Editor’s note: Roger VanHaren was unable to file a column this week, so we are rerunning one of his essays from 2013.
I had already begun writing this column when our friend Joan used the term “showhouse” while we were eating dinner recently. I hadn’t heard anyone use that word for many years, and I had to laugh at the coincidence.
When I was a kid, we didn’t go to the movies; we went to the “show.”
And we didn’t go to the theater, we went to the “showhouse.” It’s funny; I would never use those terms now, but for the first 18 years of my life, they were regular parts of my vocabulary. I loved going to the show and went whenever I could make it.
The Grand Theater on Main Street in “uptown” Oconto Falls was our showhouse. When we went to the show, there were some standard features we came to expect every week.
Remember the newsreels from Movietone News? We didn’t have NBC or CBS to bring us the nightly news, but we had Lowell Thomas on Movietone News to give us a weekly update on the news of the world. There was a great symphonic introduction with the 20th Century Fox logo. Check it out at www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvbovcgPPoo.
After the Movietone News, more often than not we’d get the coming attractions and then a Mighty Mouse or a Heckle and Jeckle cartoon. In his yellow supersuit with the red trunks and red cape, he was the vermin equivalent of Superman, each week saving Pearl Pureheart from some disaster or distress, usually caused by his dastardly enemy, Oil Can Harry, a despicable cat. Like Superman, Mighty Mouse was able to fly and had X-ray vision and some some kind of telekinetic powers so he could make inanimate objects move.
The stories were almost operatic: Pearl was a soprano, MM was a tenor and Oil Can Harry was a bass/baritone. They sang sort of mock opera, and MM was always ready to fly into action and to sing his famous line, “Here I come to save the day!” And at the end of the adventure, there was a voice-over narrator who’d proclaim softly, “What a mouse!” and then loudly, “WHAT A MOUSE!”
Check the YouTube site, www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdIev12fCPs, to listen to the theme song.
Great memories there!
Heckle and Jeckle were created by the same studio that created Mighty Mouse so I suppose that was why we saw so many of those cartoons. Heckle and Jeckle were a pair of identical talking magpies who mischievously tried to outwit their foes, and quite often the foes won! They were identical in appearance, but one of them had a Brooklyn accent, and the other had a sort of British accent. They were funny.
After the cartoon, we sometimes got a Flash Gordon serial (starring Buster Crabbe), and then it would be time for the good old B western movies that were so popular in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Those serials were already old when we saw them, and we saw them more than once.
Another thing that I remember about the Grand was that they sent out fliers in the mail, advertising the shows and the showtimes for the next week. They were sort of like miniature movie posters that you’d see in the cases outside the showhouse. I recently saw a similar flier advertised for sale on eBay. I guess people will buy almost anything!
A special note to my Times Herald readers: Today marks seven years since my column first appeared in the Herald. I’ve appreciated all the feedback from my hometown readers. Thank you for reading!
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