Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh

Posted by Lynn Dudley

June 25, 2016

Ok. Here’s the deal. A footlocker you can lock up. A duffel bag, you can’t. We’re going back to the Summer of 1963. Destination: YMCA camp at Camp Campbell Gard. “Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh!” was on the radio, and you could hear the kicking and screaming from the cars ahead of us, all the way down Augspurger Road. We’d been down “The Trail of Tears” before, taking older brothers to band camp, and (dammit) they always came back! Prayers for a water buffalo attack went unanswered.  I was 11, Paul was 9, and this was our first time experiencing the “fun” of going to camp. Older brothers Dale & Jay had spent several weeks at Camp Minehaha up in Michigan somewhere, and once again, it was a sad day when they returned. Where was quicksand when you needed it?

This camp was for guys only, so no hanky panky could go on. Let’s see, tooth brush & paste, towel and washcloths, enough socks, undies, “slingshot” and swim suit, tee-shirts, shorts, pants, Coppertone, bug spray, flashlight, book to read, pencil, paper, envelope and stamp, soap-on-a rope, shampoo. I think I’m set.

Charlie Pimplechops, the guy who ran the locker room at the “Y” downtown, was there with a fresh array of acne, pontificating his worldly wisdom of the fairer sex, and if you didn’t pay attention to him, you’d regret it. As part of “checking in,” the snack shop and craft supply booth at the rec hall had a “bank” where you could stash money for your craft projects and daily afternoon snacks. Mom & Dad escaped without marks from dragging us to the parking lot (fleeing the scene was more like it) and we were stuck there for a week.

The activities of tennis, volleyball, basketball, baseball, and swimming kept us busy.  While there were some older than me there, there was knowledge to be had of safecracking, hot wiring cars, pari-mutuel betting and Charlie regaling about “making out in the balcony” with his sister?

The grub was standard Campbell Gard grub, and everybody got their turn dishing out the platters of bacon, cereal boxes, pitchers of bug juice and river water. The Vulcan gas stoves, Hobart mixer and dishwasher were the same as at our church. I can’t think of any church I’d been in, that didn’t include an industrial strength kitchen.

There was a culvert down the road near the railroad overpass, where the legend of “Green Nosed Harpy” centered from. The woods at night were full of things seen and imagined, and sorting them out took serious investigation.

I got my first and only experience with a gun at camp. Out near where the “Kentucky” area of cabins was a shooting range, and we were loaned a bolt action rifle to use on each other (just kidding) and a bank of hay bales with targets. I don’t recall that I was exceptional, but it was fun. Crafts were reasonably priced and challenging. I got some kit with a mold, a sheet of copper, and a wood stylus you used to conform the copper to the mold, and after a couple days of “scribbling” you had an image of Alexander Graham Cristowski you could frame and look at years later, wondering “Why in the hell did I make that?”

Snack times on a hot afternoon were my appointment time with an orange popcicle! I don’t like oranges themselves, but I love the flavor! I know… I’m weird. Something I’ve known for 64 years. Sunday night, there’d be a bonfire at a spot out in the woods with “benches” all around, and things took on a semi religious tone. The fire crackled and danced, shooting sparks & embers heavenwards, but not high enough to touch the canopy of trees overhanging. For just a brief moment, to connect with a higher being, and sense where we fit in in the scheme of earth, sky, sun & moon, planets, universe……….until that damned mosquito lands on your ear lobe!

Nights, sleeping in the cabins with the canvas window coverings up to let the night air in, were free of threats of shaving cream, or other counterproductive pranks. Watching an evening movie in the rec hall had put most of us to sleep already. “The Crisco Kid meets Hopalong Cassidy,” wasn’t my cup of tea.

We wrote the traditional letter home and mailed it Monday, and there might have been stowaway attempts on the mail truck, unsuccessful of course. Still, a week at Camp, we made friends with the kitchen help we’d see again and again thru church retreats and band camp years later. Would I do it again? Well, yeah. But could we fog for the damned mosquitos? Good and fun times, from so long ago.

