1956 Baltimore Maryland

Marsha Friedman
Born 1946
Baltimore, Maryland
Interviewed on 02/02/2025
by Maxwell Sternlicht

What is the first movie you remember seeing? 

King Kong, I remember King Kong. It’s standing out the most because it was so vivid and so scary, but you felt sorry for King Kong. At the end when he was holding Fay Wray in his arms up in the sky on the New York Empire State building, and the planes were coming in and shooting him with the machine guns, and it was the biplanes, as my brother had said, and that’s what they were doing, aiming at him and trying to shoot him down, but he was protecting Fay Wray. It was really something. It was sad because even though he was so ominous and frightening, you didn’t want him to die like that. You really didn’t. You felt sorry for him because they had brought him there through no fault of his own and he got loose from those chains. And he just wanted to be left alone and it was sad. They should’ve taken him back. But that’s the one that stands out from when I was younger 

How old were you approximately? 

Probably about nine or ten years old… My brother must’ve been four or five years old. So if he was five, I was ten or eleven, because we’re six years apart. It was playing at a local neighborhood theater called the Avalon theater and all the kids would get together on the weekends on a Saturday and we’d go to the movies and then have a newsreel and then they’d have the feature film and cartoons, so it was always a fun thing to do on a Saturday.

Did you have any particular thoughts about the actors?

Well, Fay Wray was a very pretty actress. The men who brought King Kong, you just didn’t like them. It was sad, you know, and things like that are still going on sadly. The way they brought him here and exploited him… it was wrong. We should let nature stay where nature is and not uproot them for our benefit.

You had mentioned that your younger brother was with you, anyone else? 

My girlfriends, we always would walk together, friends from the time I grew up until we moved away when I was 12 years old. And so every Saturday we’d all get together because that’s what the neighborhood used to do. It was a very, very close neighborhood, children and families. Everyone knew everyone and it was an after war community that was built, and so most of the fathers had been in World War II. And war brides. I had a friend whose mother was a war bride from England. And a lot of religions, all kinds. It was a high concentration of Jewish kids and it was right before they started blockbusting the communities. You just all got together on Saturdays and walked up the street and took Park Heights Avenue and that’s where the movie theater was. It was called the Avalon and everything on that street was called the Avalon. The Avalon pharmacy, the Avalon deli, the Avalon movie theater… The pharmacy had a little soda counter that you could sit up on and get a soda. And when you got into the movie you bought your ticket. You went in and they had a cute little candy concession there. So everybody was there and then the popcorn machine where you put a dime in, I think it was, and you got popcorn in a bag. I don’t think they had the buckets back then, but you probably could buy a cone of popcorn and then all kinds of candies to choose from, including Penny candies. That’s what we did on the weekends. And then afterwards everybody went home and we’d spend time with our families or went out and played. People played marbles and you’d talk about the movie and how scary it was. The whole movie would erupt in screams just altogether. It was a scary movie, it really was.

Going back to the candy, so were Penny candies your favorite or did you have another type of favorite candy around that age? 

They had a thing called Jujubes. The Penny candy was usually mint. It was a blue mint, and it was in a jar on top. Otherwise you paid like five cents for a candy bar. And they had teeny tiny little nonpareils in a box and they had the jujubes and then they had juicy fruits. I’m trying to think of what chocolates, like Hershey bar and Oh Henry bar. Oh Henry why does that stick with me? It was crowded with everybody and if you wanted to get up again and get more you could, but the candies were usually the mints in a jar and they would have maybe one or two kinds and all the rest were for bars of candy or boxes of candy, mostly boxes. They had raisins, nonpareils, chocolate bars…

Were there ushers at the Avalon theater?

Oh yes, they had an usher and they would come to tell everybody to be quiet. They’d shine the flashlight on you, and so kids were pretty good. They were pretty good. Once in a while there would be some things that would happen but you just moved on… Just for that movie, it was very crowded. The Avalon was the go-to theater for that area and across the street was a synagogue and then up the street was a church, one of the big churches, Saint Ambrose. You had everything you needed, a food store, a corner liquor store, and the fish store. Everything was there so if your parents took you or picked you up, you would walk there and they could do their shopping if they wanted to. It was very convenient to be able to walk to the movies. There were other movies far away, people walked to those too, but usually your parents walked with you. You didn’t walk that far by yourself or with the group of kids, parents went too.

Marsha Friedman is my maternal grandmother.