1948 Highland Park, Illinois

Jim Florsheim, born in 1940. Highland Park, Illinois

Interviewed on February 2, 2024 by Stella Gray, his granddaughter 

I would love to give you something really profound and interesting. But I can’t even remember the movie title. It was a double feature on Saturday afternoon. It was a cowboy movie. Tin pan western. It had that impact on me. I was just blown away by it – totally gripped and pulled into the screen. I regularly used to do that when my parents would let me out of the house. I don’t remember going with a friend. Not a parent. I would just go on my own.

The backstory is interesting. 

Doing World War II, around the late 1940s, it’s hard to give you a real precise date. But my dad was in the war, second lieutenant. He never left the states or saw any fighting but was away. And my mom and my sister and I lived with my grandparents in Highland Park. There was barely any domestic housing built during the entire war, because we had been producing ammunition for our friend, England. So most of the previous 10 years nothing had been built, but the population was growing. Houses were hard to get and very expensive, especially for people of limited means. My dad was just starting out at a job and my mom was a stay at home mom and we didn’t have very much money. But they had a few connections. One connection we had was with my uncle Bill who was in the steel business. This proved to be invaluable because he helped us buy an apartment in a terrible neighborhood. The apartment was horrible besides the fact that it was not too far away from Drexel Boulevard Shopping Center which had a movie theater. 

I didn’t have a lot of friends. I would go to the movie theater by myself. The movie theater was meaningful in my life because it was almost literally my entire social life. I don’t remember playing with kids other than my sister, so at that point in my life it was a lot. I would go to the candy counter, get stocked up on whatever I could afford. I really looked forward to it. Movies weren’t like Oppenheimer three-hours long. They were pretty cheesy but so popular. There were a few key characters in the 40s and 50s. I don’t remember if the Lone Ranger was around there. 

A religious person might have considered going to the movies going to temple. You felt safe and secure, you could listen and enjoy yourself. It filled that need. The time need, the getting away from it all, kind of need. I was a little kid. Around 8 or 9 years old, pretty young. I  remember there was always chewed gum under the seats. I was more of a candy person than a popcorn person at that time (I’ve pretty much lost my sweet tooth as I’ve aged). I’ve always liked Hershey bars and Baby Ruth bars, that sort of chocolate caramel candle. For the record Stella, I would rather eat a Snickers bar today than the finest piece of French chocolate ever made. I remember the candy, but I have no specific memory of the movie theater on Drexel Boulevard that I would have been going to. But it was a pretty bad neighborhood, it’s sort of inconceivable that I was allowed to go to the movie theater myself. Probably not a safe environment on the southside of Chicago. But I don’t remember feeling any fear. 

You felt fully immersed in the movie. There was sound all over the theater and horses riding and shooting and action. You were transfixed by what was going on on the screen. You weren’t thinking about anything else. It threw you into that life.  It was a new experience and it was captivating. I felt WOW! That sort of feeling.