Comments from George Tennessee Wiseman

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George Tennessee Wiseman
George Tennessee Wiseman commented about Capitol Theatre on Jun 27, 2014 at 3:43 pm

(Re Jaunuary 27 comments) Yes, Tillman was my father. I just read your comments today. If possible I would be interested in contacting you re your having worked with my father. You can write me at . Thank you very much. George

George Tennessee Wiseman
George Tennessee Wiseman commented about Capitol Theatre on May 13, 2012 at 12:41 am

Bob, Chuck and Joe, it was exciting and interesting to find your comments about the Capitol. This was the first movie theater I that I ever entered and I still have warm memories of it today. I grew up in Camden, having been born there in 1958. The only movies I ever recall seeing with my father, who passed away in 1969, were at the Capitol, and they were: “CLEOPATRA” (1963) and “THE DIRTY DOZEN” (1967). I still treasure these memories. The one other film I distinctly remember seeing there was “HUSH, HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE” (1964) and on that particular Saturday it wasn’t my Dad, buta friend who I knew from school, Camden Elementary. During a very suspenseful beginning of a scene which came shortly after the carnage inflicted with a meat cleaver, as some young boys walking into the foyer of the old house, I was so started by the loud chiming of the grandfather clock that shattered the tense silence that I nearly jumped out of my seat, ejecting almost the entire contents of my box of popcorn sending it skyward before landing on me and my buddy. This was rather embarrassing, as you might well imagine.

I surprised to read that the old Paris, Capitol was at one time called the Dixie. There once existed a Dixie Theater in Camden, although I find no mention of it on this site. Maybe I’ll write to the Benton County Historical Society and see if I might be able to procure any photographs or information about it. I don’t know when it closed but my earliest memories of the old building which once housed the Camden Dixie were during its incarnation as Kuhn’s Variety Store. Kuhn’s was the nearest thing we folks in Camden had at the time to the much more well known but now also long gone Woolworth’s, in Paris. Perhaps some of you remember it, as well. I love the beautiful Court House in Paris which I saw again for the first time in many years during a trip back home a year ago last December. I felt grateful that this building, unlike the Capitol, appeared very much just as it did so many years ago when when I visited Paris regularly during my childhood. My father’s job with the Highway Department was in Paris and I also had relatives who lived there.