 

Field Trip: Middletown Hospital

Posted by Lynn Dudley

April 11, 2016

Those DeLorean drivers who are out of jail for speeding, let’s go back to April of 1962. Destination: Lincoln School. Spring has arrived, and the crocuses are croaking, the tulips are flowering, and the daffodils aren’t taking any guff off of the snapdragons.

We’re going on a walking field trip to Middletown Hospital. I was so proud! We’d be walking thru MY neighborhood, and I knew about everyone in it. I was 10 and in the 4th grade at the time, and a “horsepistol” trip could be good.

I was sick of hearing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and the “Puke of Earl” from being WAY over played. Every Saturday at the YMCA, the Scotch tape was rattling on the radio’s speaker, with those two blood-curdling melodies.

Grab your jackets, cause April can still be a little chilly. Up Central and turning on to Alameda Circle, we passed Sandy Casper’s brick house on the right. We’d been playmates, listening to records and watching the morning kid’s shows, before they moved and the Schramms moved in. I made friends with one of their boys, and the same thing happened (listening to the tunes of the day). Next was the Holman’s house, which had an in ground pool in the back yard. I never saw it filled, as before we moved to Middletown (’55) one of a neighbor’s sons got into it and drowned tragically. Don Holstein’s house was on the corner of Stanley, and they had grandkids visiting now and then we’d play and bike with.

Across Stanley, was the Sutter’s house. The name Ken Sutter comes to mind, as a college aged boy. When I was older, I cut their grass sometimes when they were on vacation, and they had one of the first garage door openers, run by a key switch on a pipe down the hill by the street. Across the street, taking up half the block, was the Ranck house/mansion. Later, Dr. Sawyer moved in, and daughter Ann was our age and an occasional playmate.

Back to our side of the street, was Charlie Hook’s place, complete with putting green, pool and tennis courts. Their granddaughters from France visited every Summer, I spent a lot of time up there. On around the circle was the Terry’s half-timbered house. Mike had been in our Cub Scout den, and next to them, the big white columned house on the corner at Central, lived the Detchers: Eric and Mary. Mary was in my grade, and Eric a few years older, and our paperboy for a while.

OK, Let’s quit dilly-dallying around and get up the hill to the hospital. The original building had been added on to, but the 7 story building was a few years away. Once past the receptionist, they showed us one of the emergency rooms, all set to go at a moment’s notice, except for the kid who sneezed. Then it was down one of the halls to the patient rooms, with their heavy doors, door handles you could open and shut using your arm and brass plaques on many doors in memory of loved ones, or furnished by various local businesses. Some were private rooms, some had two beds. Then there were a couple of wards with six or eight beds.

They showed us the nursery, where the newest souls crossed the portal to this world, and the children’s ward, outfitted with TVs from Ruth Lyons, lots of distracting games and puzzles, and walls painted with murals by Ginny Reese, daughter of Dr. Walter Reese, one of the most skilled surgeons in the area.

They took us up to the top (4th floor) where the operating rooms were, and just as you got off the elevator, there was a bronze plaque, dedicating the operating rooms to Dr. Reese. He was nicknamed “shorty,” as he stood on a wooden (but sterilized) coke crate to reach the operating table. They didn’t take us down the hall, understandably.

Any little cough or sneeze wouldn’t be good. Back downstairs, at the nurse’s stations, were the autoclaves, where stuff got sterilized by steam, and the shut-off valves for vacuum and oxygen were located for the whole floor. The lower level had the commissary, preparing food 24 hours a day for staff and patients, the nuclear medicine department, with the really nasty cobalt 60 isotopes, and close by, the X-ray department and film lab.

The switchboard with three operators was down there, and under the entrance (as I recall) was the lab. All the test tubes, flasks of blood and other bodily fluids, microscopes and paperwork, it was a busy place. I got a whiff of probably ether, and my knees went weak, and I was out like a light. Formaldehyde has a distinctive “sweeter” smell to it, but I remember waking abruptly to the whiff of smelling salts, and I was ready to take on any alligators that came down the hall. Embarrassed, I rejoined the group, but I missed the blacksmith’s shop where they straightened bent needles.

