Up Town Saturday

 

Ice Cream Shop, Jamestown, KY, original Post Office

After the chores are finished the most important day of the week is Saturday, be it country or town. Breakfast is a hurried affair as each person in a household has special plans for the day. It is a day of socializing with family and friends.
  When people had to travel long distances by horse and wagon some families kept a tiny one-room house in town for sleeping over. In Texas, where some of these cottages still exist they have been restored as small homes for one or two persons. Others slept in & under their wagons or bunked in with family members who lived in town.
   The advent of automobiles didn't change the custom of going to town on Saturday for supplies, business affairs, recreation, and visiting. Even today though the meeting places have changed from Main Streets and school or church buildings people flock to large indoor malls with vast parking lots especially when cooler weather arrives. Saturday is the true vacation day of the week for the communities.
   Going to town meant visiting with friends while one used a laundromat to the the entire family wash at one time in a few hours instead of stringing it out over an entire day one load at a time. Even thought a family had a washer and dryer at home the men of the family never understood the desire of their women folk to use those big machines in town.
   Stocking up on a week or month's supplies was important for there were few country groceries near their homes where one could obtain all the goods necessary to sustain the family. The women generally shopped in chain groceries devoted to food. For clothes, sewing materials, and shoes they frequented a dry goods store. Children were delighted to view the bones of their feet in an x-ray machine, it didn't matter that there was a warning sign indicating harm from too frequent usage.
   Men left their corn to be ground for feed at a mill or picked up sacks at the feed store, and tended to congregate in the courthouse, hardware store, or pool room. A haberdashery provided clothes for men and boys. Drug stores had a fountain for ice cream delights and sodas, sandwiches, magazines & newspapers, cosmetics, and coffee besides medicines.
   The star of the town was the movie theater.

Art Deco Star Theater, Russell Springs, KY

Saturday was double-feature day of westerns, cartoons, and news reels. If children under twelve could manage to get to the show before one o'clock the cost was a dime, with fifteen cents left from a treasured quarter for treats. No one complained if you sat through the showing twice except your parents if you were late for supper.
   One of the most unique small town movie houses was in Dixon, KY long before drive-in theaters. Each spring a man would paint the outside wall of his service station a fresh white. During the spring, summer, and fall on good weather Saturday nights he would use the wall as a movie screen. Patrons would bring their own treats, chairs, and cushions to watch a motion picture show.
   When friends from my home town get together to travel memory lane this story always comes up. The stores stayed open until eight o'clock. For a short period of time the only television in town sat in the window of the furniture store. It had a screen about eight inches square. On Saturday night people would gather on the sidewalk outside and watch a show on this strange new luxury. I don't remember what it cost, if I ever knew, but everyone was sure it was beyond their price range. After the program people would go next door to the drug store for a soda or a hand-dipped ice cream cone before going home.
   I've talked about the delights of going to town on Saturday, but there is a hidden picture behind the story. Each community had the stores I've mentioned and they provided jobs, substance for the owner, and taxes to the government. Those shops and businesses made the town. When they began to die and disappear from the scene a way of life for many Americans also vanished. Some communities are making an effort to bring back these institutions to attract tourists, but I expect it's mostly for their own benefit.

Star Theater

   Main Street in Russell Springs, KY is home to a beautiful Art Deco styled building. Construction began in May of 1949 and it opened to the public as a movie house on February 28, 1950. It will celebrate its sixty-sixth birthday with the final performance of this season's Beauty and the Beast. The venerable theater served the public as a movie house for three decades. Like many entertainment centers across the county it fell on hard times with the advent of television and expansions in the industry.
   The Star as a movie theater closed in the 1970s and became the home to a number of small businesses over the intervening years until the 1990s. At that time with a gift from a benefactor the Star was purchased and renovated to near its original construction. The Star reopened in 1994 as a playhouse. We were in the first audiences and have managed to make most of the shows for the past twenty-two years.
   It is managed, maintained, and used as show place for live productions sponsored by the Russell County Arts Council. The selections for staging at the Star reflect the values of the community.
   Citizens volunteer hundreds of hours to a production. It takes about six weeks of labor to construct the sets, learn the parts of a play, block the movements of actors (at times with large casts) to their proper places on stage, provide the costumes and props for each cast member, adjust the lightening and sound, and, oh yes, make sure the concession stand is fully stocked. Their's is truly a labor of love. The quality of their work is equal to any small house in the area and they have attracted supporters from surrounding communities.
   It would be impossible for the Star to continue to exist without the generous financial support of patrons, the business community, and other organizations within the county. A big ticket item for quality plays is the royalties that must be paid for the privilege of staging a public performance of a play. This is especially true for the spectacular Broadway musicals.
   Join us as we sit stage left on the front row on a Sunday afternoon to enjoy Beauty and the Beast. It is a show for the entire family. Live theater is a long standing Kentucky tradition, the first advertised performances were is 1790, two years before Kentucky became a state.
   Who knows you might even feel the presence of one of the resident ghosts that Roberta and Lonnie Brown discuss in their book, Haunted Holidays.