1941 Roswell, New Mexico

James Dowaliby
1929 Roswell, New Mexico
Interviewed on January 26th, 2019 by Philip Vasseur

At this point I can’t remember any specifics of the first movies I saw. I remember images in my mind – Laurel and Hardy, we used to go and see them. Also of Charlie Chaplin of course. I have images of Charlie Chaplin in his big shoes in the snow.

I would’ve gone to those movies with my mother. My mother was not a highly educated woman. She finished high school and then went to a finishing school in New York called Mrs Merrill’s School for Girls. She was the one who took me to museums and to theatres and to movies. She pushed me to read in the earliest days of my life, when I first could read. She is an abiding presence in my life.

Later on, in the 40s, we were living in New Mexico. I used to go to the movies on Saturday afternoon for a dime. Around us there were two – actually three theatres. Two of them were owned by the same people. One was called the Yucca, one was called the Pecos, and then there was the third independent theatre – known as El Capitan. The Yucca was kind of the fanciest theatre of the three. The Pecos was a little lower scale, and it was the Pecos that on Saturday afternoon used to have serials – this is Roswell, New Mexico we’re talking about – Flash Gordon and the like. We went to serials and cowboy movies, westerners. They used to have Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers in them. After the cowboy movies they’d have sessions of the serial, a chapter every week.

I can’t seem to remember specifics of concessions or the people working at the Pecos, but I’m sure there must have been. There were always people sort of supervising, I guess those were the ushers. Though really on Saturday afternoons they were just watching the kids to make sure they didn’t do any damage.

These Saturday afternoons I met friends at the theatre. My mother wouldn’t come along. As I said it was a dime to get in, so it wasn’t much of a problem for us. My family didn’t go to the cowboy movies and the serials, though my friends did. I had in particular four friends who lived in my neighborhood. We used to go to the movies together – we also went to school together.

I think we went most Saturdays. We could either ride our bicycles downtown or walk. It wasn’t all that far. We didn’t have to have anybody take us in a car. We really were very

free in that part of the world, in that time. In fact, we used to have picnic lunches on summer days and ride miles out into the country. We would ride far out to a little river called Berrendo and we used to picnic out there. Nobody worried about us. We could be gone most of the day. Have a picnic lunch out by the river and then turn around and come back.

I was in New Mexico from 1937 until 1945, when I finished high school. I had barely turned 16 when I graduated.