1938 Waveland, Mississippi

Ninette Webster
Year born: 1930
City/town where movie was seen: Waveland, MS
Interviewed on 25/1/19
by Louis Abrassard

The first movie I remember watching was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, with Shirley Temple and Randolph Scott. It was based off of this novel I had read (or maybe it was read to me) so I was excited to see the movie version. All the girls my age went to every Shirley Temple movie, she was the star, you know, par excellence. She was very talented – she could sing, she could dance, and she was very pretty. I don’t remember much of the movie save that she was an orphan who travelled between houses.

I was around 7 or 8 years old at the time I think, and I wanted to be like Shirley Temple. She was all the rage at the time. I had my hair curled in singlets like hers. She was THE idol of the time, kind of like Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley. It didn’t matter what movie she was in, everybody went to her, and it was a success. They had all these rumours about her and her hair – that it wasn’t real or that she wasn’t blonde.

I went with my cousin, Alice. That’s all I can remember. Sometimes I would go to the movies in New Orleans with some of my friends though. We didn’t usually go with boys to the movies that young, not until later in high school.

In Mississippi my parents drove. In New Orleans we could walk, but on the Mississippi coast we had to be driven. I don’t remember the theatre name. It went in a hurricane, maybe in Hurricane Camille or the Hurricane in 1947. That was before Hurricanes had names.

Yes, there was a concession. My favourite candy was Milky Way. I loved chocolate, still do, but I don’t eat it. Yes they had ushers. And the other unique thing was that they didn’t have air conditioning, they had very large fans. It was ok because you were used to it, no one had air conditioning back then. They might have had window fans, you know in the windows, that would’ve circulated the air. They also had big fans either side of the stage.

Waveland, MS. In 1938.