10/22/21 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: 2nd Grade hard at work!

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family:

Back in the olden days, which for me was the 1960’s, I lived for a time when I was in grade school in a small town on Long Island called Northport. We lived within walking distance of the little downtown. The main street was called Main Street. My school, St. Philip Neri, was downtown as well and sat behind the church on the corner of Main and Church Street. Creative street names!

From second grade through sixth grade I lived in this little village up against the Long Island Sound. We walked or rode our bicyles everywhere. During good weather, like a lot of people of my generation, we spent most of our free time outside. 

We had the woods and the beach and the harbour and all the streets of the village to roam by foot or by pedal to our heart’s content. Family sizes were larger the, we had six kids in my family, and parents were happy to have us out of the house. There were no organized sports or structured activities to attend. On days when there was no school you just left the house in the morning and showed back up for dinner. 

However, when the weather got colder we had the Northport Theatre which sat on Main Street about halfway between our church and Northport Harbour where the road dead ended at the water’s edge. On many a Saturday we would bum 50 cents from our parents or take it out of our allowance and head to the movies. Saturday matinees started mid-morning and ran all day. They showed the same movie over and over again along with a cartoon short and coming attractions. It didn’t matter what time you got there because if you missed half the movie upon arrival you would just watch the first half the second time around. 

The 50 cents admission price was an all day ticket. If we liked the movie we would sit through it three times in a row. If we were lucky we had extra money for a box of candy or a bag of popcorn which were a nickel a piece. I don’t remember any adults inside the theater on a Saturday afternoon save for an usher or two, the ticket taker and the concession worker. The whole darkened auditorium was mayhem. We talked, we laughed we spilt soda pop on the floor until our Converse tennis shoes stuck to the floor. We jumped on the seats, we ran up and down the aisles with abandon. If the movie was really good we might sit and pay attention, at least the first time around. One of my favorites was “Robinson Caruso on Mars.” We all loved the Beatles “Hard Day’s Night” but the girls screamed their love and devotion to them, especially John and Paul.

Sometimes the ushers would come down the aisles with flashlights. Once in a while the projectionist would turn off the movie and the house lights would come up until we settled down. I remember being kicked out a couple of times but honestly, I think people just accepted the fact that if you put a couple hundred kids in a darkened room there would be trouble! 

There was a balcony in the back of the theater. Teenagers would go up there. At my age, I had no idea why. The best seat for us was the very first row where our eyes bugged out as we attempted to take in the whole screen from ten feet. One Saturday, I kid you not, they were playing the movie “The Crack in the World.” My little sister, Sue, wandered up to the balcony to check it out. On her way down she got pushed, and during the filming of “The Crack in the World” she got a crack in her head and had to go to nearby Huntington for stitches. 

We would spend hours there watching the movie, hooting and hollering, eating junk and hanging out with our friends. When we left, usually four or five hours later we would frequently act out our favorite scenes on our walk home. “What did you do today,” my mother would ask me. She had no idea where I was but as long as I made it home for dinner life was good. 

As an old principal who spends a frequent amount of time in the halls and at recess telling kids what they can’t do, I shudder to think what we got away with as kids. For the most part, we didn’t do anything too bad and none of us got too hurt, and all of us managed to make it home. I’m not saying those days were better but it seems that we adults nowadays want to surround the kids in bubble wrap and program every minute of their day. We complain about kids’ screen time on television and phones and computers and forget that we used to spend hour killing our vision staring up at a giant screen while John Wayne rode his horse by or The Man from U.N.C.L.E. foiled another fiendish plot from T.H.R.U.S.H. 

It seems that kids haven’t changed since I was one. It’s the adults. Not sure that is always for the better!

Jim Silcott