Saturdays at the Erwin
by David Benjamin
“What
is it?/ Hey, why it’s Buttercup/ Popcorn!/ Add sweet cream butter to
hot popcorn,/ Mix it up, wrap it up,/ Buttercup is born./ It’s
delicious!/ So nutritious!/ It’s a taste delight!/ It’s so munchy ,
crisp and crunchy!/ You’ll enjoy each bite./ Eat Buttercup, Buttercup,/
Popcorn at its best./ It beats all the rest!”
— Movie intermission jingle, ca. 1953
MADISON,
Wis. — A kid named Chucky Dutcher was my mentor in the art of
moviegoing. A slightly disreputable urchin from a sprawling, unruly
family who lived on the wrong side of the Milwaukee Road tracks in
Tomah, Chucky was the unlikeliest of cinema mavens, if only because in
school he had a hard time sitting still.
Like many of my early
friends, Chucky was a street kid who had no curfew, lived by his wits,
talked out of both sides of his mouth and knew where the action was. In a
small town, the movies represented a reliable source of action, at
least ’til we were old enough to drink. So, the movies is where Chucky
went — and sat more or less still, even at the risk of refining his
tastes and improving his mind.
For most Tomah kids, moviegoing
came two ways. One was with your parents, usually in the family Ford to
the drive-in out by Routes 12 and 21, always a double feature (one of my
fondest memories was a twin-bill of The Thing and The Deadly Mantis).
Trouble was, the drive-in closed in September and didn’t re-open ’til
almost summertime. In the cold months, you could beg mom and dad for an
evening out at the Erwin Theater. But for me, with two working — then
separated, then downright divorced — parents, such excursions were damn
scarce. And I had no recourse to grandparents. None of them had been to
the flicks since the Depression.
Tomah’s only other portal to
Hollywood, for kids, was a Saturday matinee program sponsored by the
Erwin. In school, for two bucks, you bought a precious ten-week
perforated card of movie tickets (Lassie, Doris Day, Tommy Sands, Roy
Rogers, Francis the Talking Mule). Parents — even those as hard-up as
mine — gladly ponied up the deuce because it promised two or three hours
of kid-free tranquility every Saturday afternoon during the diphtheric
Wisconsin winter.
One blessing of the Erwin matinee was that
all ten movies were approved by the Legion of Decency (thus indemnifying
me from a Near Occasion of Sin). The worst part was an entire movie
house full of other kids, screaming, fighting, running up and down the
aisles and smelling like Dubble Bubble wrapped in dirty underwear.
And
then, when you piled out of the Erwin in a mad, violent mass
evacuation, prodded along by sadistic teenage ushers, the sun was still
somewhere up there, sulking behind a leaden overcast. Tomah, in
daylight, in the dead of November, projected a bleakness that made the
Erwin — with its Technicolor screen and Dmitri Tiomkin scores, its
cavalcade of stars, and its walls adorned with Indian-themed art-deco
murals — seem like either Shangri-La or a cruel hoax devised to make
fragile children hate their lives.
Chucky Dutcher’s solution to
the normal kid’s Hollywood hunger was the personal, unauthorized,
25-cent Erwin marathon. On a cold Saturday after matinee season, Chucky
and I ventured parentless to the Erwin for the early showing of Journey to the Center of the Earth,
starring Pat Boone and James Mason. We watched all five showings. Next
day, after church, we went back and watched it five more times.
We
skipped four meals and didn’t get home — twice — ’til almost midnight.
Nobody commented, or even noticed our absence from the world, because
Chucky and I were, by popular local consensus, destined for delinquency.
We both had parents too busy, too troubled, too tired to care whether
we were in the house or off someplace. They’d just as soon we stayed
away as much as possible. As long as the police didn’t bring us home, we
were on our own.
I figured out quick that it’s hard to go ten
hours in the movies without nourishment. There was food, of course, in
abundance, at the Erwin, but you had to buy it. Neither Chucky nor I
exactly had a stash of ready cash. We had to husband our nickels and
dimes and make prudent meal choices. The most heralded of cinema
cuisine, Buttercup popcorn, was usually beyond our means, as were most
of the classic candy bars — Snickers, Milky Way, Mr. Goodbar, etc.
Instead,
we focused on the proletarian candy choices on the lower shelves behind
the glass. You had to know your options and choose fast, because the
hostile high-school girl behind the counter hated little kids, there
were twelve bigger people behind you and — you could hear him — Lowell
Thomas had already begun, in that immortal, mellifluous baritone, the
Movietone News. Hurry!
