Chapter Eleven - The Coed Theatre

Chapter Eleven
The Coed Theatre

Our neighborhood movie theatre was called the Coed. It was a couple of blocks West of Central Park Elementary school; so, in easy walking distance. It was in a building with two other businesses. On one side was a barber shop and the other side there was a donut shop. The price of an admission was 14 cents for children and 35 cents for adults. Saturday matinees were where you wanted to be. I don’t remember how much the donuts cost, but usually we had enough money to get into the movie and to get a donut. In those days Hollywood was turning out movies like a factory. We would get a double feature, a cartoon, previews of coming attractions and maybe an episode of a serial or maybe a newsreel. The movies usually changed twice a week or at least once a week. Most of the movies were in black & white and a square format.

Many of the features we would watch would be cowboy and Indian movies with stars like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy. Hopalong Cassidy was cool because he was always dressed in black with a black hat and yet he was a good guy. He had two pearl handle six-shooters and of course was a crack shot. There was Roy Rogers’ sidekick Gabby Hayes who was a favorite of us all. I remember reading somewhere once where a Native American said he used to like the cowboy and Indian movies and always cheered for the cowboys. He didn’t identify with the Indians at all because Hollywood’s version never came close to reality. I’ve never heard an African American say this but I imagine the same thing could be said about Hollywood’s African natives in the movies like the Tarzan series. Johnny Weismiller was a favorite but his sidekick Cheetah, the chimpanzee, was the character that captured my heart.

The Coed would have raffles sometimes at the Saturday matinees and one time I won a chicken. How proud I was to take that home to Mom to fix for dinner.

The Coed theatre as I mentioned was a short walk from home; however, you had to go through Central Park which usually was no problem. If Gary and I would go to see a Frankenstein or Wolfman movie and we didn’t get out until after dark, we would make it through Central Park in record time especially if there were a full moon.

When I got a little older, Jr. High age, it was no longer the matinees that held the charm but either Friday or Saturday night at the movies. I remember going to the movies with your girlfriend and trying to get up the courage to put your arm around her during the movies. Once you got up the courage then you were faced with a decision. It didn’t take long for your arm to start going numb from resting on the bony, narrow top of the seat. So, did you brave it out to impress the girl or remove your arm for awhile and get the sensation back, maybe putting your arm back later.

We had two large theatres downtown that we would go to occasionally called the Jayhawk and the Grand. I remember that my mother took me to Kansas City to see one of the first major color movies, “Yankee Doodle Dandy”. It starred James Cagney who normally played a gangster type, but in this movie he was a song and dance man. The first 3D movie I remember seeing was “Bawana Devil”. There were a lot of throwing spears directly at the audience and that type of thing. One of the technological movie breakthroughs that I remember was “The Robe” starring Richard Burton and Victor Mature. It was a biblical picture about what was suppose to be a robe Jesus used just before his death. It was in CinemaScope which widen the picture format about double. It was more like man’s natural vision. One other thing that stands out in my memory about the downtown theatres were that negroes or colored people ( I don’t remember which term was being used then) were required to sit in the balcony. The Coed didn’t have a balcony. I could probably go on and on about movie memories but there’s already lots of books published on that. So, instead in the next chapter we’ll go into the radio shows.