Following on from the Saturday night at the pictures story, and fast forward about 4 years, and we are now living in the house at the back of the corner store business that my parents had gone into so that dad could quit driving the Coke truck. This was a big committment for them, and required all their time. So entertaining the young family on the weeends was not really possible, but we were resourceful and it was not such a dangerous world then, so we were pretty much left to entertain ourselves.

This was the home that I lived in when I first went to school, and we lived there for several years. One of the attractions of this move was that it was only about one mile from the Imperial Theatre. To walk a mile to go to the pictures, even if you are only six years old, was nothing. Mum and dad were needed to work in the corner store every day, including Saturdays, and that made a small problem with how to keep the kids occupied on a Saturday afternoon. At the same time the Imperial Theatre was starting to have problems filling seats, and to get the people through the door they ran the full program on a continuous loop on Saturdays. The continuous screening of the entire program meant that as soon as it has looped through the full program, it simply started again and the admission fee allowed you to stay in the theatre as long as you wanted. It didn’t matter at what point you came in, you could stay as long as you liked and could see the entire program, and then even stay and watch it all again if you wanted to.

On the program in these times were the serials. The serials were important to us, because you had to go every week to make sure that you kept up with the story line in each of them. There was Batman, The Lone Ranger, Superman and others but I don’t remember them all now. But I do remember how important it was that I could talk with my friends in a knowledgeable way about the current status of our heroes on the screen.

Every Saturday became for us our day to go to the pictures. The budget was kept tight, but we were happy. Mum knew that the admission cost threepence. Every time we needed to keep us occupied and let her get on with her work on a Saturday she would allow us the princely sum of fourpence. This allowed us threepence for the ticket, and one penny to buy sweets. These days that doesn’t sound like a lot, but in 1956 you could get a lot for a penny. The half penny coin was still in circulation, and if you spent your full penny you could get quite a big bag of candy, certainly enough to keep us chewing happily through the full cycle of presentations. Often we would stay longer so ended up seeing some of the shorts or cartoons more than once, but we didn’t mind at all. It was all fun, and we actually had something to do for a change that was entertaining.