1947 Manchester, New Hampshire

Eleanor Lariviere
Born in 1940
Manchester, New Hampshire
Interviewed on January 24th, 2019
By Marisol Lariviere

The first movie I remember seeing was a Bing Crosby– The Bells of St Mary’s. He played a priest who gets transferred to a different parish that’s falling apart. He wants to shut it down, but the nuns there don’t want to because they feel like they have a connection with the people there. The nuns looked sort of generic but I think they might have been Sisters of Mercy. I think Sister Superior was played by Ingrid Bergman. I remember wondering why anyone would shut down a parish because Catholic parishes were thick on the ground at the time in Manchester– they were always full of people. The thing that was the most memorable to me was the music. You might even recognize some of the songs from the soundtrack. Another movie I remember seeing early on was Joan of Arc, but it scared me a lot because of the scene where Joan is burned at the stake.

When I first started going to the movies, I was in grammar school when I first went to the movies– so maybe seven or eight years old. My grandmother would drag me along to the movies like The Bells of St Mary’s because she thought they were ‘good religious movies’ or because she couldn’t find anyone else to go with her in her 1936 Chevy. If there was a good soundtrack or dancing in a movie I was happy to see it. Once I was a bit older, I would start seeing movies with my friends. Usually we would see serial movies like Hopalong Cassidy, until we outgrew those. My friend Charlotte was a dancer and I loved music, so we saw a lot of musicals at the movies.There was not much else to do in Manchester at the time and there wasn’t TV, so we went a lot. The first cartoon I remember seeing was Song of the South, though it’s considered pretty offensive today.

The theater that we liked to go to the most as State Theater on the main drag of Manchester– a street called Elm street, but pronounced “Ellum” if you’re from the area. The bus would stop just a side street away and this was back in the day where buses in Manchester ran every 20 minutes, so it was easy to get there. It was the biggest theater because it had a balcony and had good popcorn. We didn’t buy the candy because we knew it was overpriced. I remember when they added a stereo I was blown away. On the front of the theater they had this big bust of a greek god that St. Anselm College saved when the theater was being torn down.

Another theater that we went to sometimes was the Palace theater. Back before my day they used to have Vaudeville shows there. They also used to show silent movies and had an orchestra pit. My father used to play the piano for the silent movies every so often to earn some extra money. I remember that they refurbished it a while back to be fitted with a new organ so that they could start performing musicals there.