just below Court Street across from Mrs. Arnold’s little house.  If the movie was a western, it was cowboys and Indians.  If it was a war movie, out would come the little olive drab rubber soldiers, and battles would be fought until Dad’s whistle for supper.  Then baths and sitting out on the porch swing with the old man, listening to the nighthawks circling high overhead and hoping for an evening thunderstorm.  If we were lucky, Mom would’ve made popsicles.  Any excuse to stay up past bedtime.

Fighting WW II with olive drab rubber GIs was a major activity in sand boxes and open fields.  Judging by the rubber boat, this collection must’ve been Marines.  I particularly liked the guys with grenades and flame throwers.

 

The Nu-Way

If it was summer and a Saturday and the Old Man was in the mood and he had a dollar and he approved of the movie, we would pile into the ’36 Chevy two-door coupe and head across the toll bridge and down the highway to the Nu-Way drive in.  The excitement would’ve already been building because right after supper Mom would make popcorn and a big jug of lemonade.  It’s a sad fact that, just like at the Rialto, my brother and I never once bought anything at the Nu-Way concession stand.  When I was really little and dressed in my “Doctor Denton’s,” we weren’t even allowed inside the concession building.  If we had to go, Mom produced a large canning jar and passed it back.  I always wondered what was in there that put it off limits to kids.  In a few years when I finally got old enough to go inside with my brother, I sadly learned she had our best interest at heart.  The place was crowded and smelled of soggy paper from the steamed and wrapped hot dogs and hamburgers.  The bathroom was totally gross with a trough to pee in and three stalls that looked as if they had been sprayed with Porta Potty remains.  Our only defense was to forgo the lemonade and hope like hell we could make it through the two-hour show.

But there was always the outside chance that the Old Man would be in the money and stop on the way at the Custard Cup for soft ice cream.  The Custard Cup could be seen up and down the highway because of the giant hot dog and root beer mug on the roof.  We never went inside.  The Old Man would go to the walk-up window and get the same thing every visit:  four small cones of vanilla.  They had to be eaten fast in the hot, humid Pennsylvania summers and they usually didn’t last past the drive in ticket kiosk.

The Custard Cup on Hwys 11/15 across the river between Shamokin Dam and Selinsgrove.  It was the very first “soft” ice cream place in the central valley, beating out the Tastee Freeze on North Fourth Street by a year or two.

 

We always parked in the same spot:  two rows back and three spaces to the right of the concession stand.  And the speaker had to be on the Old Man’s side.  Then came the waiting.  It took forever for it to get dark because the cars faced west.  There would be this detestable sky glow pouring over and around the screen.  Cars parked close to the screen would start playing spotlight tag, but even they would quickly tire of it and would start blaring their horns.  It wouldn’t take long until the whole drive-in came alive with beeping horns.  There’d be the usual “Shave-and-a-Haircut, Two Bits.”  Others would beep out Morse code.  Still others would just lay on the horn and not let up.  Sometimes, the projectionist would get on the PA system and announce through the speakers that it was simply too early to start.  That would just provoke the rest of the cars to join in.  Finally, the projectionist would give up and start the show with the result that the Old Man would start complaining that he couldn’t see what was happening on the screen.  For my brother and I, it was all better than whatever dumb movie would eventually come on.

If it was a double feature, between the movies they’d always show this short of a huge count-down clock with a stupid-looking elf standing off to the side eating one concession item after another.  There’d be advertisements for all the stuff they sold.  One stand-out was “Flavo’s Shrimp Rolls.”  Then the short would switch back to the clock and then the again elf who’d be slobbering over something else.  An excited voice-over would announce, “The feature will start in five minutes.”  I seemed to go on for hours.  It usually didn’t matter because I’d be sound asleep only a couple of minutes into the second feature.  Sometimes I didn’t even make it through the first.

One time, I was wide awake the whole movie.  The Old Man got the ads in the Daily Item confused and thought we were going to see a Richard Widmark western.  When we pulled into the drive-in, the huge sign out front read “War of the Worlds.”  I wasn’t paying attention, but ten minutes into the feature my hair went up on ends.  There were these horrible, snakey things with three-lobe eyes that made these creepy noises and bobbed around looking for humans to snuff.  I totally freaked and got down on the floor.  But I couldn’t blot out the sounds coming from the speaker hooked over the Old Man’s window.  As Ray Bradbury noted, the human imagination is ALWAYS worse than anything you can write about or show on the screen.  I was curled up in a ball with hands over my ears and my mind ricocheting from one hideous monster to the next, all far worse than anything my parents were watching on the screen.

All it took was one look at this thing from Mars to send me onto the floor of the ’36 Chevy with my hands tight over my ears.  Even worse was the horrible sounds these things made.  I can still hear them.

The Old Man thought it all was funny.  Mom wasn’t amused because it gave me nightmares for weeks and made me scared of the dark.  From then until I was out of grade school, my mother held absolute veto power over going to the drive in.  She would double-check the newspaper ads and check with members of her card club to make sure the movie was “safe.”  The Old Man knew when to pick a fight and when to lay low.  For the drive-in, he had a permanent white flag when it came to deciding whether we’d be going to the Nu-Way, The Point, or The Silver Moon.

