1948 Falls Church, Virginia

23Sep - by Rosales, Jacob - 0 - In Yale University

Karen Gustafson
1941
Falls Church, Virginia
Interviewed on September 22, 2019
By Jacob Rosales

I don’t remember the name of the first film I ever saw, I just remember that my dad would take us to the drive-in theater and that I would always fall asleep in the back seat. What I do remember though, in later years, was when I would go to the weekend matinee. And what they did was a double feature. In those days we had one movie theater and it was down in Falls Church, Virginia, called the State Theater. It was a very nice little theater. Of course, it didn’t have air conditioning, but it didn’t seem to matter to us.

They had double-features on Saturdays, and I would go with this little boy across the street. He was my neighbor—my parents and his parents were best friends. His name was Ronny Sanchez, and he was really cute. We were the same age, and in the same grade. We were probably in 2nd or 3rd grade. We would sometimes walk to the theater, but I think our parents would usually drive us there. The double-features would begin at 11 o’clock in the morning, and we had one movie, and then we would have a break with cartoons, movie reels, we might have had some kind of a short film, and then we had another movie. So that took us until like 3 o’clock, if not later, and then we would walk home after that. Those movies would tend to be the cowboy movies. So, it would be Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers, and Dale Evans, and then there were also a lot of King Arthur movies. I don’t remember the names of any of those movies, but they were all similar in a way.

With the cartoons, it was the Looney Tunes often. I’m trying to think of early movies that I might have seen. I certainly saw a lot of the Walt Disney movies when they came out. I saw Cinderella and Snow White; I loved those movies. When I was in elementary school, I would imagine some of the Walt Disney ones were my favorites. As I got older my taste changed. One of my all-time favorite movies is The Damned, by Visconti, but that was quite a long time after ha-ha-ha.

But with the double feature movies, the adventure and cowboy movies, this little boy and I would come home and then spend the rest of the afternoon acting out the same movie we had seen. So of course, in all of those movies, the boy had the big part. I was always Jane sitting on top of the “tree” which was the doghouse, and he was running around being Tarzan or Roy Rogers. And then I got to be Dale Evans and run around a bit too. But that’s how we would spend our time, the movies were very important to us in those days.

When I was little, we idolized the characters. We thought whatever they did was wonderful. I remember Margaret O’Brien, and one movie where she and this old man tied themselves to a tree because the little elves and fairies lived in that tree and they didn’t want it to get cut down, because that would have destroyed all the little people who lived in that tree. I remember Margaret O’Brien came to a local department store because she had a line of dresses out, and my mother bought me one of them. So, because I was buying the dress, Margaret O’Brien autographed something for me. That was really important to me, I had that stuck up on my dresser mirror forever. So yeah, I think we certainly idolized all the actors. In those days, too, there wasn’t all the internet and the fast-moving news. You didn’t really hear bad things about, or gossip so much, about the actors. So, they were able to stay up on their pedestal for a long time.

I always had popcorn and Goober’s chocolate peanuts, and I would eat them together. It was very important to have a little popcorn and a little peanut chocolate. Later, probably when I was a teenager, if they didn’t have double-features and we only went to see one movie early in the morning, we would go downtown to the drugstore afterwards and get a banana-split. And the two together were very important parts of our Saturdays. It was a lot of fun.