I always thought this was the most beautiful movie theater in Oklahoma City. I used to catch the bus from the suburbs with my best friend to get downtown to the Midwest. We would go early, so we could sit in the semi-darkened theater before the movie started and enjoy the “view.” It was designed so that partway up the walls it looked like a stucco garden wall with a sort of Grecian design. Above that and overhead was midnight blue with “stars” sprinkled all over. We would lean back in our seats and feel like we were in another world, feeling so cosmopolitan.
This is the theater I grew up attending on Saturday afternoons, along with every other kid in the neighborhood, in the late ‘40s and early '50s. I would walk from my house and pick up my friend Martha at her house and we would go to the movies for a quarter. We would get Milk Duds or Holloway’s Sugar Daddies because they were chewy and would last a long time. Sometimes the film would break and the kids would put up a howl until they spliced it back together. At other times the noise level would get so loud they would stop the film and turn on the lights until the kids quieted down. The first movie I ever remember seeing was when my parents took me to see “The Jolson Story” (1946 – I was 5) with Larry Parks. A world of magic was opened up for me. Other favorites were “Words and Music” (1948), with June Allyson singing “Thou swell, thou witty…;” “The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady,” with June Haver and Gordon McCrae, all the Ester Williams movies, and many more. All seen and loved at the beautiful (but sticky-floored on Saturday afternoons) Coronado Theater.
I always thought this was the most beautiful movie theater in Oklahoma City. I used to catch the bus from the suburbs with my best friend to get downtown to the Midwest. We would go early, so we could sit in the semi-darkened theater before the movie started and enjoy the “view.” It was designed so that partway up the walls it looked like a stucco garden wall with a sort of Grecian design. Above that and overhead was midnight blue with “stars” sprinkled all over. We would lean back in our seats and feel like we were in another world, feeling so cosmopolitan.
This is the theater I grew up attending on Saturday afternoons, along with every other kid in the neighborhood, in the late ‘40s and early '50s. I would walk from my house and pick up my friend Martha at her house and we would go to the movies for a quarter. We would get Milk Duds or Holloway’s Sugar Daddies because they were chewy and would last a long time. Sometimes the film would break and the kids would put up a howl until they spliced it back together. At other times the noise level would get so loud they would stop the film and turn on the lights until the kids quieted down. The first movie I ever remember seeing was when my parents took me to see “The Jolson Story” (1946 – I was 5) with Larry Parks. A world of magic was opened up for me. Other favorites were “Words and Music” (1948), with June Allyson singing “Thou swell, thou witty…;” “The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady,” with June Haver and Gordon McCrae, all the Ester Williams movies, and many more. All seen and loved at the beautiful (but sticky-floored on Saturday afternoons) Coronado Theater.