1959 Corpus Christi, Texas

Allen Borden

Born 1951

Corpus Christi, Texas

February 21, 2021

By Onyedikachi Onuoha

The first movie I ever remember seeing was called Operation Petticoat. It was the Ritz Theater in downtown Corpus Christi. If you want me to embellish on the theater, I will. [I tell him to go ahead]. So, Corpus Christi is a small town, and w had maybe three theaters in the entire town. The two biggest theaters were in what we call our “downtown.” You had to drive from the neighborhoods, or ride your bike, or walk to get down here. And the Ritz theater was a really grand old theater in the ideas of those old, established theaters—one of the ones that had the big marquee out front and that old carpet. You ever been into some of those old theaters, and the carpeting is that red or dark blue, really thick carpeting; and you walk in and it’s almost squishy? That’s what the Ritz was like. At the very front, there was a little lady in a glass booth where you pay to enter, and then you walked in the doors, through these turnstiles. And you go in there, and there’s a place you can buy some popcorn and a coke. But in those days, the concessions were pretty limited.

And the movies, well they were pretty cheap, at least by today’s standards. I remember it [Operation Petticoat] being a dollar-fifty for the ticket, and then fifty cents would get you a bag of popcorn and another quarter would get you a Coca-Cola. And that’s a lot of money, when you’re eight or nine years old. You had to get that from your mother. [chuckle].

I went with one of my friends. His mother had driven us down there and dropped us off. Now, obviously somebody, probably his mother had researched the movie and found it not to be risqué or anything like that. It was ok for a young kid to go to. So, a buddy of mine, his mother, I think, dropped us off. I can recall that we sat to the left-hand side at the bottom. You had the main section and the two little sections on either side, so we sat on the left-hand side, about halfway down. I mean this theater had a balcony behind us and these big red velvet curtains that opened and closed. So, when the movie started—dun duh dudun—the curtains would open up, and then the sound would come blaring around. Though it was really horrible sound back in those days. It was nothing I’d ever seen or experienced before. I mean we had a black and white TV. But the movie was in color, technicolor I think, which was really like, WOW look at that.

And for the theater experience, there were other people in the theater. I don’t remember if it was a huge or small crowd, but there was some laughing ‘cause this was sort of a comedy; a mix of drama and comedy. I loved the movie, thought it was great. It had all kinds of things that appealed to an eight year-old boy who was growing up not that far from World War II. My father was a World War II vet, though I never spoke to him about the movie. He wasn’t that into movies. Though, I do remember a story he told me from his childhood. My father grew up here in Corpus Christi as well, in the middle of the Great Depression. His father died when he was pretty young, so that left my grandmother with three kids to take care of. She ran a boarding house and washed clothes for people, but they were really poor. And during the depression, kids would gather at this same old Ritz Theater. You got into the theater for a nickel and got popcorn and coke for a nickel each. My dad’s mom never had money for these movies like his buddies did, but luckily, we had this uncle who was a lawyer with an office close to the theater. My dad and his buddies would come up with this ploy to go to that uncle’s office on the way to the theater, and when this uncle shook all the boys’ hands, he’d slip my father fifteen cents for the movie. So, the kids never knew that my father didn’t have money for the movie, but that was how my dad got to see movies as a kid during the Depression. Later on, though, he didn’t keep that attachment to movies.

Like I said, my dad was a veteran. He came home after the war and started his family, so all of his buddies and all of our family friends had been in the Army or the Navy, and well that’s basically how America was at the time. I was raised in the era where being in the Army or being in the Navy was the right thing; it was just what happened. And, at that time, we were far enough removed from World War Two that the nastiness and pure bad of the War had kinda gone in the memory bank already. This movie came out, what, thirteen years after the War ended, so we could poke fun and enjoy some humor out of this awful thing. Carey Grant was the Lieutenant Commander of this submarine. The commander is supposed to be this tough frustrated guy who is trying to deal with the nurses that have been brought to live on the submarine with the Navy crew, and I think he played that well. Their submarine was sunk during an air raid, and he was trying to get the submarine back up and running to be able to evacuate the island. He was going around the island gathering people to evacuate them, and one of the people he found was Tony Curtis [actor’s name, not character’s name]. Tony Curtis played this playboy, but he was a scrounger. His job was to scrounge things for the submarine. And he was well-placed for the part ‘cause he has this kinda sneaky persona.

At one part, the submarine needs to be painted; so, the scrounger goes out and gets these two buckets of paint, but he doesn’t look at what color the paint is. When he brings the paint back he says, we have enough paint to paint the whole submarine, but half of it is gonna be red and the other half is gonna be white. And the captain decides to mix all the paint together, and they paint this submarine pink. The US Navy thinks that this is some sort of Japanese submarine, ‘cause as far as they know, they don’t have any pink submarines. And the Japanese thinks the sub is American. So, at one point, both the Japanese and US navies are trying to sink the submarine. And one of the funniest lines, I think, comes from this battle. The navies are dropping charges and stuff on the sub, and the captain gets the idea to release some stuff in the sub to the surface of the water so that the US ship might recognize that the stuff belongs to an American sub, but the Navy captain sees that and says that could be anybody’s stuff. So, they get the idea to shoot one of the nurse’s bras to the surface. And when he sees it, the captain of the destroyer says, “I don’t think the Japanese have anything like that.” Idn’t that funny?