I have just found a reference to the Ramona Theater in Phoenix in my late great-aunt’s diary from 1930. She speaks of it from a middle-class white girl’s perspective (apologies for her bluntness). This is what she wrote on March 22, 1930:
Saturday, March 22
Paul and I went slumming tonight. Really – I mean. We started at the Romona theater – a dirty, smelly, poorly ventilated hovel. Mexicans and Indians and relics of humanity seated around us. The vaudeville was ranker then rank. And the chorus girls were on the last step of degradation. It was hardly possible to believe that girls not much older than I am could be so course and Boulder and utterly devoid of any glimmer of respectability. The picture was an old-time cattle rustling adventure – with the hero galloping to the rescue. It was all very novel and we got a big boot out of it.
So it sounds as if it was there before 1935. She misspelled it, but she was a notoriously poor speller. I’ve been publishing her diaries at www.thedorisdiaries.com.
I have just found a reference to the Ramona Theater in Phoenix in my late great-aunt’s diary from 1930. She speaks of it from a middle-class white girl’s perspective (apologies for her bluntness). This is what she wrote on March 22, 1930:
Saturday, March 22 Paul and I went slumming tonight. Really – I mean. We started at the Romona theater – a dirty, smelly, poorly ventilated hovel. Mexicans and Indians and relics of humanity seated around us. The vaudeville was ranker then rank. And the chorus girls were on the last step of degradation. It was hardly possible to believe that girls not much older than I am could be so course and Boulder and utterly devoid of any glimmer of respectability. The picture was an old-time cattle rustling adventure – with the hero galloping to the rescue. It was all very novel and we got a big boot out of it.
So it sounds as if it was there before 1935. She misspelled it, but she was a notoriously poor speller. I’ve been publishing her diaries at www.thedorisdiaries.com.