1938 Luray, Kansas

James Lawrence
Born 1932
First movie memories from Luray, Kansas, population 400
Interviewed on January 26, 2019
By Cynthia Horan

My hometown was Luray Kansas, in wheat country in northern central Kansas. When I grew up, there was a population of about 300 or 400. I had 60 people in my high school, and 15 in my class. It was a very small community.

The main street had all the services we needed—a grocery store, drug store, barber shop, bank, and lumber yard. On the side of the grocery store, the end building on the main street, was a blank wall. On Saturday nights during the summer, they would hang up a big white canvas the size of a movie screen on the side of the wall. There was a projector in the back, and people brought chairs or blankets and sometimes picnic food. It was 5 cents for entrance, but if you didn’t have 5 cents, you could just stand around and watch the movie anyways. The farmers would all come to town to do their shopping on Saturdays. The pool hall and beer hall were very busy. We had ice cream socials, band concerts, and the movie on the side of the building.

My father moved to Luray in 1921 and he worked for a grain elevator company. After the wheat harvest, which only lasted for about a month in the summertime, the people who ran the elevators didn’t have a lot to do, so he started the Saturday night outdoor films around 1924 or 1925. He never got to go to the theaters as a kid. He was born in 1892 and graduated high school in 1910, and in Kansas there were no theaters in 1910. He grew up with this desire to see movies, and so he projected them for a while in Luray until they built a theater in Lucas (a nearby town). He probably ordered the projector from a catalogue company, maybe Sears and Roebuck. It wasn’t a business for him; he felt the community needed to have a movie in the summertime.

I used to watch him put the film on the projector. You had to take the film and thread it through some little pulleys to get it lined up and secure, then you had to turn a switch to start the reels, and usually there was a whole bunch of black and white confetti stuff on the screen. Then if you were lucky the name of the movie would show up and then the actors, and finally the movie. It was not always perfect—sometimes the film would start to vibrate and the image on the screen would blur.

I can’t remember the name of the movie, but the first movie I watched when I was about six or eight years old would have been a cowboy movie, starring Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. They were usually set in New Mexico or Arizona. Part of story would be about how the cowboys interfaced with Indians, and sometimes they had fights or shared meals, and sometimes they would exchange gifts. There were also situations where the Indians got upset because cowboys took their land, and so there would be fights. In addition to the westerns, there were also movie musicals with stars like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

One of our favorite movie themes was the Andy Hardy series with Mickey Rooney. They probably made at least eight or ten of those. Those were always interesting. Roy Rogers was a big thing, and Hopalong Cassidy and Abbott and Costello. I also liked the series with the little dog, and Myrna Loy and William Powell, called The Thin Man. They were on the radio too. And the Marx Brothers were popular in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.

At a very early age, I would have gone with my mother and brothers to the outdoor movie. When the movie theater was initially built, I would have gone with my parents and brothers. But my parents sat in one place and we sat in a different place—we didn’t all sit together. When I could drive, I went with friends.

Around 1940, the neighboring town Lucas (about 10 miles down the road) built a movie theater. The town of Lucas had about 500 people at the time. They usually had matinees on Saturday afternoons and movies on Sunday night. If you think about that period from when the talking movies started, movies became the entertainment for the whole country because we didn’t have television. It’s what everybody looked forward to on the weekend; very few people went to movies during the week because they were all working or going to school. Weekends were times to go to the movies. Pretty much my whole time that I was in school I attended Sunday night movies. I don’t think I ever missed a weekend movie from the time I was about 10 until I was 18.

The Lucas Theater was a family business run by the Gailberths. It was 10 cents for kids and 25 cents for adults. Mr. Gailberth ran the projector and Mrs. Gailberth served popcorn. There was no candy or drinks, nothing like that, but actually some people brought their own food with them. The theater had a balcony that seated about 50 people and the main floor seated probably around 100. But there was never a problem getting a seat, especially during the 40s when so many young men were gone off to the war. Also, I think families didn’t go out so much during the war, they stayed at home. A lot of the movie stars were also in the military, like Jimmy Stewart, and had tours of duty in the military. So they were gone for three or four years, but they still made movies. But the theater was never crowded. The seats were wood, they were not cushioned, so they weren’t very comfortable.

Also, Russell, the county seat, was 22 miles away and had two theaters, so we essentially had three theaters available to us. It got to the point where we would look at the ads in the weekly paper to see what movies would be playing at the three different theaters and would choose which one to go to. Come to think of it, for my little town of 300 people, it was quite unique to have a choice of three different theaters within about 20 miles. We saw a lot of movies.