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IF IT WAS A FABLE,
LET IT CONTINUEby
Britt Towery | |
Brownwood
Bulletin -
There
was a certain pride of station when I wore the maroon uniform of a Lyric Theater
usher. That was a time when theater ushers actually helped people find a seat
during the film. In those days you could buy a ticket and enter anytime during
the showing of the movie.
Show-goers tried to arrive before the start of
the main feature, so my usher work was mostly during the showing of the newsreels,
coming attractions or a cartoon. It was all pieced together by Red Townsend up
in the projection booth and shown continuously from noon until the last show beginning
about 9:30.
If you arrived half way though the main feature, you could
stay on and watch the show to the point where you came in. You could stay all
day if your time allowed. Ushers had to stay on their toes, as theater-goers were
coming and going all day long. Our theater was a community.
The movies
changed each week. Sunday and Monday were usually what we would call a "blockbuster"
today. Tuesday and Wednesday a lesser feature was shown. Then Thursday, Friday
and Saturday another first-run movie. In second-run houses, like the Gem, Queen
and Ritz (all on Center Avenue) ran double-features. Two full-length films, one
a cowboy western and the other usually a modern mystery or comedy, with an added
15-minute serial.
My mother evidently favored the Queen Theater as she
took me and my sister regularly on Saturday nights. It was as regular an event
as Sunday school the next morning. Camp
Bowie was just being built and after the show we met dad as he closed his
barber shop and we drove home together. During Camp
Bowie days barber shops were open until nearly ten every Saturday night. The
soldiers preferred our town barbers to those on base. Community was important.
Of
all the films during my youthful days as an usher, few have stayed with me as
much as the 1943 MGM film "The Human Comedy." William Saroyan's sentimental Oscar-winning
story of life in a small American town during World
War II. It hit home to a nation at war with the Empire of Japan and Hitler's
Nazi Germany.
The film was Mickey Rooney's finest acting as a teenager
and few can forget the droopy eyes and buck teeth of six-year old Jackie "Butch"
Jenkins as Rooney's little brother Ulysses. A youngster who knew nothing of those
days said, "The film is a fable from another time." Maybe, but not my experience.
In
the film Rooney delivers telegrams for a firm like Western Union. He comes of
age one night as he has to deliver a telegram from the War Department to a mother
that her son has been killed.
During
that war, Brownwood's Western
Union office was next to the Lyric, and Tex Worsham's News Stand. As in the film,
many Brown County homes received word of the death of a loved one in the Pacific,
North African or the European front. It was a time when people cared about people.
Call me naïve, but I liked a time when we lived as a community.
Our human
comedy is meaningful and great only in community. Knowing and caring for our neighbors;
reclaiming what America once was. Not perfect, but a concerned inter-related community.
"Each of us holds the life and well-being of our neighbors in our hands.
We can choose to lift each other up, or we can shrug and decide it isn’t our problem.
If we are indeed a community, if we are indeed good, we can make the choice to
do that lifting." (Quoted from an article by William Rivers Pitt, author of "The
Greatest Sedition is Silence.")
It is our choice. We choose if our human
comedy evolves as a nightmare or a dream – like a fable.
Copyright
Britt Towery
Along the Way with Britt,
July 12, 2009 Column
Email: bet@suddenlink.net
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