1945 Fitchburg, Massachusetts
Mary M. Trainor
1939
Fitchburg, Massachusetts
Interviewed on Jan 26th, 2019
by Gabi Seo
The first movie I can remember? I think Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I probably saw it with my sister Janet, but I don’t remember the year. I was probably five or six. I was enthralled with the movie. I was just, you know, the animation, and the story. Everything. That was the one that made the greatest impression on me. I can still see them going off to work, and her singing.
It was a happy movie. I just remember the memories of it were happy for me. It was an uplifting movie. There was nothing scary compared to the other movies I used to see with Janet. So it was a very positive thing. I came out of there very happy, probably humming the tunes.
I thought Snow White was beautiful. I loved her gown that she wore. I think it had yellow and blue. I thought the dwarfs were cute. They were all very different—Dopey and Dock and Grumpy, they were all different characters. But they loved her very much. When she wandered in and they found her, one of them didn’t want her around, but she made them happy. They would go to work… Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, it’s off to work we go, Doo-doo-doo doo-doo… Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho! They were always happy. She cooked and cleaned for them. And there was Bashful, too. I remember Bashful.
When I started going to the movies, until I was a teenager, movies were twelve cents. That’s what we paid to see movies and they were usually double features.
The one that had the war movies was called The Fitchburg Theater. I think the movie house that had the kid-type movies was called The Strand. I know it was on Day Street in Fitchburg. You could see the marquee when you drove up on Main Street.
In The Strand, I don’t remember refreshments of any kind. When we went to the Fitchburg Theater uptown, next door there was a candy store. I always got a sugar lollipop. They were all different colors and they were in shapes of animals. I remember looking at all the brightly colored shaped lollipops and picking one out, and sucking on it while I watched a movie. Or movies!
I remember in the forties, during the war years, my father went to the movies every change. He would alternate movie theaters. He was a movie buff, as we would say. After the war, I saw several war movies he would take me to in the evening.
He would drive the car to The Fitchburg Theater, because it was uptown. At that time, we were living on Water street. We would go in the car at night. They always started with a newsreel of the war and its progression, and then after that, there would be a movie that Hollywood made about the world war. I saw at least two, three, four about that. What they were called, I do not know. But they were about the war.
If we went on Sunday, we would be wearing our Sunday clothes. But we never wore jeans or anything, anyway. But on a Sunday, I’d be wearing a dress.
Movies were our only source of entertainment. That and the radio. I definitely preferred the movies. After the Sunday movies, my mother and father would go visit relatives, and Janet and I would take the F&L back to the house. We would use the money from mowing the lawn to buy a hot fudge sundae, which was 25 cents, and we would eat our sundae and read the funnies and wait for Mum and Dad to come home.
