1950 Preston, Idaho
Farrell Jensen
Born in 1940
Preston, Idaho
Interviewed September 20, 2019
By Jack Jensen
I was born in 1940, so my recollections are from the late ’40s and early ’50s. In 1950 or 1951, they had a drive-in movie installed in Preston that I went to a lot. There was a movie theater in Preston Idaho called the Grand Theater. They used to always run a Saturday night single feature or occasionally a double feature. The old Grand Theater had a lower section and a balcony, but the back half of it sloped up. We always liked to sit in that balcony. There was another theater in Preston called the Isis Theater. When I was a kid that usually had more adult movies, rather than the Westerns. My friends and I didn’t go there nearly as often.
I would go to the Grand Theater for church activities, which were the center of life in Preston then. When older people went on a date, they went to the movies. When my parents went out they went to the movies. Most often, I would go with a couple of neighbor friends, Bill and Larry. Our folks would drive us, since the theater was four miles away. We would ride bikes sometimes as well. We used to go on a Saturday afternoon for about 25 cents. You could just walk up to the door and buy a ticket. It never had long lines because Preston only had a population of about three thousand people. You could buy popcorn and soda and candy. I don’t remember too much of that, since we never had the extra money to go buy goodies.
In those days you would have a news reel at the beginning of the movies or in the middle of the features. That news reel would have live accounts of newsworthy items like war or storms. There were always a series of cartoons they had too, like Popeye, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. Those are the ones I remember. I don’t remember the actual name of most of the movies, but the key actors were Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.
The Lone Ranger was another one that they used to have – another Western. The Lone Ranger is probably the first movie I would have seen. I was eight years old the first time I saw it, but it went on for a long time. It was a serial, meaning they didn’t just make one of them. They would make a bunch of them. One week there would be a movie, and the next month there would be a new one.
The Lone Ranger had an Indian side-kick by the name of Tonto and a white horse by the name of Silver. There was a bandit or bad guy of some sort who was in the mischief, but of course you had the Lone Ranger to solve it. He would get the guy under control and round him up. I remember there was an Indian fight too — a gun fight with the Indians. I remember a bar brawl as well. People were throwing chairs, jumping off of things on top of each other, and throwing bottles. This part was the most fun. The Lone Ranger and Tonto were always in a skirmish, but they always won.
Links for photos (in order):
https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/16/opinion/greene-lone-ranger/index.html
http://www.rushcreekeditions.com/stein/stein-content25.html
