NOT THE TYPICAL PICTURE SHOW AMERICANS LIKED...
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP...the movies were a big event for children between about 5 and 12; Saturday movies were cheap. They wasn't an economy back in 1949--you either had money or you didn't. Anyway, for one thin dime, I could escape the terrors of my Uncle's turkey pen for an afternoon at the Byam Theater in Fairmont. The movies were a thrill. I liked the cartoons, but it was the movie that I looked forward to. It was at the Byam Theater where I first saw The Sands of Iwo Jima. Forever a patriot afterwards. I will tell you this--I was terribly disappointed if the Three Stooges was playing. They were, in my six or seven year old opinion, totally ridiculous. No, it was not that I had no sense of humor. Felix was great; Mickey Mouse was okay. Porky was right good, but the essence of Saturdays was the featured movie. Let me see a Long Ranger movie at the old picture show just one more time; let me ride with the Cisco Kid and find the bad asses he always found. Who else do I want to see again? Hopalong was okay. He was a bit too finished for me. Okay, there were lots of gangster movies with everyone using Tommy guns. Us guys liked that kind of action. But it was the war movies, yes, the war movies with bodies scattered everywhere. We were eager to get home to the woods behind our neighborhood homes so we could play war and start killing Nazis and Japanese. We were sad that all the wars were over. "Shoot, we won't get to kill any enemies now that our dads and uncles have killed them all," whined my best buddy, Tim Duggins. We had no idea what war was about or how often they came around. It was not that we had not received some elementary education about wars. No, we knew all about the Redcoats and the war about the slaves; we knew about that war where mustard gas was sprayed in our grandfather's faces. We tried that one time with a jar of mustard and got in big trouble. Well, it was a bad idea; we knew nothing elementary about the First World War. Our teachers had not yet started the myth about The Arch Duke of Ferdinand being the one who started the first world war because it was a "shot heard around the world." No, we didn't favor the silly uniforms our guys wore in the First World War. The helmets were weird, odd, not at all cool like the U.S.Marine helmets in the Second World War. We laughed when we saw those leggings laced up. But that wasn't near as funny as the French helmets. There was a classic. Lots of them were lost in that war, another reason only a few were left for the second world war. Note how few of those archaic iron helmet are seen on the military channel's newsreel creations. Now I have strayed a long way from John Wayne. Let's see, I did not care for slapstick comedy, love stories or musicals. Musicals got better after I turned thirteen. I remember Shirley Jones in Everything is Okay in Oklahoma. Sexy was a word that was naughty. Damn and hell were bad words too. It was okay if they were said by John Wayne. So, there I was in Japan at nineteen. Talk about some easy duty. I didn't know how good I had it for awhile. Compared to what our troops in combat theaters of the Pacific Theater had to endure and compared to the Nazi stench that drifted throughout Europe, the service personnel in Japan had it good in the sixties. Where in the hell am I going to find any good movies in Japan? There was the base flick. Fairly good movies, but I can't recall any that I saw. There were other entertainments that drew my attention. Today, I look at the quaint cutout couple outside a Japanese Movie House in 1961 and chuckle. I was worried about the movies? I thought our dads and uncles had won all the wars. Youth is so naive. At least this youth was naive for many years. There was a storm brewing. We could feel its vibrations from within the hangar of our squadron. There was war and rumors of war. Security was gradually tightened. Naval Intelligence was beefed up. More than a few members of our squadron mysteriously disappeared after a visit from visitors from Washington D.C. The squadron was very Top Secret. I had decided, upon checking into the hangar when I arrived, to play the role of the three monkeys: Speak No Evil, See No Evil and Hear No Evil. It worked out well. It was not until years later that I discovered what was happening throughout the military in the Vietnam War. One thing leads to another. Things always lead back to places we have been and seen. And there finally comes a time, like now, when one asks what it all meant anyway? Evil still exists. Wars are still being won and lost. And cardboard cutouts and posters are still higly collectible items. We live in interesting times; we have lived in interesting times. May our children's children be able to enjoy an America that was as joyful as the one I grew up in during the 1950s. It was, no matter where one lived, a time of innocense and naivity. It was a time we remember as "good old days" just like they say in the picture shows.
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