1957 Tyrone, Pennsylvania

Mark Mooseker

1949

Tyrone, Pennsylvania

Interviewed on February 8, 2022

by Drake Pike

Some of the first movies I ever saw were on TV. I was a little kid. They were all Disney movies too, you know, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, really the whole list that you can think of. The biggest hit for me though, which became a movie, was the Davie Crocket series. I was just a complete nut. I had a coonskin cap, and there is one episode where they were in a riverboat race and I turned the attic couch into a riverboat. I would pull myself to ride the boat and there were toy guns everywhere—I was a real Davie Crocket fanatic.  

I grew up in a village of two houses called “100 Springs” because it was in the middle of this natural spring. The nearest town was about four miles away called Tyrone, and there were two theaters. There was the Wilson Theater, which was the high-brow theater. The Wilson was notorious for playing all the featured films, and  I could go to the Saturday Matinees by myself. They would play a series of Western films on repeat, and the tickets were only twenty-five cents. I would spend a dollar and get a movie and a box of candy, which was usually Raisinets or Milk Duds. I was six or seven years old. The  only other theater was this drive-in theater, which was about ten miles from home. It was there I remember seeing my first movie.

Why my parents took me to this theater, I’ll never know. My brother and sister were older and definitely did not want to go. They were both just too cool to see a movie with mom and dad and old enough to stay at home alone. It was a movie called Picnic (1955) starring William Holden and Kim Novak. I’m almost positive that they released the movie in the mid-fifties, but the drive-in didn’t get front-runs, so it was probably 1957 before I got to see it. We went to see a pretty racy movie at the time, meaning that there were lots of dancing, lots of conflict and romance all set at this picnic on Labor Day. The picnic made me hungry, but my dad was cheap, so he didn’t buy any popcorn. Me and my parents watched the film from this 1955 blue and white Chevy Bel Air— a rather beautiful color. Thank God my siblings didn’t come because it would have been a very crowded backseat. The backseat where I was sitting was like this giant bench-seat, so I guess my folks just thought I would fall asleep, but I didn’t.

I felt transfixed and really fell in love with Kim Novak. She was just absolutely amazing. Now don’t get me wrong, I have forgotten most of the plot except that there was a lot of romance. Well, I do remember that they end up meeting at this town because the male character, William Holden, left on a freight train and Kim Novak got on a bus. The last scene was the train going west with the bus riding by its side—it was so romantic. Oh and how could I forget this fantastic dance scene that was to a tune called “Moon Glow”, which I still hum to myself. I guess you can say that this movie really stuck with me mainly because of Kim Novak’s character. The film portrayed Novak’s character as a young and beautiful girl that came across this unsavory guy. He was a football star that got kicked out of town for stealing something—I forget.

As for the dancing scene, Kim Novak just stole the screen. They were trying to learn this new dance move, and she was doing it by herself but somehow got William Holden’s interest. When she did, that’s when sparks started to fly. The other characters in the film started growing angry of Holden and Novak’s relationship and there was this epic fight scene. I remember Holden’s shirt getting ripped open during the fight. For a nine-year-old kid, it was a pretty sexy scene between the dancing and the fighting. It didn’t matter though because I was just rooting on Holden and Novak’s relationship.

The movie made me feel. Going to the theater was not the most common of occurrences, but the smell of popcorn is something that is hard for any man to forget. It helped me make friends and it bonded my family. It also helped me fall in love—with Kim Novak that is.