Additional thought – when I worked at the Ventnor the Manager was a Mr. Watson (maybe Ed?). Most of the time he sat in the drug store next door having coffee reading etc. One assignment he gave me was doing the movie schedule timing each week and I called it into the paper for publication.
We almost always had a newsreel and cartoon plus other shorts.
At that period of life you could buy a ticket and stay all day…people came in during the middle and stayed until they saw the entire show.
We had a candy machine and one the reheated pop-corn via heat light. The pop-corn came in large brown paper bags we used to load into the top. For $0.10 or $0.15 you got a small bag of pop-corn dispensed at the bottom. We do not think we had soda….
I also was an Usher at the Ventnor during 1954-56. One movie I remember playing was Mister Roberts, another was an Oil Rig film with Dan Duryea among many of the stars. When I set up the marquee there was not enough room and I did not know who he was so I left off his name. Well Atlantic City was then a popular play ground for stars…guess what Mr. Duryea stopped in asked the Manager why his name was missing (he was one of the main stars)…they had me change it ASAP.
Also, the movies ran every day starting at 1:00 pm bit during the summer when we had good weather, we’d run the real with no light to keep the schedule in time…if someone bought a ticket I had to run upstairs to tell the projectionist to turn the carbon on.
However, if we had rain or poor weather, the afternoons would be filled with kids as most summer apartments at that time did not have A/C of even television (if it had TV the reception was poor this was before cable and the nearest signals came from Philadelphia).
John Berezowski did a magnificent job restoring the theater and my wife and I saw many movies there while it was open. It was even less musky then when I worked there in the 50’s. John planed to buy the theater, but had to drop those plans when Ventnor City put forth a redevelopment plan which called for the theater’s demolition. John always said the Commissioners said he was save so he then poured his money and time into the restoration…but when the Commissioners backed a plan calling for its removal poor John just had to pull out and lost a small fortune.
Additional thought – when I worked at the Ventnor the Manager was a Mr. Watson (maybe Ed?). Most of the time he sat in the drug store next door having coffee reading etc. One assignment he gave me was doing the movie schedule timing each week and I called it into the paper for publication.
We almost always had a newsreel and cartoon plus other shorts.
At that period of life you could buy a ticket and stay all day…people came in during the middle and stayed until they saw the entire show.
We had a candy machine and one the reheated pop-corn via heat light. The pop-corn came in large brown paper bags we used to load into the top. For $0.10 or $0.15 you got a small bag of pop-corn dispensed at the bottom. We do not think we had soda….
I also was an Usher at the Ventnor during 1954-56. One movie I remember playing was Mister Roberts, another was an Oil Rig film with Dan Duryea among many of the stars. When I set up the marquee there was not enough room and I did not know who he was so I left off his name. Well Atlantic City was then a popular play ground for stars…guess what Mr. Duryea stopped in asked the Manager why his name was missing (he was one of the main stars)…they had me change it ASAP.
Also, the movies ran every day starting at 1:00 pm bit during the summer when we had good weather, we’d run the real with no light to keep the schedule in time…if someone bought a ticket I had to run upstairs to tell the projectionist to turn the carbon on.
However, if we had rain or poor weather, the afternoons would be filled with kids as most summer apartments at that time did not have A/C of even television (if it had TV the reception was poor this was before cable and the nearest signals came from Philadelphia).
John Berezowski did a magnificent job restoring the theater and my wife and I saw many movies there while it was open. It was even less musky then when I worked there in the 50’s. John planed to buy the theater, but had to drop those plans when Ventnor City put forth a redevelopment plan which called for the theater’s demolition. John always said the Commissioners said he was save so he then poured his money and time into the restoration…but when the Commissioners backed a plan calling for its removal poor John just had to pull out and lost a small fortune.