On this day

1947 — Flying saucers were reported over Mount Rainier by pilot Ken Arnold.1947 — Jackie Rob-inson of the Brooklyn Dodgers swiped home for the first of 19 times in his career.1957 — “I Love Lucy” aired for the last time on CBS-TV.1979 — Nancy Lopez won the LPGA Lady Keystone Golf Open in Pennsylvania.

In late autumn of 1955, Patty Mitchell Becker and a couple of her best friends from Ursuline Academy were sitting in the darkened Senate Theater downtown, absorbed in the just released “Rebel Without a Cause,” starring James Dean. It was a school day, but this was the much anticipated and last movie starring Dean, who had been killed just a few weeks earlier in an automobile crash.

Becker and her friends conspired to skip school that day and get them-selves downtown to see the movie they had been waiting for. In the movie, by the way, Dean por-trays a rebellious teen-ager.

At one point during the show, an usher came down the aisle and called Patty’s name. That is how you used to reach someone who was in a

theater before there were cell phones.

Patty followed him out and was led to a phone in the lobby. It was her mother.

“I cleaned chalkboards for a month at Ursuline,” Patty says today. “You couldn’t get away with anything back then.”

For a lot of Springfield teenagers in the 1950s, the appeal of taking the bus downtown, getting something to eat at one of the many restaurants, perusing the books at Coe’s Bookstore and then seeing the newest movie, never got old.

“There were seven the-aters downtown, three neighborhood theaters and the drive-in,” says Jack Duffy, who graduat-ed from Springfield High in 1950.

When he was in seventh or eighth grade, Duffy and his friend belonged to the YMCA,

and they would go down-town, ostensibly to swim.

“We would go to a movie instead, then on the way out go into the bathroom and wet our towels so it looked like we had been swimming. Kids can be sneaky,” he says.

Duffy went to a lot of movies at the Lincoln Theater near Fifth and Capitol because they showed a lot of musicals and he liked those.

“There was a stand on Fifth Street that sold peanuts salted in the shell,” Duffy recalls. “We nearly got thrown out (of the theater) on our cans for leaving peanut shells on the floor.”

One year during the war, the Orpheum The-ater had a promotion to sell bonds to support the war effort. Duffy says he prevailed upon his parents to buy a bond, and in return the theater provided a pass to see a movie. “I watched ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ five times that day.”

“Of course we all re-member the Orpheum,” says Carolyn Trask, who

was a Springfield High classmate of Duffy’s.

The Orpheum was the grandest of them all.

The State Journal-Reg-ister once described it as a place of such splendor and magnificence that patrons could forget “one’s lowly status, mod-est income or humdrum life” just by walking through its front doors. The vaudeville-era the-ater was on Fifth Street between Jefferson and Washington and was demolished in 1965 to make way for a bank.

Although she recalls the splendor of the Or-pheum, it was a weekly date with her dad that brings back her fondest memories.

Trask’s grandmother lived in the area near the SouthTown Theater on South Grand Avenue. While her mother would visit with her, she and her dad went to a movie.

“Dad and I would see a movie every week no matter what was show-ing. We had a favorite place to sit, near the third light sconce on the

Getting away from a humdrum life

FLASHBACK SPRINGFIELD — June 24, 1955

Monday, June 24, 2013 THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER PXX

wall,” she remembers. In the 1960s and ‘70s,

the Orpheum, Roxy, State, Strand, Senate, Tivoli and Lincoln were hard pressed to compete with the forces of prog-ress and they eventually closed. The small televi-sion lured people away from the big screen and changes in retail shop-ping patterns led to the deline of downtown.

— Rich SaalSee pictures of the

downtown theaters at www.sj-r.com/flashback.

The beautiful Orpheum Theater in 1965, just months before its demolition. SANGAMON VALLEY COLLEC-TION AT LINCOLN LIBRARY