1939 Olean, New York
Al Curry
1929
Olean, New York
Interviewed on February 10, 2021
by Lucas Ferrer
The first movie I remember seeing… well let me back up just a bit. The key here is “remember”.
The first movie I went to was 1933, but I wasn’t sent to the theater to see a movie. Back in 1933 – well before television, the internet, and all that – everybody was a movie buff. My parents were. They used to go to the movies in Berkeley, California in the 1930s, and they would take us kids and babysit us while they were watching the movie. That was my first experience with movies, but of course I didn’t know what was going on.
We used to go to the movies after every Saturday afternoon in Berkeley to what I call “Shoot ‘Em Ups.” They would have these three-, four-hour continuous movies and serials about good guys and bad guys chasing each other up and down dusty roads on horses. What they taught our generation was that the good guys always prevail, and they kept the world straight. Well, I guess that’s where my generation was. But 10 years later when I wound up in Korea, we were the good guys, and we didn’t prevail. That three-year war was started in 1950 and it ended in 1953 exactly where it started, and all we had was a cease-fire. So, my indoctrination about the good guys prevailing didn’t prove out when I wound up in Korea.
The first movie I remember seeing was in 1939 in Olean, New York. We were moving from Berkeley, California to New Orleans, Louisiana in 1939 and we drove our car to Ithaca, New York. We were going to spend a few weeks in Ithaca while my Dad went down to New Orleans to find a house and make some arrangements. On our way to Ithaca in 1939, we stopped in Olean, New York to visit with my mother’s oldest sister’s – Grace McGranahan – family. And in the course of that two or three-day visit, there was a matinee at the Haven Theater in Olean of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. So, with your grandfather – my younger brother – myself, and our cousins, we went to the matinee. That was the first movie I remember seeing. And it blew me away.
It made a big impression on me. The movie was so well done, and I could follow the plot. I thought it was the greatest thing I had seen at the time – I thought it to be the highlight of my ten years of life.
But I have to admit that over the years as my own children went to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, we would discuss it at the dinner table, so I’m not sure how much is from my memory at 10 years old and how much is added from my own children’s take on the same movie. But I remember the story – the fact that she had an evil stepmother trying to do her in and she was hiding out with the seven dwarfs. And she finally did take a bite out of that apple and went into some kind of coma, and then the prince came along and brought her out of her stupor, and off they went.
At the theater, I’m satisfied that there were some crude concessions, but we never patronized them. We’re talking about the 1930s – money was scarce and nobody who went to the movies in my crowd had the money to spend on concessions.
10 years later, when I wound up in the army, they destroyed my hearing when they introduced me to the 90-millimeter cannon. That cannon was so loud that it took a good bit of my hearing just in basic training, and Korea finished it all. Movies and Al Curry just got a divorce back there in the early 50s. That was the end of my movie.
But I did see all the technicolor and all those advancements that came in, all those marvelous improvements in movie making. Everyone, including my wife Liz, was a big movie buff, but we never went to the movies after Korea because I just couldn’t follow the dialogue anymore. I didn’t take up another movie until they came out with closed captions, and even that just didn’t replace what movies were for me before Korea.