They sent us back to school with a do-it-yourself lobotomy kit, and it was back to class. Little did the hospital staff know, that 12 years later, I’d be behind a radio microphone, drumming up business, making people sick!

Project 600

Posted by Lynn Dudley

December 18, 2015

Among our previous factory tours, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that Armco’s Project 600 groundbreaking was 50 years ago this year, while steel wouldn’t be coiling up on the downcoilers for a couple years, it’s still worth investigating what’s changed in those 50 years.

Let’s set your DeLorean for late 1969, when some parts of the project were up and running. A lot of the old East Works is as old as I am: The Wilputte Coke batteries were built in 1951, and #2 Open Hearth, with furnaces 9-14, dates back a year earlier. Hot metal came from the blast furnaces at New Miami via the thermos bottle cars regularly observed passing the LeSourdesville Lake entryway, and from Middletown’s blast furnace.

An advantage of the now obsolete open hearth process is that you could start a heat with nothing but cold scrap. Hot metal was not needed. The newer and much faster Basic Oxygen Furnaces depend on molten metal, but could make a 200 ton heat (same capacity as the open hearth’s) in about 40 minutes. The open hearth took 16-18 hours.

East Work’s hot strip mill was installed with 6 finishing stands in 1928, after John Tytus had perfected the continuous process at Ashland, and the mill was running into the early 70’s. Four pickling lines (including a heavy gauge pickler) were the destination after the hot bands had cooled, and removed any rust and scale prior to cold rolling.

The #1 cold mill was a Mesta 4 stand 48″, and the #2 mill was a United 3 stand 60″ (I think?). Box annealing softened the steel for the presses at the customer’s plants. Temper mills #1, 3 & 4 were in West Processing, and # 2 & 5 were in East Processing, where 5 finishes of rolls gave each strip its final finish.

A #1 roll had a mirror finish you could see your hands/face in. Rolls 2-5 were progressively shot blasted, to the point where you wouldn’t want to place your bare hand on a #5, but it left a finish that paint and ceramic coatings readily adhered to.

Project 600 brought a new 86″ hot strip mill complete with soaking pits to reheat the ingots, and a slab mill to turn ingots into slabs. Four slab reheating furnaces brought them up to rolling temperature for the roughing stands, bar mill and finishing mills of 7 stands. The roughing mill began with a VSB (Vertical Scale Breaker) which broke up the scale forming on the slab, and at each roughing mill stand, high pressure water sprays continued the fight against scale forming as the steel progressed through the stands one by one.

The computer room was a sizeable installation: cabinets upon cabinets of 1960’s processing power from Westinghouse. Mr. George Verity & George Westinghouse became good friends, because Armco made a good quality electrical steel of great value in transformers.

I worked on an East processing line called the “Strip Normalizer” where the strip is heated up to just below the melting point which was 1800 degrees (it would melt at 2100) in a furnace exposed to air. After the cooling zones, it was immersed in a heated bath of sulphuric acid to dissolve the scale, then a phosphoric acid rinse to get rid of a “stain” the other acid gave it, then dried, and coiled up. This process allowed the crystalline structure to “snap back” to normal, after the cold rolling had crushed it.

This made for great electrical properties, and one of our major customers was Brookhaven Labs in Long Island, where they were building a newer Syncrotron for atom smashing. Most of our product was “enameling iron” sold to Maytag for appliances.

Anyway, back to the new Project 600 hot strip. It took a while to get everything in that building fine-tuned. The strip would fly out of the finishing stands so fast it would become airborne and miss the downcoilers, making a “cobble” against the North Wall beyond.  It was impressive to watch the cooling sprays on the runout table raise up, all the table rollers reverse to pull the strip back into an accordion mess, then catch in a downcoiler and literally rip it off the table like a cop writing a ticket and ripping it off his pad.

Two picklers, a 5 stand cold mill, a hot dip aluminize line, and more annealing capacity rounded out the improvements. I can’t forget the Vacuum Degas unit as new technology, between the two” Big ‘ol’ ______” vessels, and the continuous caster, which ultimately eliminated pouring and stripping molds off of ingots, the need for soaking pits and a slab mill. CG&E built the Todhunter Road station to supply reliable power within guaranteed voltage parameters to supply the mill.

