Those Saturday morning, double feature movies at the Webster Theater in Springhill back in the forties and fifties were hazardous to kids’ health and safety.
Not that there was anything nefarious in the movies themselves. Most of them were about good conquering evil and all that, but the themes and action in the pictures generated some perilous behavior.
Every boy in our neighborhood tried to imitate the feats of the movie characters all week after seeing the films. Then we would be in the theater the next Saturday to soak up more play-time ideas.
In a western we saw one Saturday, the Durango Kid pursued a bad guy on horseback. When he caught him, he dove off his horse and knocked the crook out of his saddle and onto the ground.
For days after that, boys pretending to be the Durango Kid chased other guys on gravel roads through our neighborhood on bicycles and jumped on them to dislodge them from their bike seats.
Boys ended up scraped and bloody in those chase scenes, and bicycles were bent and twisted.
Most of the movies were westerns with stars like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy. We simulated their shootouts and saloon fist fights in the fields and pastures of our little mill village community.
Our cap pistols popped and smoked but never hurt anybody. We did get a few bumps and bruises in the hand-to-hand combat because we never mastered the art of fake fighting like the movie stars did.
There was an actor in westerns called Lash Larue who used nothing but a bullwhip against even the worst of villains. He would whip a cigarette out of their mouth or a gun from their hand.
My parents took us to the State Fair in Shreveport one year, and I won a leather bullwhip throwing footballs through a tire.
A few days later when I was practicing Lash Larue moves in my room, I accidentally hit a wall and sent wallpaper flying. It was exciting, so I put several more slashes in the paper with the whip.
When my dad got in from work, he took the whip and ended the Lash Larue impersonation and withheld my quarter-a-week movie money for what seemed like a long time.
Inspired by the Superman serials at the Saturday movies, nearly all of us pinned a bath towel around our neck as a cape and flew out of trees and off the lower roofs of our houses.
The flights ended abruptly at the ground and left us with sprained ankles and skinned knees.
We would swing from vines and ropes in nearby woods like Tarzan did in some of the movies we saw and competed on those flights to see which of us could make the most realistic jungle call.
The closest we ever came to losing a neighborhood kid in one of those movie reenactments was when a guy tried to dress his younger brother like the Frankenstein monster.
With his body wrapped in white athletic tape from head to toe with just enough slack to shuffle his feet, the boy started to weave and wobble as his brother guided him down the road.
Some older guys finally tore enough tape off his face for him to breathe. Our parents never let us create another Frankenstein that looked that real.
A few of those Saturday morning shows had big screen heroes kissing girlfriends. None of us ever had the acting skills or the willing girls to do that in our neighborhood versions of the movies.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES