Ten Cent Movies

There was a large community hall and gym, in the Hi Point housing project. Every Saturday there would be a movie and a serial shown in gym. There were hundreds of kids in the project, and most of them showed up at the gym, with a quarter in their pocket.

The movie only cost ten cents; candy bars and popcorn were five cents each, so with a quarter, one could have a sugar good time.

But there was a way to have more money to spend for candy and popcorn. Larry and I would show up at the gym, about an hour early. A man would open a single door, and pick out ten kids to set up the folding chairs on the gym floor, that’s how we got in for free. We did not get picked every Saturday, since there were lot of other kids standing at the door too, but Larry and I got the job at lest once a month.

Once we got the chairs set up; we could get our candy and popcorn, without standing in a long line, and then pick out our chairs in the gym, before the doors were opened.

Most of the movies shown were cowboy movies. Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, Bob Steel.

We would wear six guns, and when the bad guy came on the screen, we would draw our cap pistols and shoot the bad guy. Larry and I always had a couple of extra rolls of caps, in our pocket. You could see the smoke from the caps rise up through the lights of projector.

The noise and the smell of exploding caps made us feel as if we were part of the movie. The serials were "Dick Tracy" still fighting the dirty Nazis, or my favorite, Flash Gordon. It did not matter, the smoke from the rocket ships, went up, or the fact we could see the strings attached to rocket ships. This serial was high tech to us kids in 1949.

The ten-cent movies went to the wayside, with a four-hour program on TV on Saturday, called Brakeman Bills cartoons.

After fact…In the mid 80’s, my daughter was in college, and she invited me, to see a movie on campus called "Rocky Horror Picture show" Wow what fun, if only I had my six shooters.

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