1946 Cambridge, Ohio
Barbara Jane Weston
Born 1940
Cambridge, Ohio
Interviewed on 31 January 2019
by Xan Miñan
“The first movie I remember… well it was a cowboy movie that I went to with my dad. I couldn’t have been too old, I think I was about 6 or 7. I can’t recall the name of the movie, some cowboy movie, but I know Tex Ritter was there because it was one of his movies. He was a cowboy singer at the time, real famous in a bunch of pictures. Anyhow it was one of his cowboy movies that they were showing at the State Theater in downtown Cambridge and he was there with his group, you know, and they did a little show on the side. I don’t remember anything from the movie, but I remember his show. He had his group with him that always performed with him, they would go around and do these appearances. I had such a time, it was so much fun. I remember thinking how funny it was… you know, he was sitting there in a chair in the theater, and he would pretend to be asleep. His boys would wake him up and you know, he’d jump up all surprised. Then he’d fall back asleep again and hiccup, which I thought was so funny. That I remember.
I liked the musicals more than some of the other stuff. My girlfriends and I would go on the weekends and see movies when I was younger, but they liked going to religious movies, but I didn’t really like those. They made me antsy, you know. But I looooooved the musicals, those were my favorite. Especially Singin’ in the Rain with Gene [Kelly], Donald O’Connor. I loved going to see the musicals. Mom and Dad would take me to see Elvis, I remember that. I remember seeing one of those first movies he did, in the 50s [Love Me Tender]. Mom and Dad loved Elvis, we had all his records, you know, and they would listen to them all the time. But we would go see his pictures every now and then.
The State Theater was the only theater they had at the time, until later when they put in the drive-in movies down the road – oh boy. That was a lot of fun too, they’d have dollar nights where you could fill up your tank for a dollar and watch a movie. Me and my friends, we would stop at the bakery there in town on our way to the drive-in, and the general store, and we would buy a bunch of food, and we’d go in there and set up our chairs to watch the movie. I don’t think we even paid the dollar, we just went on in. Well, you know, you could do that back then. But my earliest memory is at the State Theater, that was across from the post office in downtown Cambridge. That was all we had. And that was normal thing for movies back then, you know, you didn’t have a bunch of theaters around. At least in Ohio. That came later. There was just the one for a couple miles around.
You know, I was actually just there at the State Theater not that long ago, when I was up last to see Annie (note to reader: Annie is her sister-in-law who still lives right outside Cambridge). Annie’s friends had a musical program thing going on there, so we went to see that. It was still pretty nice. It was like the old theaters, it had a balcony, course I only sat there once when I went to see Gone with the Wind. But it was a very nice theater, really nice seats, you know nice, beautiful bathrooms. Of course, the big red curtains like the kind you see in older theaters. They don’t do that anymore.
I didn’t go there much for the last few years I was still at home, but later they would start doing, you know, news of the day kind of things right before the movie you were seeing, and they had comedy shows and all these different smaller shows before the movies would come on. I liked the comedy ones, they were pretty good. They didn’t have a lot of the informational ones or the geographic ones you see sometimes on the Turner Classic channel. You know I’m always seeing what they have on, I like catching the Westerns with Dean Martin. Anyhow, it was interesting to see what they played. And the things of what was coming, the previews kind of thing they would have, and they would change them every week. Those were fun to see.
