12 December 2007

The Clinton Theater

When we moved to Rochester, there was a movie theater about five blocks away - the Clinton Theater. The normal program included a newsreel, two movies, one of which was a “B” movie, an episode of an adventure serial, and coming attractions. Friday nights were when most of the kids in the neighborhood would be there because there was usually a western, where the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore black. We all knew to BOO the bad guys.

The admission was about a dime, but one could earn a bunch of passes by delivering a monthly program to houses around the area. I “signed up” for that one time and was autoed to a suburb and dropped off, where all the houses were served by mailboxes at the curb. Not being familiar with rural mail delivery, the other fellow and I decided that we needed to raise the little red flag on the side of the box to let the homeowners know that there was something in the box for them. After we had finished our round, we were picked up by the theater owner, who handed us our passes. On the way back home, we told him we had made sure to raise the red flags. Well, he told us that we shouldn’t have done that; the red flag is a signal to the mailman to stop and pick up mail from the box. It was too much to go back and lower all those red flags. I imagine the mailman was a little perturbed to have to stop at every mailbox, when not all of them had mail to be picked up.

I don’t remember ever again being asked to deliver the monthly programs.

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