Entertainment

We lived in a small town with a movie theater. We didn't have TV, iPods, cell phones, etc. Our entertainment was listening to the radio after supper. We would gather in the living room around the radio. Mom sat in her rocking chair that was a wedding gift in 1917. So it was an old chair that squeaked. The rest of us sat on the sofa or the big chair - or on the floor. We listened to Red Skelton; Baby Snooks; Fibber McGee and Molly - with Digger O'dell, the friendly undertaker; the Lux Radio Theater; Amos and Andy; Allen's Alley; Jack Benny; Bob Hope; Inner Sanctum with the scary squeaky door at the beginning of the show.

After school I listened to Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy; the Lone Ranger; Captain Midnight;and some others I don't recall. I never had a decoder ring because Mom wouldn't let me send in for one!

We had Saturday movie matinees - cost 15 cents. It was a double feature. There was a cowboy movie with Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger or Gene Autry and his horse Champion or Lash LaRue or Johnny Mack Brown or the Cisco Kid and his partner (there were other cowboys, too). Then there was Movietone News, a serial ending up with a cliff-hanger, and another movie. I always ate sunflower seeds at the movie - a package cost 5 cents, I think - and I put the hulls in my jeans pocket and threw them away at home instead of throwing them on the floor at the theater.

It was a safer time and place where everyone in town knew everyone else. If a kid did anything wrong, their mama knew it before they ever got home! The kids never really figured that out! It was a good time and place to grow up.