My all-time favorite Erwin entrée was
Raisinets. But they ate fast and didn’t last. You’d be digging up your
final raisin before the end of the first reel. And you couldn’t go back
for more. No self-respecting kid ever left his seat during the film,
even to take a leak or puke. Ever. You were glued to the screen.
Other
ill-advised movie victuals were nonpareils, chocolate cigarettes,
Spearmint Leaves, Good & Plenty, Junior Mints, M&Ms and malted
milk balls. Tasty but ephemeral. If you wanted staying power, you leaned
toward the classic filling-pullers — Dots, Jujubes, Jujyfruits — or the
little rocks you had to suck. Root beer barrels, Lifesavers (dull but
durable), and, especially, Jawbreakers. A ten-cent box of Jawbreakers
once got me through all three hours of Ben-Hur.
Above all,
there was one movie meal you could chew ravenously or suck subtly,
devour in one reel or nurse through the credits. A caramel-centered
chocolate-covered minié ball invented in 1926 by Sean Le Noble, the Milk
Dud, for any kid who ever went to the movies, is the pinnacle of
20th-century confectionery.
The magic of a movie marathon was
that, once you were settled into your Erwin homestead, with a supply of
Milk Duds and Jawbreakers (and nothing to drink lest you need to pee),
you were immersed. Sunk into your seat while audience after audience
came and went, you uncoupled from reality. You became film, and film
became you. You weren’t in Tomah, but in Scotland and underneath Iceland
with the Lindenbrook expedition. After I’d seen Journey to the Center of the Earth
ten times in 48 hours, I was ready to converse with Pauline Kael on the
delicate nuance in Pat Boone’s Thespian style, and the mounting
insinuation of Arlene Dahl’s raw sexuality.
By and by, you
became, inevitably, irresistibly — for the rest of your life — a line
memorizer. You began, innocently, by saying, along with James Mason,
“Never interrupt a murderer, madam.” You end up in a gin joint,
hollering at perfect strangers, “Goddammit! It’s not ‘Play it again, Sam.’ It’s just ‘Play! It! Sam!’”
Then,
one day, without warning, Chucky’s nomadic dad uprooted the whole
shebang and disappeared to God-knows-where. Luckily, I didn’t need a
sidekick anymore (unless it was Maureen O’Hara). I’d been lured into the
Erwin and seduced by Hollywood. I was probably the first kid in my
grade to solo at the movies. Alone in the dark, I got my first glimpse
of the Final Solution in the scariest film I ever saw, a documentary
called Mein Kampf. I fell in love with Jean Seberg in The Mouse That Roared. I watched Steve Reeves in Hercules and Hercules Unchained at least eight times each. I spent one sublime day learning how to dance from Zorba the Greek.
And afterwards…
Coming
out the door from the warm Erwin womb into the arctic dark of Tomah at
midnight, I beheld the yellow street lights suffusing the bars, diners
and storefronts along Superior Avenue with the faint golden glow of a
backlot New York.
If I squinted a little, succumbing to the
sugar in my bloodstream and the chill of the night, I could just barely
see, under a faroff, flickering streetlamp, the silhouettes of Alan Ladd
and Veronica Lake, kissing in desperate haste before fleeing into the
darkness from the killer on their trail.
Thursday, January 12, 2017
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2 comments:
your blog is wonderful! I, too, went to the movies at the Erwin on Saturdays. I remember Westerns mostly and when i came out i would try to recreate the entire story in my head. I seem to remember we got 10 tickets for $1.25 through some promotion with the Miller School. It doesn't sound quite right but money then isn't what it is today.
I saw the Academy awards on TV for the first time when i was about 10 years old and as they were giving out the awards I realized that none of the movies had yet made it to Tomah. This kind of took the air out of the balloon but there were still my teens years to enjoy some fun times there.
i saw " A hard Days Night" and when it was over my friend and i decided to watch it again. The one and only time i ever did this.
And then "Easy Rider" in High school. This movie alone gave me the taste for travel.
Wow! thank you for all the good memories!!
Mom loved the movies, which is how I wound up seeing Elizabeth Taylor schlepping around New York City in a slip and mink coat in "Butterfield 8" at a shockingly early age. I remember her taking me to "Suddenly Last Summer" at the Erwin too; for some reason, SH e was reluctant to discuss whatever it was that was happening to Sebastian Venables on that beach. I spent a lot of time at the Erwin, saw a lot of good and bad flicks there. Thanks for bringing back the good, non-Virgil Bachman memories.
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