The Rialto was my favorite downtown movie theater, then the Beacham and the Roxy. Don’t think I ever discovered the Astor. Loved the double features w/cartoons at the Rialto. My big Saturday at age 10, 1957,was to ride the Greyhound from Rose Hardware SOBT into town, 50cents round trip, buy a box of chocolate covered cherries for 25c, and buy a movie ticket at the Rialto for 25c to see Cisco Kid serials, a couple of cartoons, and back-to- back movies: It Came from Beneath the Sea, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Monster that Challenged the World, Forbidden Planet…
One of the last movies I saw at the Roxy was “The Mouse that Roared,” with Peter Sellers, probably shown Spring 1960, when I was 13. I vaguely remember a jungle movie at the Roxy with a white lady in a revealing leopard-skin get-up, maybe 1958-59. The Roxy was close to the great racial divide, Division Street, and in the late 50s, this area was the most integrated street I knew of; near the Roxy or perhaps the Rialto, there was an African-American clothing store for men where my father sometimes shopped for unique styled suits—one was chartreuse—and for spectator shoes that the owner called Stacy Adams. The Roxy was elegant and tattered during its final days.
The Rialto was my favorite downtown movie theater, then the Beacham and the Roxy. Don’t think I ever discovered the Astor. Loved the double features w/cartoons at the Rialto. My big Saturday at age 10, 1957,was to ride the Greyhound from Rose Hardware SOBT into town, 50cents round trip, buy a box of chocolate covered cherries for 25c, and buy a movie ticket at the Rialto for 25c to see Cisco Kid serials, a couple of cartoons, and back-to- back movies: It Came from Beneath the Sea, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Monster that Challenged the World, Forbidden Planet…
One of the last movies I saw at the Roxy was “The Mouse that Roared,” with Peter Sellers, probably shown Spring 1960, when I was 13. I vaguely remember a jungle movie at the Roxy with a white lady in a revealing leopard-skin get-up, maybe 1958-59. The Roxy was close to the great racial divide, Division Street, and in the late 50s, this area was the most integrated street I knew of; near the Roxy or perhaps the Rialto, there was an African-American clothing store for men where my father sometimes shopped for unique styled suits—one was chartreuse—and for spectator shoes that the owner called Stacy Adams. The Roxy was elegant and tattered during its final days.