1938 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Bill Hill
Born in 1932
Pittsburgh, PA
Interviewed on September 23, 2019
By Bobby Jahrling

The first movie that I remember seeing in theaters was probably… Lost Horizon if I had to guess. It definitely was my friend’s sixth or seventh birthday party. This was exciting because it was the first birthday party that I had gone to where we left one of my friends’ houses and went into the city instead. We all piled into my friend’s family car and his parents drove us into the city. There were no seat belts not even enough seats for us so we all just rolled around in the back. Luckily, we were tightly packed enough so none of us could slide around too much. I remember the movie being a little too mature for us to be seeing at a sixth birthday party and looking back on it realize that a lot of the movie went right over our heads. The general plot of the film was that a British man named Robert Conway had to rescue westerners who were stranded in China; however, on the flight home after successfully retrieving the westerners, the plane they were on was hijacked and they crashed in the Chinese mountains. After being rescued, the survivors were brought to Shangri-La. This was a different society from what the survivors new and all of the citizens followed the directions of the High Lama. Conway was intrigued by the civilization, but his younger brother convinced him to leave I think. Before leaving, Conway met with the High Lama who told Conway that he was destined to replace him as the High Lama. Not totally believing this story, George convinced Conway to leave, but their return voyage was plagued with misfortune. In the end, Conway returned to Shangri-La and fills his role there.

I have a better memory of going to the movies as a child but not necessarily my very first one. We graduated from having to go to the movies with a parent pretty quickly and by the time that we were we were eight, nine, or ten we got to go on our own. Sometimes we would take the street car down to East Liberty but other times we would save the ten cents and walk down. There were four movie theaters all very close to each other in East Liberty and we would choose one to go to at random most Saturdays except for the winter when it got too cold to go at all. We really did not care what movie we saw. The movies were not the main attraction for us. Instead, the highlight of the trips was seeing the news reals of what was going on in Europe during the second World War. I did not have a television at home, so this was very important to me. After the news segment, they would show a cartoon and then two specials which would change week to week. My favorite specials were the western ones. There was usually one western every week. By the time the movie actually played I felt like I had already gotten a good deal for the ten cents I paid to get into the theatre. Whatever movie that came on was just an added bonus. If it was good, great. If it was bad, at least we were out of the house. The freedom that going to the movies gave us was great. It gave us an excuse to get out of the neighborhood and go closer to downtown and experience the city which was a very exciting opportunity for me eighty years ago. We would never really get more than 3 blocks away from home if it were not for the movie expeditions.

Theaters back then were different. They were somehow far more magical but also far less impressive than they are today. The ones we went to at least were bare bones. They would have one screen and either wooden benches or chairs. There were no snacks for us to buy there and they were never the right temperature. Regardless of what we wore we were either far too hot or shivering. There was never and in between. Despite all of this, I still had a sense of wonderment every time we went to the movies. Maybe it was just because it was the only time we were able to watch something on a screen. Regardless of what it was, I still get flashbacks of great memories whenever I am driving through East Liberty. Now there are many new AMC’s and other big-name movie theater chains there. The old Theaters are gone for the most part. My personal favorite was on 6108 Penn Avenue but that got torn down years ago and is a CVS now I think. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the old movie theaters but air conditioned 3-D movies with food delivered to my seat in not that bad either, especially for an old guy like me.