Since then, many processes and operations have been removed, replaced, or retired. Old temper mills #1, 3 & 4 were ripped out of West Processing, to make room for Electrogalvanize #1 which ran experimentally for a number of years until #2 replaced it. It used almost as much electricity as the whole city of Cincinnati. On hot summer days, Duke Power has the right to call AK and tell them not to run it, so they can supply the city’s air conditioners.

There’s a newer #6 Temper mill, not a part of Project 600, but more modern nonetheless. Other finishing operations such as slitter shears and Hallden shears, have been farmed out to steel processors. Oh, and that gigantic hot strip computer has been reduced thru microprocessors to the size of a laptop, and a lot faster too. Then there’s the innovation of cross-pair rolling, or is it pair cross rolling?

Changes and innovation continue, but its construction began 50 years ago. It’s not too late to say “Happy 125th Birthday, Armco/AK Steel, and I hope you’re around for many more.”

 

 

Sunset Pool & Slingshots

Posted by Lynn Dudley on April 8, 2016

It has occurred to me that we’ve never used the DeLorean’s radio, and with 1.21 gigawatts, it ought to be pretty good. While you’re at the Plutonium station, punch up CCR’s “Green River.” Ask your significant other to do the fueling and take their time. The song has a certain “sassiness” to it, I’d bet everyone in the station stops what they’re doing to watch her shake what her Momma gave her!

Let’s head back to 1965, mid April. Destination: 204 Stanley. I was 13, and wishing I wasn’t. Seventh grade at Roosevelt, playing cymbals in band, and a mouth full-o-braces, I was every babe’s desire! Not!

There is a time in every young man’s life, when they need to visit Lewis Drug. Lewis carried some different stuff than Gillen Crow; canes, walkers, stuff for people just out of the hospital, and some other items. The walk down there, gave me time to think. Cynthia Lewis’s Dad owned the place, and the last thing I needed, was her finding out I’d been in to get an athletic supporter.

Cruising the Hallmark and Gibson cards, pondering the cough drops, Hum…How many flavors of Lifesavers were there? At least you didn’t have to ask the pharmacist. These overgrown slingshots were right out in the open, and I wasn’t going to just waltz up and grab one that easily.

Mom saved me the grief. These strings & straps were supposed to do what? “It’s a thong! You know what a thong is? It’s what Frank Thinatra things!” Such went my Mother’s sense of humor. She’d been to Broadway shows on trips with Dad, so she’d seen skimpy costumes.

Pop “The Game of Love” by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders in the radio. I love the rhythm guitar. It reminds me of a South Seas island girl, dancing a seductive hula type dance.

Well, it’s on to Sunset Pool, and there wasn’t going to be any island girls there. Swimsuits for guys were boxer shorts with a nylon or cotton “pouch,” and a cotton yarn you tied at the front. No elastic. Not a whole lotta support without the slingshot. Girls/women’s suits had made some progress since the “thigh-to-shoulder” suits of the 20’s, 30’s & 40’s. Tan lines were starting to exist, as two piece suits became popular, but boy, was it slow. Straps were wide, bottoms were like boys briefs. Nothin’ to get worked up about, but in a few years, spaghetti straps and a couple of triangles were becoming the norm.

Walking down Bellemonte, past Danny’s Train Shop and the beauty shop next to it, you started hearing the noise of the bathers. Down at the corner, was a big metal box with the water meter’s face sticking out of it. Swimming was fun, unless brother Dale was there. His hobby was dunking me, and swimming off with his swim fins.

Having taken lessons at the YMCA, we had to do a dive off the 1 meter board. I never mastered them very well. I found the 3 meter board an awkward place to change my mind, and usually solved the issue of kibitzers on the ground, by doing a one and a half pike position jack knife belly flop that left me bright red for 3 days. My voice changed back to second soprano. It made it easier to sing along with “Help me Rhonda,” even though the Stones were saying (This will be ) “The Last Time.” Pet Clark “knew a place,” and I survived to do cannonballs off the lower board.

