1952 Laconia, New Hampshire
Sandra Mae Bolduc
Born in 1939
Laconia, New Hampshire
Interviewed on February 13th, 2021
by Kelly Speltz
We used to take canned goods to the movie theater and that was our way of getting in. They were full cans, like cans of soup. That’s how we paid; we didn’t have money. People would turn in cans to us and then we would use them to go to the movie theater. I had a lady on my street and she would give us stuff like that. She worked for the theater so she would give us canned goods that we could use.
I would have been a teenager I would say. I went to the movies probably with my sisters. My sister Sheila was a year or two younger than me. We usually went on the weekend or on a holiday. We tried to make it so we could go every weekend.
This was in Laconia, New Hampshire. We always lived around the same neighborhood. You could walk anywhere you wanted to go and the theaters were just up the street. There were two theaters in the same place, one on one side of the street and one on the other side. We always knew what was playing so that was how we decided which one to go to. They maybe had a preview of what the movie was going to be that they would show the week before. The theaters had a lot of western movies. We weren’t too picky about what we went to see. If they had a movie we were there. I don’t remember ever going back to see the same thing more than once. I think one theater had more going on than the other; it was bigger and had been around forever. I think the name of one of the theaters was the Colonial Theatre. The other one was called the Gardens Theatre.
Sometimes they sold snacks there. Not too often did we get snacks or popcorn. Sometimes we brought stuff from home. And of course, my father operated the machine that was used to play the movies. It must have been a projector that he operated. The movie theaters had the tape. Probably most of the movies were in black and white. Sometimes if we didn’t have what we needed my father would make sure we got in. There were a lot of people in this predicament who didn’t have enough money, but everybody seemed to be able to make it in.
I can tell you about the lady who ran the theater. Her name was Christine Fowler. She was around twenty years older than I was. She lived around the corner of our street. It was a good job for her. She was there every night to make sure everything went okay. She must have been there through the daytime too. My father worked at one theater and Christine ran the other. They were very friendly with each other. If my father was having trouble at his theater Christine would help him out. My dad was sometimes working at another job and couldn’t get to the theater in time and Christine would help him. He had two or three jobs.
John Wayne and Gene Kelly were the stars that were most up my alley. I remember seeing Singin’ in the Rain in the theater. Gene Kelly was dancing up the street. It was pouring rain and there was all kinds of water and he would slip into the street. He was dancing along the curb on the side of the road. He danced like hell while he was singin’ in the rain.
We also used to do drive-in movies. They had big screens. I think probably I was married by this time and had two little kids. My oldest was probably four or five. We used to take them in the car. They would get in the backseat of the car with pillows and blankets and watch the movie with pajamas on. That was our chance to get out and see the world. This theater was different from the other two. We drove our car in and it had little meters. You would put money in the meter so they knew you had paid. There was a lake beside it. It had a great big screen in the lot, and we would just park there and watch a movie.
