1956 Napoleon, Ohio

Lu Young
1944
Napoleon, Ohio
Interviewed on September 21, 2019
By Haley Hegefeld

What stands out in my memory is that I went to one, and one only, movie with my mom and dad, because they just didn’t go to movies. Kids went to movies in Napoleon. But when Around the World in Eighty Days was coming out, there was a big hype about it. There were like 100 actors and all that. It came out in 1956, so I would’ve been 12. We had to go to a big city and I think either it was Toledo or Detroit, because there was a huge hype about this movie coming out and everybody was going to see it. So for us, first of all to even go to a movie, for them to even take me to a movie, was something unusual. Then, to have to travel to another city to go to a movie was even more astounding. I do remember the movie…Phileas Fogg was the name of the character and there was some kind of bet about being able to go around the world in 80 days. The one part I remember in particular was them in a balloon. I don’t know if they tried to do the whole thing that way or that was just one section of it, but that was memorable because it was very colorful and the actors were in this balloon basket travelling. I just remember the color, it being so colorful and the fun part of all the actors that took part in it. They might have just had a tiny little cameo, but you recognized them from the movies so that was a fun part of it.

It was a big treat to go to the movies. Of course, it probably cost 10 cents or something to get in, maybe that much for popcorn. But in a small town, that was a big deal, going to the movies. I remember it being a very fun, happy time in the period of going. Because you were with your friends and it was an escape from small town life. Small town life was good because we could be doing things outside, but in terms of any kind of organized stuff you would go to, there wasn’t much outside of school. There would be plays and the whole town would go to theater productions that the high school did, but outside of that, there just wasn’t a whole lot to do.

It was a tradition for my friends. We always went to the movies on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Of course, somebody had to drive us. In that little town of 8,000 people, there was just one little movie theater called the State Theater. I was trying to estimate what I thought it might even hold and honestly, I don’t know, 100 people maybe. It was tiny, but it was right downtown on Main Street. It looked like a little store front. I guess it had a marquis and a tiny little box office. It got torn down eventually and now there’s a bank there. There weren’t ushers when I went, but I remember my aunts Lil and Viv, one of the things they told me was that they ushered at the State Theater. God, I don’t know what year that would have been. That would’ve been way back. They were born in the ‘30s so I would guess in the early ‘40s, late ‘30s.

We had to have concessions. We got all the candy, due to my horrendous sweet tooth all through my childhood, and popcorn of course. I don’t know when Milk Duds came out but they’re my favorite and it probably goes back to that history of those theaters, eating that chocolatey caramel thing. Really the only place you had popcorn pretty much, at least in my family, was at the movies. It wasn’t something you really made at home, because you didn’t do snacks. You had breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then that was it. There weren’t a lot, that I remember, of any kind of snacky stuff at all, until later.

I think what happened with the movies in Napoleon was probably they were old when they actually came to the State Theater, because I remember seeing The Wizard of Oz there and that came out in like ’36 or something. I remember my girlfriend’s mother picking us up and we all, her included, were singing “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” in the car on the way home. I would guess this was maybe around the early to mid ‘50s, because we also saw a lot of romances, like the Doris Day movies. They were light dramatic comedy romance things, and June Allison movies, but those were more after-the-war movies. That’s why I’m thinking they came late to the State Theater, because I was watching after-the-war movies and I was born in ’44. But they were black and white, you know old black and white movies with actors and actresses like Clark Gable and people of that era. There were always happy endings so I felt happy when I came out, because everything would be resolved in a good way, in the ones I saw anyways.