Movies Peter watched as a kid
Another of the files rescued from Peter’s hard drive was a letter containing stories and anecdotes about Peter’s father and about Peter’s childhood. A lot of them were pretty bitter and unpleasant, and I won’t post those; and most of them aren’t directly about Peter anyway. But here’s one bit that I thought was interesting enough to post, about how Peter would spend his 25¢ weekly allowance as a kid:
each Saturday, after I finished my chores, I was allowed to go to the magic lantern (movie theater). The admission was 15¢, and popcorn was 10¢! For this munificent sum, what I got was 3 feature movies: a) sometimes war movies, with Japanese generals playing Go under naked light bulbs in tents!; b) sometimes science fiction; c) sometimes adventure (Kim, or King Solomon’s Mines…); d) sometimes westerns (I remember Hopalong Cassidy and the Cisco Kid…); and always about 12 cartoons (pretty dumb, but I liked them anyway); 1 or 2 “shorts”; a newsreel; and a Superman serial (I “dug” “Superman vs. the Mole Men”)….
It never occurred to me before that it’s possible that I got my interest in movies from Peter; even though we never had much money, it was always understood that we would go see movies now and then. I think that, at least for a while, the allowances we received were specifically intended to be enough to see a movie each week.