1960 Denver + Breckenridge, Colorado

John Etie

Born in 1953

Denver + Breckenridge, Colorado

Interviewed on 1/25/19

By Lucas Walz

         The first movie I can remember seeing was at the drive-in. The thing that I remember most about it is being in our pajamas and being in the car doing something unusual – more than the experience of the actual movie. We were pretty much a poor family. Even something like that was pretty exotic for us. I don’t think I can speak to the movie, though. I was about 6 years old or so.

      We had a station wagon. I think it was a Wrambler of all things. Made by some company that doesn’t exist anymore. And we would park it backwards and lay in the back with our pajamas on. I vaguely recall it but I’m sure we all fell asleep before the movie was finished. There were a bunch of kids – I’m sure we had like 3 or 4 or 5 kids at that time. I was sure I was fighting with my brothers and sisters. Poking at each other and screaming. My poor sainted mother had to deal with all of us because my father was literally never around unless he was making a baby. We kids were all just 1 year or so apart.

       I remember seeing rows and rows of cars in a circular arrangement and a building that had the projector, some restrooms, and the concessions store. I can definitely remember us buying popcorn. Or maybe just as likely my mom popped some popcorn and took it with us so we could save money. They also sold this candy neckless. We didn’t actually eat it – we would pull on either side of it and after we got a good amount of tension, we would bite it and it would break. Then, we would fling the candies against the screen or against someone’s head or car. I actually don’t remember eating even a single one of those. I also remember eating some sort of caramel sugar babies. And this big long tube of gum called bub daddies – they were probably a foot and a half long coated with some powder and you would chew and chew and chew until your jaw couldn’t take it anymore.

       Going to the drive-in wasn’t routine at all. I only remember going only a couple of times. What more could you expect from my poor mother and all these screaming kids? I remember the Wrambler had this seat that would face backward in the final row. I wasn’t allowed to sit there anymore because I would get motion sickness and throw up. The Wrambler was light-green and had hand cranks on all the windows and these vinyl-type seats. When we laid down the seats to watch the movie it would have this chancy carpet on the back end.

      We moved to Breckenridge when I was about 8 years old. There was only one movie theatre in the entire county and it was across the street from a motel called the “Moose Lodge”. The movie theatre or the “Quonset Hut”, as they called it, was this World War II era rounded building made of this corrugated steel. They had built a foundation under it that slanted down and we watched movies in there for years. They probably brought in some old movie seats from somewhere else and installed them on top of the cement floor with no carpeting. I remember that place was always sticky. The cement was still arguably better than the chancy carpet in the back of the Wrangler, though. One time we watched The Nutty Professor which was kind of a funny comedy that was out and about. That would’ve been around in ’63 or ’64.

      Going to the movies was one of the only things to do in Breckenridge. We actually lived in a small town outside Breckenridge and my mom would have to drive me ten miles because we lived way up there in the mountains. She would take me every weekend and we had some friends in town and we loved spending the night at their houses because they had some TV channels. I would always go with the same friends to the movies. They had more luxuries than we did – we didn’t even have some of the modern conveniences of the time at that point in my life. God forbid we would have to read books!