Moviegoing in the 1950s

When I was a kid in the fifties, we didn't have a lot of money, but my mom would always scrape up enough to send us to the movies on the weekend. It was ten or fifteen cents admission then, and you could stay through as many movies as you wanted. We would go to the Airway Theater in Milwaukee--arriving at noon and staying until 6pm. It was the only break from us kids that my mother ever got.

I remember once staying through Gordon Scott in "Tarzan and the lost horizon" three times. I remember seeing a lot of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movies--and then Jerry Lewis solo. "Old Yeller" and other animal movies. Once there was an odd scheduling of films, and I sat through "The Three faces of Eve" several times. Very depressing for a kid--I must have been around ten at the time.

Once my younger brothers and I were dropped off at a a theater in Cudahy--maybe three or four miles from our house. It was a Martin and Lewis film festival and we stayed for the usual six hours. This time, however, our dad forgot to pick us up. He was probably sitting in a tavern somewhere, but we had no idea where. I forget how we eventually got home, but I think we walked over to a nearby restaurant and had someone call home. Mom didn't drive, but I assume she tracked down our father and had him pick us up.