1946 Staten Island, New York
Ruth Miller
1938
Staten Island, New York
Interviewed on February 9th, 2022
by Eve Wattenberg
Maybe several blocks from my house, there was the Ritz Theater on Richmond Avenue in Port Richmond, the area of Staten island where I lived. It was beautiful and wonderful and a huge space to walk into in the dark and be escorted to your seat by an usher. The ushers had flashlights to guide you to your seat. It didn’t smell like perfume! When you went past the lobby, you could smell popcorn, and maybe I should just be grateful that I don’t remember anything particularly bad. It was your visual senses. You were in a different world with darkness everywhere.
Going to the Ritz on a Saturday morning with ten cents, which is all it cost, was the highlight of the week. It was huge, I thought, and sometimes I’d sit in the balcony. They ran the movie continuously all day long, but the ushers would check so you didn’t stay and watch the movie more than once. Also, it wasn’t just the movie. First there were coming attractions and cartoons! So you always enjoyed the cartoons with Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, the Road Runner… The full show kept repeating all day long. Before you got to the seat there was the candy counter in the lobby. I’m sure candies were five cents or ten cents. And the candy that I always bought were Jujubes. Little tiny gummies, they were little like a quarter inch in different flavors, and I’d get them and sit in the dark and it was wonderful. All for ten cents!
The first movie I remember seeing was Disney’s Snow White. I think I was seven or eight. It was wonderfully colorful with Snow White, the charming heroine, and the prince who was the love of her life, and the seven dwarfs. To this day I can tell you their names: Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Doc, Happy, Grumpy, and Bashful. And I remember there were woodland scenes with beautiful little friendly animals—nothing frightening—and the birds were always singing and talking to each other. There were butterflies and flowers. It was a land of magic. And then there was this young lady. You met Snow White, and I remember a scene where she was by a wishing well and she sings a song: [singing] I’m wishing, I’m wishing for the one I love to find me someday… While she’s singing this dreamy thing by the well, the birds are around and the animals are jumping and you’ve got this whole scene.
There was also the evil queen. She was just narcissistic in the extreme. She asks the magic mirror on the wall—she says MAGIC mirror on the who’s the fairest of them all—not mirror mirror! And the mirror tells her it’s Snow White, and she has a fit of course. She decides she’s going to do away with snow white, so the plot thickens. She has this poison apple, this beautiful red, shiny apple that she gives to Snow White. When she bites into the apple, Snow White falls asleep or dead, one or the other, and the seven dwarfs built this glass coffin for Snow White because she was still so beautiful. She was resting for eternity in the glass coffin, and she was always loved by the seven dwarfs, and there were always flowers and birds around.
I should back up a little. Before she bit the apple, she was moaning for a prince to find her one day, and sure enough, as she was lying in her glass coffin who should come along but the prince! He sees her and immediately loves her even though she’s just lying in this coffin and the prince gives her a kiss and she awakens. I can envision the prince in his princely outfit arriving on the scene, and the little rabbits and butterflies, and the seven dwarfs and the songs they sing, and I can just see them these crazy little dwarfs bouncing along with their picks and shovels going to work in the mine. It was a sweet and innocent time.
I was not there as a theater critic, I was there strictly for entertainment, and I was entertained. I was a kid. I loved it! I loved going to the movies. When you did it once a week it was very special, and remember, we didn’t have television. Other than going outdoors to play jump rope or hopscotch, or visit with your girlfriends, this was a special entertainment. It was different. Where else were you going to see a movie? Your entertainment and source of information came from the radio all week long, but on the weekend you had a movie.
To get there, we walked. It may have been eight or nine blocks in a residential neighborhood. But this was on Richmond Avenue itself, the big shopping street in Port Richmond. It’s where all the stores were. Possibly I would go with my cousin Carole. We lived three blocks apart, and she was one year older than I was, and she’s the closest thing I had to a sister, really. Possibly when I got to be a little older, I imagine my brother Bobby was along at some point. He was two years younger than I was. It was a neighborhood theater and you were likely to run into friends from school, too.
The façade of the building, it was an old building, was to me quite marvelous. It was designed to be a centerpiece of the community. It had an arch in front, and decorative motifs they don’t use on modern buildings anymore, and a marquee that said RITZ in bright big letters.
The Ritz was different from most theaters today because it had a stage and a curtain for live vaudeville! That was probably more the evening for adults, I think. I remember for some reason being there for some vaudeville show with a dog act. I think it was fading out. When television came in people had all kinds of things to look at and didn’t have to go traipsing in to watch a dog act in a theater.
Times change, and the Ritz later became the home for rock concerts and roller skating, if you can believe it. It was a big stage. Now, apparently, it’s used as a showroom for a tile company, which is sad because I remember the building being so beautiful. And my high school graduation was held at the Ritz theater! It was funny to revisit it after not going for weekend cartoons for years. I guess by the time you start becoming aware of boys, if you’re a girl, you lose interest in cartoons.
It was a wonderful time of my life. Things seemed so simple, and even with war and everything, as a kid I was lucky enough to have the security of my parents being there and having cartoons. I feel I was very lucky to feel protected and cared for and entertained at the movies!