I miss the old pool, with its shady areas at the deep end and around the kiddy pool. Sometimes, the lifeguards would stop diving on one of the 1 meter boards, so we could indulge in retrieving stuff tossed in…coins, keys, little brothers. Once I was ahead of Paul on a ladder, and I took my foot and dunked him. He wasn’t expecting it, and chipped a front tooth on the ladder, and he never let me forget it. Well, the chip is gone, the pool is gone, and so are the times of girl watching, going down those slides, and sunning on the hill. But the smell of the suntan lotions, the changing fashion in swimwear, and the abundance of friends and cute girls made those times golden. Marco! (Polo!)

 

 

Where is your Arbor Day tree?

Posted by Lynn Dudley

February 21, 2016

Where is your Arbor Day Tree?

I’ve got an hour for a DeLorean trip on this sunny day, if you do. There’s a lot on our plate coming up.  I’m searching for something I can plant that the squirrels will leave alone, and planting stuff takes me back to when we celebrated Arbor Day.

Let’s go back to Lincoln School, in the Spring of ’62 or ’63. I forget which year (5th or 6th grade) they passed out seedlings to take home and plant. We all got red buds, and were instructed to dig a 6″ hole, spread the roots out, put the dirt back in the hole (Oh, raising a child of my own, showed me there’s many alternatives what can be done with dirt), give it a drink a couple of times a week, and see if it doesn’t take off.

Being only 11 or 12 years old, I could handle the kid-sized gardening stuff we had to dig a hole. Excavating a shallow grave for sibling brothers was beyond my capabilities, and there would have been questions to answer at the dinner table. The southwest corner of our backyard at 204 Stanley was the chosen place to try planting it.

Who knew what I might find? A portal to another dimension, a Chinaman cursing me from the other side of the planet, a high pressure gas line? Nope, just dirt. It was a fairly shady spot, both from the trees in the neighbor’s yard behind us, and from the shady deals cut in our playhouse next to the Edgington’s garage. (I’ll trade you two Ted Klewzewskis for a Vada Pinson.) The clubhouse got outgrown, but the tree survived, somehow.

I had a green thumb, red neck, scarlet fever and blue blood, and enjoyed planting some corn, carrots, pumpkins and “maters” next to the garage. Mom would save the huge jars that Shedd’s peanut butter came in, cut a strip off an old tee-shirt to act as a wick, and we’d place it at the pumpkin roots, and it gave them a non-stop supply of water, as long as you kept some in the jar. These were the days before Miracle-Gro, but we had made a mulch pile out of the old sandbox, and spreading some around helped with weed control, and enriched the soil.

Older Brother Jay could be counted on to plant a castor bean plant. Castor oil was one thing. The plant itself is poisonous! No missing persons that I can recall. Even when we moved to 1809 Schirm Drive, a garden was staked out there, and fenced in to keep varmints out.

Mom was always a good cook even before the Julia Child and James Beard generation, so a well kept garden just made her efforts that much better. There’s a big evergreen in the front yard of 609 Stanley that my son & I planted in about 1985. It’s the surviving one of two.

Well, I gotta stake out my seat for the Indy 500 and get my snacks lined up. Didja ever notice the bowling audiences look like former TV repairmen and astrophysicists? I mentioned I used to be on the WPFB’s Fumbling Five for a couple years. Those were fun times. OK, kids, next trip will be 4th of July celebrations at Barnitz Field in the 60’s. Hang on till then.

Murphy’s & Broadway News

Posted by Lynn Dudley on October 21, 2015

October 21, 2015 was “Back to the Future” day, since that is the date they used in the movie. I prefer the original movie, since Biff gets on my nerves in the sequels. So fire up the DeLorean. We’re going back to the days when James A. Rhodes was Governor, and Woody Hayes WAS OSU football.

Destination: G.C. Murphy’s at Central & Broad.

