Sunshine Theatre

Most striking was the rapid gradation of Clovis' sunny Main Street from pristine to prurient in five very visible blocks. Standing at the intersection of Seventh and Main where the high-school, the courthouse, the First Methodist Church, and the squeaky-clean Silver Grill stared each other down, one could see in a line as straight as a bowling lane the marquees of the shiny State (rhymes with"date") where M.G.M. and Fox deposited their inspiring entertainments, the Sunshine where Paramount, RKO, Universal, and Goldwyn’s often more thoughtful ruminations played, the moth-eaten ex-vaudeville house the Lyceum, home of shoot-‘em-ups, edgy or artistic road-shows, and my junior-high tap-dance recital (!), and at last the murky Mesa, catering to salesmen and servicemen from the adjacent train depot or the facing Hotel Clovis (whose gift-shop concealed some “naughty novelties” among its souvenir ashtrays and magic tricks), as well as to wandering workers, poor husbands out for some cheap-seat relief, and urgent adolescents begging to buy illicit liquor from corrupt cops. And all of this in one straight-line five-block stretch! It’s a wonder Clovis never turned out a major social novelist!
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