The Palace

I am a movie fan. Not the video rental kind of fan, I 'm a sit in the dark, watching the big screen with my feet sticking to the floor kind of fan. At the movies today I pay $6.50 for a ticket, $3.50 for a drink, and $5.00 for a tub of popcorn. That is quite different to the first movies I attended at the Palace Theater in downtown Haskell in the 50s.

The Palace was two doors down from City Hall and was owned by Sy Pack. The price of admission in 1957 was 10 cents for children under 12 and 35 cents for adults. The concession stand consisted of a popcorn machine in the corridor and a small bag was 10 cents. They sold nothing else!

Legend had it that they once sold fountain drinks and snow cones, but someone threw a ball of ice through the screen. I don't know the real story, but thinking back there was no plumbing or drain for such items and the corridor was about six foot wide.

The theater had two aisles with a center section of 14 seats and across the aisle were pairs of seats along the wall. My favorite seat was along the wall on the left aisle at the second wall light from the back. The theater (we called it the show) held about 200.

Many a Saturday I would head downtown with a dollar and a quarter. The dollar was for a haircut (a burr) at Mr. Watts barbershop, a few doors from the "show". Once the haircut was finished, I would race across the street to Walker's Drug and by a Three Musketeers for a nickel to slip into the movie. The remaining 20 cents paid for admission and popcorn at the matinee. It was usually a western or war movie complete with two cartoons and a Flash Gordon serial.

Once a year Hawks Milk would hold a Kid's auction at the Palace on Saturday. We would save milk carton tops, ice cream wrappers, and ice cream cartons all year to use as "money" to bid on the toys, baseball gear, and other stuff before the movie. When you think about it, it was very smart marketing.

The Palace wasn't a first run theater, but it got movies like Elvis in "Love Me Tender", "Gone With the Wind" and my favorite, Audie Murphy in "To Hell and Back".

The Palace burned to the ground when I was 10. We had to go to Muskogee for movies after that. A movie and popcorn for 20 cents was pretty hard to beat, but 20 cents was also pretty hard to get in 1957!