1940s Oxnard, California

Nancy Atlee

Late 1940s

Oxnard, California

Interviewed on 1/29/23

By Ellie Atlee

We went to the movie theater every week. Every Saturday my sisters and our neighborhood friends would all go down to the theater, and stay there for the whole double feature and the serial. I can’t quite remember a specific film, but I do remember the Westerns. It might have been a Gene Autry western, you know, the black and white westerns that just went on for years. They weren’t like the singular, comprehensive stories that we’re used to seeing in movies today. They were almost totally unoriginal, each one following a blueprint, a series of impressive jumps, or chase scenes, or seemingly impossible rifle shots. But it was a serial, it was fun. I mean, we had no control, really, over what we were going to see when we went to the theater. We simply went, and they put something new on every week, and we would watch whatever they offered us. 

I remember a lot of the time, the serial would end with a cliffhanger. And by that, I mean a literal cliffhanger, with the main hero handing from a cliff by his fingertips. He would be the white hat – there was the white hat hero and the black hat villain in every show – and the next show in the serial always showed the white hat managing to muscle his way up the cliff, grabbing a branch or thrown rope or whatever the means. You know, silly stuff like that. But we loved them, I mean it was pure entertainment and fun.

I think the thing I most fondly recall is the difference in concessions and price. I mean, we would get into the theater with a quarter! Each of us only had to have a quarter and we’d buy a few snacks before the film. At the Grove (our theater in Los Angeles that my grandmother and I go to together quite often) concessions are six, seven dollars. But I could get Jujubes for just a few cents. What were Jujubes? They were these little chewy things. Sort of like Dots today, but with a lot less flavor. Barbara and I would buy Jujubes and just sit smacking our lips from the chewy little things for the whole four or so hours that we were there. 

Another sort of particular thing to that time was the newsreel. Each viewing started with a newsreel with updates of the Cold War, or some sort of aviator hero. Planes. They loved planes. And I mean, it was exciting, watching these planes all alined in formation. There was a serious voice that spoke over the footage, and it was all very patriotic. Did I know who made them? No, god no. I mean, it was the news! I never would have thought to have asked who made it. Looking back it’s interesting to think about the narratives they probably were able to spin for us. I mean, I remember they scared me. During the war years, when I was really young, I remember asking my mother, “Mommy, are the Germans going to make us slaves?” I don’t think I could have gotten that fear from anywhere else, propaganda posters, maybe. But the newsreels just sort of emphasized how we treated the movie theater. It was a weekly thing, a ritual.