1954 Reading, Massachusetts

Philip Skerry
1944
Reading, Massachusetts
Interviewed on February 3, 2022
by Isabella Epstein

There were four movie theaters in my hometown. Back then, I went to the movies a lot because the movie theater would open at 11 o’clock and run double features one after the other. If you looked at what was playing in the movie theater in the newspaper, it wouldn’t give you a time that the movie was running, you just went in when you could. This was in Chelsea, right outside of Boston.

I’d go to the movies after school, it cost 10 or 15 cents. Because you didn’t know what time it started, you’d walk in and the movie would be halfway through. So you’d sit and watch the second half, then you’d sit and watch the stuff in between– previews, coming attractions, cartoons, news reel– then you’d see the second film all the way through, and you could stay and see the beginning of the film that you saw the second half of. I got to be a pretty good movie watcher because I’d have to figure out from watching the second half how the first half began. That’s how the experience went for anyone who went to films in the ‘40s and ‘50s. It changed in the ‘60s mainly because of Psycho.

The movies that I went to see when I was a kid changed maybe twice a week. There were four different movie theaters. Some of them showed first run films like the Olympia, the Strand showed all these B films, the second film on a double feature. The studios put out B films to run against A films with the big stars. That was the film experience I had when I was maybe 8 or 10 years old, those are some of my first memories of actually going to the movies. This is between 1954 to 1956, I was born in 1944.

I lived in Chelsea, which is a blue-collar city. But my grandparents had a store in North Reading, which was maybe 10 to 15 miles north of Boston out in the country. I would stay with my grandparents over the summer to get out of the city. There was no theater in North Reading, just a bunch of houses and my grandparents’ store, and my uncle and aunt owned a bar nearby. If we wanted to go to a movie, we would have to walk up this long street to the main road and we’d get a bus to Reading, which was the big town.

There was a theater in town that had been there since the mid-1930s called the Reading. It was a big deal for us to go to the movies because you’d have to have money to go and we didn’t have a lot of money. Then, you’d have to have the bus fare, and at 8 years old I couldn’t go by myself. I had to depend upon my parents or my two older sisters.

We used to go to the movies on Saturdays for the matinee. Sometimes there would even be a little performance. If there was a musical showing, they might have some local talent, almost like a little vaudeville act. They would always show cartoons on a Saturday morning or afternoon, and they would sometimes have a magician who would be on the stage in between the cartoons.

I remember once there was a showing of a couple horror films from Universal Studios and they actually had a little show. The lights would go down, it was completely dark and there would be a film of lighting flashes and scary music, and they had people dressed up as monsters coming down the aisle. People were screaming and yelling. I remember at one of the shows I saw in Chelsea they had a hypnotist who hypnotized kids on stage and made them do stupid things like make noises like chicken. Those are the things that would happen in movie theaters back then.

The film I first remember seeing was a double feature of two Frankenstein films. One was either Frankenstein itself or one of the clones that came later on like House of Frankenstein or Bride of Frankenstein. There were tons of those that came out because the original was so popular.

This was a double feature and I wanted to go because I had been to the theater a week or two before and there were coming attractions. It looked scary as hell, but I wanted to see it. I remember I used to love to go to the Reading theater because they would have these little bulletins of movies that were coming up and you could grab some of them. I would love to take those home because they had pictures of movies that were coming up and little descriptions.

The time came for the films, and both my sisters were going because they were older than I was, but my mother didn’t want me to go since she knew that I would be scared. I remember I threw a tantrum, I cried and begged and she gave into me. So I went.

I was traumatized by those films. They’re black and white and were shot in this expressionist style with weird camera angles and lots of scary close-ups and shock editing. I sat through two of them– I don’t know if I got through the second one, I just closed my eyes. I don’t think I even ate much of my popcorn.

Usually everybody got popcorn but there was a lot of candy too. There were these penny candies like Junior Mints, Necco Wafers, and Mint Juleps. If the movie were bad or I went with my rowdy friends, they would take Necco wafers, wet them and throw them at the screen. I probably had Necco Wafers because they only cost 2 or 3 cents.

Anyway, those movies scared me so much that I had nightmares into adulthood about monsters, especially Frankenstein. I would wake up in a cold sweat, sometimes screaming. I had those nightmares for a long time because those images were just indelibly stamped on my brain and I couldn’t get rid of them.

Back then, there was never anyone at the box office that would prevent kids from coming because they didn’t have PG or anything like that. It was up to the parents, and I guess my mother dropped the ball there because I came back crying and my sisters were so angry because they had to leave early because of me.

The movies that stick in my head are the scary ones. Even though they were negative experiences, I think these things stuck with me because they were so powerful.