The Pecan Park Eagle

The Rialto Theater
Beeville, Texas

Every couple of years or so, I seem to do a memory check on some of the Grade B movie stars that made films for our post World War II generation of kids that loaded the suburban movie theaters each Saturday morning or afternoon to watch a four-hour double bill that was aimed straight at our restless little culture-deprived minds.

 My home base for these weekly retreats from all thoughts grown-up was the Avalon Theater in the Houston East End on 75th at Lawndale. They tore that sweet bastion of adult-free space down too long ago for me to have gone back in time for a treasured photo of the original “Avalon” post. It was the “Capri” for a while thereafter, then went through several lives as a “church” before the wrecking ball got it about five years ago.

What’s in a movie house name beyond all of our fond personal memories? Most of us from that era were pretty much dancing to the same beat no matter where we lived, or what they called our base theater, even then. Our many movie homes all over America simply played to our single heartbeat tastes for action, adventure, mystery, goosebumps horror, comedy, and cliff-hanging weekly serials. Mine just happened to spawn at the Avalon.

Here was the set-up at the Avalon, circa 1946-52: Nice cents paid for your ticket. For another sixteen cents, you could get pop corn, candy, and a coke. That worked out to a quarter. So, moms and dads could get rid of their kids for four hours each Saturday for a quarter a kid and have some free time to do whatever it was that boring parents enjoyed doing with each other back in the day.

Here was the formula for what we got on the screen for that three to four hours we were there: one western; one other show, pretty much running the gamut of all those topics I described earlier, a cartoon, a weekly serial; sometimes a one-reel specialty show like “Joe Doakes”, and about one gazillion previews. – Some things never change.

Here are some of the leading western stars that I recall: Gene Autry, Johnny Mack Brown, Rod Cameron, Sunset Carson, The Cisco Kid, Eddie Dean, The Durango Kid, Tim Holt, Alan “Rocky” Layne, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, Jim Wakely, The Lone Ranger, Bob Steele, and Wild Bill Elliott, just to name a few that I’m hoping will trigger your own    memories.

 The second movie was usually a contemporary times script that frequently included some other franchise B stars like The Bowery Boys, Charlie Chan, Sherlock Holmes, Dick Tracy, The Three Stooges, Dagwood and Blondie and Boston Blackie were all common stars that we mostly embraced as we might have members of the family, They were our stars – not the stars of our parents.

The weekly serials I especially remember included Batman, (of course, there were three Batman serials), Superman, The Crimson Ghost, The Purple Monster, Rocket Man, The Phantom Rider, King of the Forest Rangers, The Daughter of Don Q, and The Mark of Zorro, There were others. Perhaps, you can help me remember what I’ve now forgotten and left off the list.

The movies were our electronic social gathering point back in the day. We didn’t text or e-mail 0r play computer games, but we did rally to the messages of our post war movie fare. Funny thing is, even though there was a lot of shooting, especially in westerns, I don’t recall these exposures making us think or feel that shooting people in reality was OK. We just didn’t think in those terms.

We did believe in fist fights and wrestling matches as ways of settling serious disputes. That much I know for sure.