1959 Brackettville, Texas

Claire Poehler

Born 1945

Brackettville, Texas

Interviewed on January 25, 2019

by Helen Cai

My sister Joyce was seven years older than me. She could see movies by herself before I could, and she would always come home and sing the movie theme songs. I knew the names of people, but I didn’t know if they were movie stars or singers. Jane Russell, Esther Williams—I had paper dolls of them.

The first movie I remember was a Shirley Temple movie. I was probably seven or eight. I don’t remember where I saw it, but I think it would have to be in Uvalde. We would drive about an hour to get there. We thought the theater in Uvalde was real upscale compared to Brackett. It had nicer seats and the theater in Brackett was so small.

The movie theater back then was still segregated. The colored people could go inside as far as the concession stand, but they had to go outside and go upstairs to the balcony where the projector was. There were maybe ten seats upstairs. White people could sit downstairs in the real theater. There were about thirty-five seats downstairs. Nobody thought about it—everybody got along fine. I always felt bad because I knew them and they were my friends. But when they got rid of the rules, some colored people still wanted to sit upstairs. They just wanted to sit there.

There weren’t any premieres in Brackett. I saw the premiere of “The Alamo” and “Cleopatra” in San Antonio. It was at the Majestic Theater downtown. That was always a big deal—you had to get dressed up in suits and evening gowns and stand in line to get in. If you didn’t get a ticket, you had to wait until the next showing—it always filled up so quickly. They had regular wooden seats, but a little nicer. They had velvet curtains and it was ushered and everything.

My mother ran the ticket office in the movie theater in Brackett. She also made the popcorn and sold the candy. My older brother ran the projector. Most days there were only two people working at the movie theater. If my mother thought it was going to be really busy, sometimes she asked for help, but at most there would be three people working at one time.

You had to pay a quarter a ticket, but I walked in anytime I wanted. I saw some movies six or seven times. I don’t know how many times I saw “The Alamo.” That movie was filmed in Brackett. It took one and a half years, so people lived in town. We saw John Wayne and Happy Shahan and the other movie stars—they would go get groceries and stop and talk to you like regular people. Laurence Harvey and Richard Widmark stayed in town too.

Sometimes the singers would have dances for everybody. Everybody from town would go to them. Frankie Avalon hosted an outdoor dance on the slab at Fort Clark. One time we went to Rudy Robbins’ house. There were ten or twelve people there—it was a real small house. He sang for us.

The extras for the movie stayed everywhere in town. They didn’t bring in any trailers for people, so all the families were renting out rooms. They brought in people from Del Rio, Uvalde, as far as San Antonio—but they got as many local people as they could. A lot of my friends from high school auditioned for the parts. A lot of people got it—but not me! My mother wouldn’t let me hang around movie people because they were “too rough.”

Once you saw how fake the movie was, it took away from the experience. The horses they shot weren’t real—they were stuffed animals. In the movies, you saw people shot and you thought they were dead. But when they were filming, they just got up and walked away.