Even though the Firecat loves to do 95, with your time machine, you’d beat me. Strolling in through either set of doors, you could follow your nose to the candy counter, and here is where the fights started. You can have your knock down drag out over which tastes best: In this corner, the cashews, weighing in a just a quarter pound, and in this corner, the contender, from South of the border….Spanish Peanuts! Not to be forgotten were the regular peanuts. Now anybody can serve nuts at room temperature, but when you heat them up, the oils in them let loose a fragrance that, as my Dad would say, “Makes your tongue slap your brains out!” I think cashews win for smell and taste, hands down, but were a little more expensive.

While waiting after a movie at the Paramount for Oscar to return with the “Upper Arlington” bus, Murphy’s was an ideal place to wait out the rain. I’d be diggin’ thru my pockets to see how many quarters, dimes & nickels I had. I couldn’t hock my little brother, and anybody would just bring him back in 5 minutes after they figured out just what they had anyway, so I had to settle for some candies instead.

The bins were filled with M&M’s, and most of the Brach’s line of chocolates. The chocolate stars were my favorites. Chocolate covered raisins? Ugh! Yet my eyes were still drawn to the revolving tray of cashews. Decisions, decisions! The store was filled with distractions. Everything but the kitchen sink, and maybe an aircraft carrier. Clothing, paperback books, and family oriented ones too. If you were looking for Ian Fleming’s James Bond or Mickey Spillane, Readmore was the place to go.

As a 10 year old, it took me a while to figure out just what “Notions” were. Fabrics and sewing stuff, yarn and knitting needles, some children’s card and board games. Ok. Gotta focus and get whatever quick before Oscar pulls in, ’cause he didn’t stay much over 5 minutes. Hmmm. If I got the Spanish peanuts, I could make a tin roof at home! Ah, but those little red hulls drive me nuts, and look so good caught between your teeth! Cashews win again. So I order up what I can afford and still have bus fare, and dash outside.

Oscar’s not here yet, so I duck into Broadway News, with its several short (4 person) benches, the smell of cigars and aromas of grilled cheeseburgers from the lunch counter. They had one of those novelty machines that dispensed a flat zinc emblem you could emboss your name on, and hang it from a key chain around your neck. A big dial with a pointer is how you selected what went on it. If you were an MHS grad of 1965, then you might remember the name “Gus Agamemnon Pantel” and I wondered how the hell that would fit on there? (I probably misspelled his middle name, but it certainly was an uncommon name).

Stroll around for a few minutes ogling the “True Detective” and “Police Gazette” magazines, and there was the sound of the air brakes and the “swoosh” of the doors opening as the buses returned from their routes. Oscar always greeted us with a smile and a hello, and if I didn’t sit right behind him to observe his panel of switches and what they did, then I’d sit in either the back (it was the “coolest” place to sit, not temperature wise, it was just the “hip” place to sit) or by the candy dispenser, where those spearmint Chicklettes had my number. If I had 2 cents left, I succumbed to the lure of the taste of spearmint inside a candy shell. I never have been a gum chewer, but I went thru those things like nobody’s business.

Oscar frequently let us off at our driveway. Frequent riders had privileges, I guess, or maybe because the actual bus stop was just 100 feet away. Then it was on to hangin’ out with friends for either a Saturday afternoon’s “Shock Theater,” or starting an unfinishable game of Monopoly.

 

 

Entertainment was Paramount

 

APRIL 1963

DESTINATION: The Paramount, the Strand, and the Sorg Opera House

ON THE RADIO: He’s so Fine by the Chiffons

I was 11 and in the fifth grade. My science fair project was motion pictures, explaining the chemistry of silver nitrate’s reaction to light, the fire hazard of nitrocellulose based film, the mechanics of moving it through a camera and then a projector, and the effects of the different lenses!

My sixth grade project was explaining how vacuum tubes worked: Diodes, triodes, tetrodes and pentodes, let alone display (radar) and picture tubes. My family subscribed to an outfit called “Things of Science” and a box on a different subject arrived every month, to ignite young kid’s minds to further explore the world around us. The one on movies caught my eye, with four strips of three frames each; you could easily see the pictures had very slight differences in them. The optical soundtrack ran along the edge, and it made me want to grab our “World Book Encyclopedia” and read more on the subject.

