1948 Tallahassee, Florida

Rolin Miller
Born 1941
Tallahassee, Florida
Interviewed on September 15, 2019
by Kent Perlmutter

When I was around seven or eight, I would go to the movie theater every Saturday. My favorite movies were the ones with Roy Rogers. They were cowboy movies. He had a ton of movies put out. He was in these black and white movies which came out twice a year. His real name was Roy Rogers. His co-star was named Gabby Hayes. His horse was Trigger. He was the type of guy who lived on a ranch. He would go out and do battle with the bad guys. When I was a kid, we all loved him. He was our favorite cowboy. He wore two pistols; one on each side. He could outshoot and out draw anyone. He would face some guy, and the other guy would draw, and Rogers would shoot the gun out of the other guy’s hand. His wife was Dale Evans. In the 1940s, he was one of the biggest movie stars around. Westerns were really a top thing with all the kids. If you were four years old to sixteen, the westerns were number one. 

We could go down to the local Ritz theater in Tallahassee, and for nine cents, see a double feature, maybe a western with Roy Rogers, and maybe something with Tom Mix. We would then see a couple cartoons and a serial like “The Three Stooges”. And that was for nine cents. So for a quarter, you could go to the movies. For a penny, I would buy a stick of licorice. For a nickel, popcorn, and another nickel for a big soda. Back then I liked Pepsi. So there went your weekly allowance. 

The local merchants subsidized the movie so that the parents could go shopping on Saturday. The parents were free of their kids because they were working from Monday to Friday. Those pictures only showed on Saturdays. The rest of the week were other types of movies. Saturdays were the only day with double feature westerns and serials like Superman. The serials always ended with cliffhangers so that you needed to go back the next week to see what happened. Usually, it was 25 cents any other day of the week. The merchants subsidized the theaters for Saturdays so that it was only nine cents but any other day was 25 cents. 

I would go with my brother, or the neighborhood kids. You probably knew a good percentage of the kids in the theater because Tallahassee had 25,000 people. You’d know half the people in the theater. You’d go to school with them. Cowboy westerns were what we watched in the 1940s and 1950s.