1944 Somerville, Massachusetts

John Richard Buckley Sr. 

Born in 1939

Somerville, Massachusetts

Interviewed on September 20th, 2019

By Mary Buckley 

All of the kids from the neighborhood would go to the movies on Saturday nights. Especially during the war; they played a series of short films every Saturday night with Don Winslow fighting Russian spies that were intense and each week end in a cliffhanger. So what would happen was one week a car would be hanging on a cliff and the film would abruptly end so you had to wait a week in suspense and wonder what would happen. We couldn’t wait for the next week. Then the next film would resume with the car hanging off the cliff and he would end up escaping and catching the so-called ‘bad guy’. 

But, the first real movie I remember seeing was when I was about four or five, it was a war film about a dog named Lassie, there were a lot of movies about Lassie but this one was called ‘Lassie Come Home’. Lassie was a red cross dog and the film made the audience fall in love with him, he got wounded in the war though and I was so sad because I thought he was going to die, but he was able to make it out alive. I don’t remember a lot about the movie itself, but we watched a lot of movies about Lassie the dog after the war too. At the time there were war movies and also gangster movies and I was young but it never was enough to scare me because they were more lighthearted and fun unlike these kinds of movies we have today. After the war the theaters shifted to a lot of Westerns and comedies, I remember Bob Hope and Jane Russell in the movie Paleface. That one was really funny, he would talk straight to the audience and the theater would erupt in laughter. I liked the comedies a lot.  

My older brother and I would go every weekend, sometimes our cousins would even join us because I had so many in the area, so I saw a lot of movies and  I don’t remember all of them. There were theaters everywhere where I lived. The city of Somerville was split into squares, like neighborhoods, and every neighborhood had its own small theater. All of the kids in the neighborhood would go together, we would all walk there, of course we walked, we walked everywhere back then. We would go to the Peel Square theater because it was nearest to us. It wasn’t as fancy as the theaters in Boston that had many ushers, this one just had one usher and you were allowed to sit anywhere you wanted. As kids we would usually run in and try to sit front row, the older kids that would go with their girlfriends would always head to the back of the theater so they could play kissy the whole time. It only cost ten cents to get in if you were ten years old or younger, but if you were older it was fifteen cents. My brother and I always had a hard time getting in on the kids price because we were pretty big for our age so they usually didn’t believe us. We always got popcorn, it was only five cents and I loved it. It was my favorite part about the movies and they would pop it right in front of you too so it was fun to watch as well. I didn’t always get candy but if I did, my favorite kind was pompoms. 

By the late 40’s movies started to get a little bit less popular in Somerville and the surrounding towns because TV started to become popular. With the theaters all being owned by studios, they started to close up when business was getting low. We still went to the movies though because there were biggers theaters like the Laugh theater in Boston, it had those body distortion mirrors that made you really fat or really skinny, and they played a lot of hilarious movies so it was still fun to go on the weekends. Once I got older we also started to go to drive in theaters. You can picture a huge empty field with a big screen, we would park as close to the speaker as possible, leave your car at intermission and they had these big clocks on the screens with a 10 minute timer and the clock would tick down until the movie was starting like a big show. I remember a lot of good times there.