Eureka Memories: '70s theater scene all boys watching girls and waiting ...

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In the 1970s, the Eureka and State theaters were places to see and be seen.

My pals and I were at Winship Junior High School from 1968-1971 when the coolest of junior high cool kids filled those big, beautiful theaters in the early 1970s.

Oh, my friends and I went to the theater a lot then, too. They sold tickets to goofballs and dorks, too.

The Eureka Theater's box office, outside the actual theater, was surrounded by glass-cased posters of coming attractions. On weekend nights when a new movie hit town, the line of theater-goers would stretch south past the old Eureka Library and wrap around and down Seventh Street to where Bill Beasley Sporting Goods was initially located.

It took one ticket-seller a long time to sell a thousand tickets at $1.50, $1 and 50 cents a pop.

There was electricity in the air when we knew a big, blockbuster type film was debuting. If the line was really long, and it sometimes stretched 3, 4, 5 blocks, we knew the Eureka Theater might sell out before we got to the front of the line. No matter how long the line, we jumped out of the car and left whichever parent had driven us to pull away in silence.

"No! No! Don't wait!" the son of the parent driver would shout. "Just go! We'll get in. It never sells out."

The parent would sigh and drive away. We all knew the theater sold out quite often, but if we saw Mary Sue Ludtke or some other pretty girls in line ... come hell, high water or sending an emissary to try to get us cuts further up in the line, we were getting into the theater.

On nights when word started to filter back toward us that the place was getting close to full, we argued over which of us would have to find a pay phone and call their mom or dad to come right back down and pick us up. They'd pick us up, but there was verbal hell to put up with all the way home.

It was 1970, 1971 ... so, no, we didn't hop on our bicycles, put a sack lunch in the basket and peddle to the theater to watch cowboy movies. We didn't ride a bus either. (We would have if there'd been an evening bus service in Eureka. Our parents would've, most certainly, strongly suggested we explore that option.)

I knew kids who walked from the Jacobs Junior High side of town, a healthy trek just to see a movie, and then walk home in the dark.

That walk gave trouble too much time to find kids. Thus, my friends and I wanted no part of a long walk in the dark from the Winship part of town. We didn't want any part of a long walk from anywhere at any time really.

A star player on the last Jacobs Junior High baseball team ever fielded made the walk to the theater in 1984 or so, but didn't make it back. The kid and some pals from his rough neighborhood had encountered a teen on a bicycle around 10 p.m. on a Saturday night. The baseball player knocked the kid off the bike, smacked him around and made the bike his own until police eventually tracked him down. Since a friend and I coached that last team, we were the guys who eventually found our star locked up in juvenile hall.

That former Jacobs baseball player wound up in prison for murder in his 20s. I took it as a lesson to all parents who insisted their kids walk long distances in the dark. Eureka wasn't as safe as we like to remember it being.

The State Theater had ticket windows at each of two street entrances. No lines, really. Well, there was a line so long for "Love Story" that my friend Dennis Bills and I had time to come to the realization that it was a movie for girls and couples. We joked that we looked like two fresh-faced guys out on a date nate. We didn't know enough in 1970 to realized that men dated one another frequently in other parts of the United States.

In the 1970s, movie theaters showed films twice each night. A double feature was still common, so we were still decades away from today's practice of having dozens screens showing a given movie dozens of times a day. Friday or Saturday nights at 7 or 9:15 ... or we weren't seeing that movie that week.

The action was inside the theater where cool boys and pretty girls coupled up. Packs of boys would sit near packs of girls to begin the early stages of the mating process.

My friends and I didn't know anything about the mating process, beyond that we longed to be part of it. We liked to ogle hot girls and make fun of guys no better than us, but just a step or three further up the social ladder at our school.

We'd routinely give one another hell for scanning the crowd inside the theater to obviously, looking for the prettiest girls or a couple that we figured would be worth watching once the lights went out.

"I'm just looking at the paintings on the wall, asshole! Geezus! Shuddup! This is classic art you prick."

We were looking at girls. Always.

Junior high kids in my youth saw, without question, some of the worst movies ever made. Once boys and girls coupled seriously enough to have long-term (3 months?) relationships, they'd go to the movies every single weekend. It was the one of the few places to be together in the dark. We didn't worry about the hundreds of other people in the dark with us.

