1942 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Judy Zalesne
born 1936
Philadelphia, PA
Interviewed on February 1st, 2023
by Matthew Siff

The first time I went to the movies made such an emotional impact on me that I still remember it, and it was 80 years ago. I can’t even believe I’m saying that. But I was 5 years old and [my mother] took me and my sister, who was 19 months older than me, to the movie downtown. We probably took public transportation, maybe trolleys. We went to a movie theater in Center City Philadelphia called The Aldine. It was at Nineteenth and Chestnut Street. I think it’s a CVS store now. Every time I go past that corner, if I’m in downtown Philadelphia, I think of it. I remember that it was a major thing to go to a movie.

I can picture being in the theater right now. Being in a theater was something extravagant in my life. I mean, this was before television. That was 1942, and we got our first television in 1948. So we never watched anything on screens except homemade 16 millimeter movies, which my father took a ton of. But this was going into town, into a major theater to see something on a screen that was enormous, massive. I had never seen such a thing before.

The theater had a balcony. We were sitting downstairs, but the ladies’ room was on the balcony. And upstairs, one wall was a huge mirror, so you could see the movie even when you went upstairs to the restroom. I don’t know whether it was a reflection or another screen, but I was amazed by the size of screens and movies all around me. Oh, you didn’t miss the movie. You continued to see it wherever you were in the theater, and I don’t know that I had ever been in a theater before that. So the whole event was exciting, and it was massive to me.

The movie was Bambi. I remember the theater now, but it’s the movie that made the impact, because I remember how upsetting the movie was. I think there have been remakes of Bambi, and I’m not sure whether people remember the original or not. But I do, and I cried for days after I saw it, because Bambi’s mother is shot by a hunter. And Bambi is this innocent little fawn living in the woods with all the dangers of the forest, and then his mother is shot. I was devastated. I guess I really was or I wouldn’t remember it.

Bambi has a friend, a rabbit called Thumper, and Thumper’s line in the movie is, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” My mother repeated that line to me, I think, for the rest of her life, and she lived until she was 101. Or she might say, “remember Thumper,” and then I was supposed to remember what Thumper said. So it’s a lesson that has stayed with me thanks to Thumper and to my mother, repeating it endlessly.

[Interviewer’s note: my mother has repeated the same thing to me for as long as I can remember. Until this interview, I had no idea where it came from.]

The emotional effect that Bambi had on me stayed with me for a long time. It was the first animal movie I saw, but I went to see other animal movies: Dumbo, and as I got older, Fantasia. I loved every animal movie, so I went to every one that I could. As I got older, Lassie Come-Home. I must have seen it 10 times. I always loved Lassie movies and animal movies.

I remember going to those movies and waiting when the movie was over, because I had been very sad. I would wait about twenty minutes: they would have shorts first, you know. It’d be the news, or it would be a cartoon, or it would be some short piece on something before the actual main feature started. For some reason, I would wait until the movie started again, because I had to see that the dog was okay or the horse was fine. I didn’t want to leave with a sad memory of the movie.