1938 Washburn, Wisconsin
Reed Taylor
Born in 1935
First movie memories from Washburn, Wisconsin, population 1,800
Interviewed on 1/29/18
by Vernon Wei Ting Lin
My first movie was–I think–Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs, seen in the little local movie house in Washburn, WI (pop. 1,800) on Lake Superior, near Ashland, and 50 miles east of Duluth/Superior. The year was 1938, when I was 3. (We later left Washburn in 1941, and I recall also seeing Gulliver’s Travels and Gone With the Wind while there). I remember how bright the colors were (Technicolor was new, and this was colorful animation), especially the contrast between Snow White’s very white skin and her black hair. I loved the Dwarfs, especially Sleepy, Happy, and Doc, and my favorite song was “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Off to Work We Go” as they went to their job in a mine, where they sang “We dig dig dig, we dig dig dig in a mine the whole day through, We dig dig dig, we dig dig dig, that’s all the work we do” to a jolly tune, with cheery countenances. Of course it never occurred to me that this was a put-down of dwarfs–I didn’t realize there were real people suffering from that condition.
Many years later, in the summer of 1955, I spent a week visiting a German exchange student in his home in Wanne Eichel, near Dusseldorf, a few miles from the mile-deep Gelsenkirchen Coal Mine–one of the world’s deepest. Through his lying that I was “Herr Doktor Ingenuer Reed Taylor,” a high ranking US mining expert, he and I were conveyed down that shaft after exchanging our clothes (including underwear!) for white asbestos suits and helmets. Boy did it ever get hot as we approached the center of the Earth! Afterward we were ushered into a room with two bathtubs, which we entered naked under the watchful eye of two female attendants who scrubbed our backs and carefully dabbed the coal dust from our eyes with cotton balls dipped in mineral oil. I was all of 20, and as yet innocent of nakedness in front of a female other than family. Then they helped us dry off and we put our clothes back on and went to an adjacent room for little sandwiches and beer. The next day the local paper carried our picture on the front page (in the white suits), with a caption in German excitedly reporting the visit of this prestigious American mining engineer!
Sorry for the digression! I must have gone to “Snow White” with my sisters, who were 4 and 5 years older (thus 7 and 8 respectively), and we walked the few blocks to the theater on a main street that was all of nine blocks long, with only a couple of parallel streets on the uphill side, and the Lake below. Can’t vouch for the snacks, but I am sure they had buttered popcorn, which I still LOVE!
Years later, when I was a high school junior, age 16, in 1951, I worked as an usher at the biggest theater in Appleton, WI (pop. 24,000), where we moved in 1941, for 50 cents an hour. We climbed to the very top of the upper balcony of this 2,400-seat palace to put on our snappy uniforms in the projection booth, where we befriended the two guys tending the huge carbon-arc projectors, changing the 12-inch 35mm. film reels every 10 minutes or so, when the little dots appeared on the screen to prompt the change of projectors. I was fascinated by the process, and later taught a film segment to 10th graders,[1] which I began by tossing little 1-minute advertising reels (Wonder Bread, etc.), no longer needed by a local TV station, into their laps–to great consternation. I made them pick up a piece of film and tell me how they thought it “moved.” They were stumped until I explained the jerk-jerk mechanism that made these still frames move. Great fun!!
[1] After graduating from Yale College in 1957, Reed Taylor taught and mentored students as a high school English teacher.