Little did we know, the Paramount would be closing just five months later, August 4th, 1963. I’ll say right now, I know nothing of the “Gordon” theater, nor the “Family” theater in the Bundy Apartment building, but I walked past the Bundy building many times going home from high school, and recognized there had been the a box office, but I never got a look inside. My guess it had been remodeled into more apartments.

The first performing venue in town was the Sorg Opera House, which opened September 12, 1891 with live stage shows and opera. A scaled down version of Cincinnati’s Music Hall, it had 1200 seats, and switched to movies in 1915. The Strand opened in 1927 with 1800 seats, and the Paramount opened April 13, 1931 with 1900 seats.

The Sorg had two balconies, but narrow seats, and the second balcony had bench or “church pew” type seats. The Strand had no balcony and narrow seats, but the Paramount was the height of movie palace opulence. The tallest, widest brightest screen, wider seats, a balcony with red carpeted staircases and restrooms on a lower level, also fit for royalty. Always spotless mirrors, never a scrap of paper on the floor, ushers eager to help you find your seat, and an attractive concession stand. A huge chandelier lit most of the hall, with two smaller ones by the box seats. I remember seeing/hearing the organ played just one time, with the console in an alcove on the left side, and a small stage show in front of the curtain, just one time; with just a couple of comedians, no scenery.

The Sorg and the Strand had “travelers” for curtains, opening side to side after parting in the middle. The Paramount had an “Austrian Drape” (scalloped) that went straight up! Then there was a traveler behind it hiding the screen, and so after the previews of coming attractions, they’d briefly close the curtains, making it a big deal when the feature film started!

Back in the days before everyone had radios, televisions or took a newspaper, many people went to the theaters weekly, and the “Movietone” news was what kept them informed of major news stories of the day.

Across the country, sometimes the old flammable film would jam or break in the projector, and the heat from the carbon arcs, even though a frame of film is advanced 24 times a second, would catch it on fire. Projection booths had to have fire doors, and stages had to have asbestos curtains from the days of gas lights. Safety film came along, and was phased in starting in 1948 to ’52. It would melt and char, but it wouldn’t catch fire.

I never saw a mishap at the Paramount; never a torn sprocket hole, never out-of-focus, always professional to the “nth” degree. I can’t say the same for the Strand or the Colonial. I remember seeing the cans of film sitting on the curb in front of the Paramount, as we showed up for the Armco kid’s Saturday morning movies.

All those good PG Disney flicks: Pollyanna, Parent Trap, Absent Minded Professor, Old Yeller, Swiss Family Robinson, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, all racing thru the projector at 90 feet per minute. A 1000 foot spool lasted 11 minutes, so reels were spliced into 2000′ reel, lasting 22.

The blue neon glow of the clock hanging to the left of the screen went by the wayside after it closed August 4th, 1963. Some say it was too expensive to air condition. I believe it was to break up the monopoly of producing, distributing and owning the movie houses, but whatever the reason, it left an unfilled hole in many people’s lives. The Strand closed about the same time, for a year’s plus renovation, leaving just the Sorg showing films.

The Studio reopened with just a 1000 wider seats that rocked! Improved stereo sound was one of it’s advantages. The Studio closed in 1984, and the Sorg went back to stage shows in 1985. The Sorg has had some interest in recent years.

I was fortunate enough to work with Charlie Combopiano on about five of the Sorg Opera productions in ’90 and ’91, and many other shows with Donzel Burkhardt, lighting traveling shows, the Barbershoppers and others.

The Dixie Cruise-In opened September 10th of 1947, and the Starglow June 30th of 1955. Drive-ins put a smile on my face, not only for all the suds I drank in younger days, but as an affordable family place to catch a flick on a warm Summer night. The Starglow had heater hookups, and could operate year round. They shut down in 1989, and the Dixie ceased operation on September 5th, 1997.

There’s a certain “romance” with/about running an arc light, and the “purr” of the transport thru the gate. For a fraction of a second, the film is moving at over a hundred miles an hour!

I hope you enjoyed this “data download” half as much as I enjoy writing it. I gotta go, I’ve got to thread up the cartoons and coming attractions, and change carbons.