1939 Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Bertram Wolfson

1930

Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Interviewed on February 1, 2023

by Harrison Bushnell

When I went to the movies, they were the talkie movies. The theater only charged 10 cents. There were three theaters in town, the Capitol, the Strand, and the Leroy. The Leroy and the Strand were a little more professional, but the Capitol was cheapest. They look like the theaters now. A lot of them were of Egyptian design with high ceilings. Very elegant. Most of the theaters were built in the 20s and they built them at that time trying to make them like palaces. And we always thought that they were very elegant.

I don’t remember what was the first one [I saw], but I remember the Four Feathers which was a British film. They branded someone; I’ll never forget that. It was probably a British colonial movie in Africa. All of the troops were African. I must have been about 8 or 9.

I remember Pinocchio. After seeing the movie, I used to draw the Pinocchio a lot. And the other picture was The Wizard of Oz. In 1938, my parents, who didn’t go to the movies very often, went to Gone with the Wind. If you’re in New England, you don’t worry if there’s a little snow. They went to the movies and it was a long movie and the drifts were about 8 or 10 feet outside so they couldn’t go home. They spent the night in the theater and they came back the next afternoon. Everyone in the theater stayed. We were old enough, my brother and I, so we stayed alone at home. My parents weren’t really worried about us as kids.

I went mostly with friends; I don’t ever remember going too often with my family…maybe to Pinocchio or the Wizard of Oz. We used to go, but they weren’t a big thing in our lives, the movies. We lived in a tenement house. In New England, there were three families living in the Tenement. This was in Pawtucket. We would make up our own games. It wasn’t until high school that we really thought of going to the movies. I think a lot of it was that the families didn’t have much money. They were cheap enough at a dime or a quarter where you could just go. Even that seemed like a lot. When I was growing up, a lot of people in the basement of their house, they’d open up penny candy stores. They would often have a shot glass that they’d measure out the pine nuts. And this was a way of families in the depression making more money. And although this was just a penny here or a penny there. At the time, a dollar was a lot of money. When I was 15, I worked at a clothing store and they paid me 50 cents an hour.

I didn’t really go to the movies much as a child. It was mostly in high school that we went to the movies. We lived in the section of Pawtucket that was next to Providence. There was the Hope Theater and when we had nothing to do we’d walk up there and just go to the theaters. The movies at that time were only 25 cents. That was when I was in high school. They always showed two movies. We never paid attention to when the film began, whether we came in the middle of it or not, we always knew there was gonna be a double header and there would be the news reels which everyone loved in the middle and the cartoon strip. If we came in the middle of a film we watched it from there on and then we stayed and watched the first half of the one we missed. We always loved the cartoons and the news reels because we didn’t have television then. The war broke out in ‘39 and that was the only way to see what was happening. We weren’t aware of it, but when we look at them now we see that there was a lot of propaganda. We all got the newspaper to find out what was happening in the war, but it was really the news reels that showed the bombings of the German cities and the fighter planes of the Germans and the British. That was where we got a lot of information about what was going on in the war. They had fairly up to date reels. We always thought they were fairly current. The newspapers spent a lot of time making the movies, because there was a lot of propaganda, you could see who was winning, and they of course always favored the United States.

We didn’t pay much attention to that [actors, plots, etc.]. Most of the movies we went to were Cowboy movies. Most of the games we played were cops and robbers with plastic guns.

We always walked to the theater. In the early days, there was the war time. And then for a long time, until ’48, they didn’t produce any automobiles after the war ended. My father had a 1935 Chevy. I learned to drive on that. He didn’t get a new car until ‘48. There were ushers to show you where to sit. You could buy popcorn or candy bars. We were always thrifty, we never had enough money to buy the popcorn and so forth. This was, of course, before the television came out. Television didn’t come out until college. Incidentally, at Brown, during exam week in between the exams, they always showed all the cartoons. The college showed them to relax people and it was very popular. They always showed Bugs Bunny, all the typical cartoons. They were silly and we just laughed at them. They were always in good attendance.