The Pecan Park Eagle

The Met and the Loew’s (to the left above), along with the Majestic on Rusk were the Big 3 Houston movie house downtown back in the day.

Once Upon a Time, during the Reign of King Elvis and the Knights of the Rockin’ Round Table, a kid who wanted to impress his steady girl friend on a normally lame and calm Houston Saturday Night had only one sane, affordable choice. He took her downtown to a first-run new movie at one of the “Big Three”, the Metropolitan or the Loew’s State on Main, just north of the Lamar intersection, or a couple of blocks further north on Main and a half block to the left on Rusk for a show at the Majestic.

The Kirby on Main was OK for buddy movies, like the time my East End friends and I stayed downtown after leaving classes at St. Thomas to take in a double feature showing of the original Dracula and Frankenstein films at the Kirby, but those weren’t good date movies until we were all old enough to access cars for drive-in movie dates. Drive in movie theatres and horror shows were a natural for teenage dating on the snuggling level, as “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” would soon enough prove by 1956, but they didn’t work worth a flip at indoor houses, at least for me. Indoor theatres and horror movies just made girls want to go home as they sometimes also lectured all the way, “I can’t believe you took me to that horrible movie.”

No, the Kirby was cheaper, but they showed older movies and what used be known as first run “B” movies. “B” movies also usually featured unknown to lesser known actors, simple scripts, cheap production, and black and white only prints. Some were also good enough to be revered today on the Turner Classic Movies cable TV channel as just that – classics. – That simply wasn’t how they were seen back in the day.

For myself and most of the people I knew, those Saturday Night Memories were only made possible by our abilities to hold down minimum wage jobs at grocery stores that started clerks at fifty cent cents an hour and checkers at seventy-five cents an hour. And most us worked eight to twelve hours on Saturdays before we got off to start our own ideas of fun. We had to plan our pending carefully.

Although we may not have put it out on a spreadsheet at the time, we did have to plan for economy rides or luxury splurges. We had no debit cards or access to credit lines in which today’s spending could be put off to some farther down the road day of reckoning. In our day, we either had the money for it – or we couldn’t buy it. And downtown dating on a Saturday night in Houston took only cold hard cash.

Here’s a reconstructed look at Saturday Night Dating Expenses, circa 1956:

The dating scenario around here was pretty routine. – Go downtown for an eight o’clock movie. Then drive out South Main to Prince’s or Stuart’s for burgers, cokes, and fries. And then maybe a half hour of gazing at the lake in Hermann Park and listening to the car radio – or getting out to visit with the ducks – and then getting your date home at the time you promised her mother she would be there.

We didn’t do drugs or booze so much back then, and maybe we were a little bit boring too, but so what. We were solid. And we loved our city, our state, our country, the game of baseball, – and the idea that we each had a shot at making our lives matter someday. And so much of those Saturday Night plans were centered on the illusionary search for our soul mates.

Someone in our cultural mentoring pool back in the days of King Elvis forgot to tell us the whole truth about love: You have to first find your own soul before you can really find your soul mate – and no one else in this world can do that for any of us. It is our job alone through the painfully born wisdom that spawns from personal discovery.

That being said, I still wouldn’t trade my Saturday Night Memories of Houston for anything in the world.