Once I escaped terminal dorkdom and had a girlfriend I really, really liked ... I mean a girl I like LIKED ... I spent more than a few mid-week nights convincing my mom that "J.W. Coop" and "The Culpepper Cattle Co." were indeed quality films worthy of her paying for me to take Karen McKeown to a double feature.

I distinctly remember my mom, who was really hip, saying, "Oh, you just wanna go so you two can kiss!" And, I remember turning in an acting performance that surpassed any from either film.

"Are you insane? Kiss? In the theater? With people there? Just because my sisters did that crazy stuff doesn't mean ..."

Kids don't bother hiding that type thing today. They are more forward, more aggressive now. My youngest son was invited by the hottest girl in his middle school to go ice skating. Then, she offered him his first kiss the same night. Then, a few days later, she broke up with him saying, "We don't have enough in common."

It took me and my friends months, years, from the time we wanted a girlfriend and a kiss to actually get a girl and then think about the kiss and then have them dump us.

In most all cases in the 1970s, getting the kiss and subsequent kisses involved going to the Eureka or State theater.

It was never as easy for us as it was for the popular guys. Popular guys were all about getting a girl and then getting everything she'd give him. The story of Winship's top eighth grade athlete receiving oral sex from a homely, stoner chick at the Eureka Theater became legend in 1970. We gathered that his friends were pretty busy with their own girls for that to have gone down in a packed theater.

My friends were ... different. We wanted a girl and we wanted that first kiss, but if we could keep busting each other's balls and make it hard on one another to get those things ... tough luck for the one of us who happened to land a spot in the dark with a girl.

Amy Waldsmith called me on a Friday night in the summer of 1970 to ask if I would take her and her friend Cindy McManus to the Eureka Theater.

I'd never been to a movie with a girl and Amy "liked" me. She mostly, though, wanted to go to the movie and knew my mom was quick to give me rides. She'd met my mom when she invited herself to sit with me at a baseball game in Arcata and then belched, "I'm going to need a ride home."

My mom said, "That girl is a slut. What kind of girl gets dropped off in Arcata and then finds a ride with a boy?" She wasn't an Amy fan.

Imagine her response when I told her that it was the type of girl I wanted to go to the movies with at the last minute on a Friday night.

"What about Berk and Jim? You gonna send them home now?" my mom wondered as I ignored two grea friends and lobbied for the complicated process of getting the three of us and two girls to a movie in less than 20 minutes.

"Nah ... send 'em home? They're comin' the show! Please?!?!"

I was a mama's boys so I got my way. I was also, on the night, an idiot.

Amy had already had lots of boyfriends and, I was certain, lots of kisses and kissing. I was a novice feeling my way around, but I felt fairly good about the possibility of her grabbing me and kissing me during the movie, thus getting the painful process of me working up the nerve to touch her, then kiss her, out of the way.

I didn't stop to consider what Berk Brown and Jim Tyler would do while they were at the theater while I was with Amy.

Of course! They would sit four rows behind us and throw candy at us, make fun of me and otherwise act as human deterrents to my getting anywhere near Amy.

"C'mon Ted. Psst! Ted! What're ya waitin' for?"

They laughed and laughed. Amy's friend laughed. Amy even laughed. I didn't laugh.

(Amy and I laughed about it together eight years later when we got married.)

For all the warm, wonderful memories of Eureka that have crossed my mind lately, thoughts of the hoppin' theater scene in the 1970s brings to mind the most heartbreaking night of my young life.

My first for-real girlfriend Karen's family was leaving Eureka for San Diego after school ended in 1972. I was a sophomore in high school. How it happened I remain unsure, but I had fallen absolutely in love with her.

Oh, yes, I was in love? We were in love. We were great friends and she made me laugh, took my shit and the kissing thing went great. Love.

How much in love?

Beyond the first kiss and holding hands, I never made an effort to pursue a physical relationship with her in the six, seven months we dated. All that time spent in the theater wishing girls would look our way and I stopped thinking about getting to second base and beyond because I suddenly found virtue in waiting until I was married.

Did I mention that I was 15 years old?

On the last night Karen was in Eureka, we went to a double-feature at the Eureka. We sat back there kissing, in the back row of a near empty theater, for over 3 hours. I knew I'd spent many years hoping I could get lucky with a pretty girl at the theater, but that night my heart was breaking. We kissed like we'd never see each other again ... because I figured we wouldn't.

Not every memory of Eureka warms my heart.