1958 Valley Stream, New York

Bob Haim
Born 1950
Valley Stream, New York
Interviewed on January 28, 2019
by Aaron Bosgang

The first movie that I remember seeing was “The Blob.” It came out around 1958, I think. Starring Steve McQueen, it was his first movie role.

I was scared out of my mind. I was about 8 years old going to see a scary movie with my older brother. We were at the Valley Stream movie theater on Rockaway Blvd in Valley Stream. About 30 to 45 minutes into the movie, I walked into the manager’s office, asked him to use the phone and called my mother to come pick me up to take me home. It was so scary it gave me nightmares for a week.

That theater was there for quite some time, it might still be there as far as I know. It was a crummy, old theater. There was a concession stand, but no ushers that sat you down. I don’t remember if we bought anything at the concession stand, but odds are we probably bought popcorn.

Basically, the story is a rock lands on Earth and someone cracks it open with a stick. The whole thing was the size of a coconut and some kind of jello comes out and sticks to a man’s hand. It consumes the man and pretty soon it gets bigger. It goes into the movie theater in the town and scares all the kids out of the theater. Steve McQueen and his girlfriend go into the diner to run away from it and it goes over the diner. The only thing he has is a CO2 fire-extinguisher. As it’s creeping under the door, he blasts it with the fire-extinguisher and realizes the cold air keeps it away. He tells the policeman and the whole town collects fire-extinguishers and blasts it until it shrinks. Eventually they take it away and drop it in the Antarctic, or somewhere cold and icy. That’s the story of the movie.

I’ve seen “The Blob” many times since then, it’s a great movie. I remember seeing it because it scared me so much, and I was just tagging along with my brother. I think he went with one of his friends also, but I would often tag along with my brother.

I was stupid enough to keep going [to scary movies]. I don’t like watching them anymore, as a kid I watched them, but now I realize I don’t need to be scared.

Back at that time, television was mostly black-and-white, televisions were very small. There was one TV in the house and the whole family had to watch whatever my father wanted to watch. Going to the movies was special, it was an afternoon out. On TV you had four or five channels to choose from. Channel 13 was public television so that was all boring stuff and was only on a few hours a day. Channel 9 and 11 were basically re-runs of old black-and-white movies. Later on it became the channel for the Yankees and the Mets. TV’s weren’t on for 24 hours a day, either.