1942 Arlington, Virginia

Julie Altshuler
Born 1936
Arlington, VA and New York City, NY
Interviewed on February 6, 2022
by Jason Altshuler

It was very different going to the movies then because you had to go there, as opposed to just turning on your TV. When I was five years old, someone had to take me. I was not going to the movies myself. It was really fun because they were doing it with me, my parents.

I think I was living in Arlington, Virginia at that point. My father went to Washington to work for the OSS, and everybody there was from the North. This was all government workers, professionals who had come to work in the war effort. I had never lived in a place like that, because I had lived in apartments. These were low rise garden apartments, about three stories, or two stories. There was this gang of kids and we’d just go and wander in the woods. It was very different from living in New York City.

There was this movie that made a tremendous impression on me called Journey for Margaret, with Margaret O’Brien. This was in World War II, and it made this tremendous impression on me because it’s about a war orphan in England, who is played by this girl around my age. I’m five years old, and so was this girl.

It’s about this American reporter who is in England and he meets this war orphan and he decides to adopt her. It’s about how he and his wife are writing letters and planning this, and then how he adopts her and gets to take her to the United States. It’s a real tear jerker, and I’m the same age as her, and it was so emotional to watch it. It made me sort of understand what it was like for somebody. She was enough like me that I could sort of say “oh, this could have happened to me.” What would it have been like if I was a five year old living in England, being bombed all the time? And then if someone brought me to the United States. It was so emotional as a five year old child.

The movie was in black and white and it was sort of like a documentary. There was so much tension: will he be able to get her out, and will it work. It was just very emotional. I’d be crying, but I’d want to see it again, because it made me understand. It brought everything home to me so that I could understand what all this was about. It was just about a girl; I think her parents died in the war or something, and he wanted to adopt her, and he wanted to adopt her, and then she came. She comes to the United States and she’s rescued, you know. She’s saved.

It’s like Bambi. There was an article last week in the New Yorker about Bambi. That’s a completely different type of genre: Bambi is a Walt Disney movie. And Bambi’s mother is shot by a hunter, and all the other animals are helping him. Bambi was just so emotional. They were made around the same time, Journey for Margaret and Bambi, and they’re sort of about the same thing. Children being rescued. Those were the earliest sort of movies I was seeing.

But there were different periods. At one point I lived near my cousin Sybil and she went with her friends, she was a teenager. They made her take me. She didn’t like taking me, and I didn’t have any choice in the movies. I remember we went to see a movie where someone had an appendectomy and they showed the surgery and everything, and I hated that. I didn’t want to see that. But I had no choice.

And then later, all the kids would go on Saturday afternoons to the movies. You would go every Saturday, and I had a bunch of friends, and we’d always go, and we’d decide what we were going to see. It was much better when I could go with my own friends and pick the movies than when I had to go along with my cousin Sybil and see whatever she wanted.

If you wanted to see a first run movie, someone would have to take you, but there were the local movies, and everyone would go. You had to sit in the children’s section and there was a matron who would be policing it and making people behave. People were throwing things and everything. The children’s section was very noisy, you didn’t like to sit it in so much.

And then there comes the time when you’re in between, and you could pay for the children’s section and then try to sit in the grown up place. And the matron would be looking to find you and throw you out of the grown up place if you were a child. The matron would be there with the flashlight and saying “get out of here!” and yanking you out. It was sort of Tom Sawyer-ish or something.