A few days ago Claire said there was something coming on TV in a few weeks that we should watch. She said it looked interesting — she had seen the trailer for it earlier. I hadn’t heard the term “trailer” for a while — but when I was growing up in Oklahoma it was the only term I knew for what are now called movie “previews.” Today, I always use the term preview — so I got to wondering if the term trailer was specific to a geographical location or it was a universal term that just changed over time. Since the term was obviously familiar to Claire and she grew up in Ohio, it didn’t seem to be related to any one location.
Well, without doing any of my extensive research, I remember when I was a kid, movies were the main source of entertainment in Maysville, Oklahoma. There was no such thing as television and live concerts pretty much didn’t exist — especially around Maysville. I think there were some amateur theater groups in the state, but probably none closer than Oklahoma City. And Oklahoma City, even though it was only about 50 miles away, was considered a trip — you didn’t just jump in the car and go to Oklahoma City….
(In Maysville, at least) every Saturday, afternoon and night, the movie theater showed western or “cowboy” movies. The regular (non-cowboy) movies were shown at night during the week. Here’s the way it worked back then: The movies started at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon and ran until about midnight. The movies started with an animated cartoon and then there was usually a “newsreel” that showed world events and sports, then there was a serial — in Maysville it was usually a “western” story of some kind — but at the end of each segment, something would happen to put the characters in some sort of a peril, and a screen would pop up urging everyone to come back the following week to see what happens. After the serial, the movie (the main feature) started. when the movie ended, they showed the “coming attractions” and these were called trailers — probably because the “trailed” the movie. After the trailers, the whole thing started over. The movie lights never came on after one o’clock until the final showing about midnight.
There wasn’t a specific “play time” for the movies, it started and played in a continuous loop until it stopped for the night.
In Maysville, if you were younger than six, movies were free — when you turned six it cost ten cents to go to the movies and when you were twelve years old, you were considered an adult and it cost twenty-five cents for admission. The admission fee just got you in — you could sit there and watch the movies for as many times as you wanted, until the theater closed. If you came in in the middle of the movie, you could just sit there until the movie started again and leave when the movie got to where you came in. A lot of people did just that. I remember on a lot of Saturday afternoons, especially if the weather was bad out, sitting through the cowboy movies two or three times — that’s really getting your 10 cents worth….
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