 

TV Knob

For the kids living in the Hill School neighborhood, television arrived in the summer of 1954.  At first, there were just one or two TV sets in the entire neighborhood.  Then one appeared in the window of Hackett’s Hardware on Market Street.  The crowd staring through the window was constantly changing, but it never thinned out until closing time.  It didn’t take long before BKP cable company arrived.  For a few lousy bucks a month, you could get three channels:  two from Scranton-Wilkes Barre and one out of Harrisburg way down the river, just enough to cover all three networks.  Three channels!  The mind boggled at the possibilities.  The TV population in town grew like bacteria in a petri dish.

Our next-door neighbors the Dukes were one of the first families in the neighborhood close to Hill School on East Eleventh Street to buy one.  Our whole family was invited to see it, and we stood in their small living room transfixed by the images and sound coming out of this huge, rectangular eyeball in a box. It was pure sensory overload:  Ozzie and Harriet, The Lone Ranger, Tennessee Ernie Ford, John Cameron Swazee, Sky King, Ding Dong School, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Howdy Doody.  There were five-minute programs, and something called “The Late Show.”  And the commercials:

“G-I-B-B-O-N-S, pure refreshing Gibbons.

If it’s Gibbon’s it’s good, so the next time you should,

Say, “Gimme, gimme, gimme Gibbons.”

Pure alcoholic poetry.  There were musical ads for Bromo Selzer, National Bohemian Beer, Piels Beer featuring Bert & Harry, every beer imaginable, drain cleaner (“…And away go troubles, down the drain.”), invisible women wearing bras and girdles, and millions of ads for cigarettes:  “Pall Mall’s extra length cools the smoke and filters it naturally;” “Come up, come all the way up to Kools;” “LSMFT… Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco.”  (Up until then, I believed Charlie Yeager when he told me it meant “Lord Save Me From Truman.”)  It was enough to keep your head spinning forever.  As if the ad agencies didn’t know that.

For a select few, it was all old news.  Those few had experienced TV Knob.  It was in the summer of 1950, and I was three years old.  I don’t know how the Old Man heard about it, but one summer evening he told me we were going out.  I took my usual spot standing on the floor of the ’29 Chevy two door sedan on the passenger side.  The rule was that I had to keep both hands on the dashboard at all times.  And that was the beginning and end of child automobile safety.  We drove north out of town and up Mile Hill Road just past the armory.  A dirt side road went off to the right and up to the top of a small hill.

The Old Man and I in the ’29 Chevy at TV Knob.  The guy in the booth can’t get anything but snow.  Watching the TV required binoculars (not provided).

(Rendering by Richard Lytle)

There was a scattering of cars, all facing what looked like a homemade concession stand.  A guy wearing a soda jerk hat was leaning with his elbows on a shelf, looking out at the car windshields facing him.  There was a droopy string of yellow light bulbs on either side.  A roughly lettered sign listed a menu of sorts with prices.  On the roof of the stand was a gigantic Dumont TV set and a horn outdoor speaker.  Dad wheeled the Chevy around and joined the front row lineup.  The TV had what looked like snow all over the tube, and the speaker was blaring out white noise.  Everybody was just sitting in their cars, staring up at the TV, waiting for something to happen.  The guy inside the concession stand reached under the counter and pulled up a big, old-fashioned microphone on a stand.  It had “ON THE AIR” written in an arc across the top.  He sat it right in front of his face and bellowed out, “We’re having a little trouble with the FM this evening.  Be patient, please.  We’ll be pulling in WNEP-16 or WBRE-28 any second, now.”

An older man parked in the back row walked up and bought a bag of popcorn.  I could smell it when he walked back past my open window.  I looked at the Old Man.  I knew that 25¢ was an extravagance he couldn’t even comprehend, so I went back to staring at the blank screen.

“What’s supposed to happen, Dad?”

He finally looked over.  “We’re supposed to see stuff on the TV screen, sorta like the movies, only smaller.  They’ve been showing pictures of TV sets in the newspaper.”

“It’s stupid.  Why not just go to the Rialto and watch stuff on the screen?”

“Well, you’re supposed to put one of these things in your living room.  You don’t have to buy tickets.  You can just get up and get a beer or make your own popcorn or go to the bathroom and come right back.”

It sounded kinda okay, but I could tell that the Old Man wasn’t buying it.  Then, just like at the Nu-Way, somebody way in the back started beeping his horn.  Then a couple of others joined in.  The concession guy started yelling into his big microphone, “Stop doing that!!  We’ll get a signal really soon.  You’re going to really love it.  Just stop blaring your horns!”

Well, it was obvious that it wasn’t just the Old Man who wasn’t buying it.  A car engine started up, and a snazzy ’50 Ford convertible left in a cloud of dust.  “Come back, come back!”  The concession guy leaned out over the counter and hollered after the car, but it was already careening down the dirt road to the highway.  Then another car started up and left, then a third.

“That’s it,” said the Old Man.  Because we were in the front row, we passed right in front of the sad man and his concessions.  He had the look of desperation.  He picked up the microphone and yelled into it, “It’s gonna be a great show.  Popcorn’s half off.  Buy two and get a free pop.”

But we were already halfway down the little hill.  When we stopped at the highway, the Old Man turned at gave me a serious look, “That’s one fad that’ll never catch on.”