When I was a student at Eastside High School in 1965 I also worked as an usher at the U.S. Theater. It wasn’t much of a job really. It was one of those jobs, like being a waiter or waitress that was exempt from the minimum wage because, like them you were thought to gain much of your income from additional tips. But the days of tipping ushers had passed so we were paid 70 cents per hour to wear a jacket (dark ones in winter and white in summer) and carry a flashlight and tell unruly kids to put their feet down and stop disturbing the girls in front of them.
We would walk into the lobby off Main Street and then open a door there in the lobby to go downstairs to the room where we changed. From there we could follow a long tunnel just under the right aisle all the way to the back of the screen. By this time, this underground passage and the rooms off of it with their dust covered collection of posters and such was the playground of the teenage usher boys but clearly it had served a theatrical purpose in earlier times. I always assumed that those were dressing rooms and I imagined stage magicians disappearing in a puff of smoke and then running through the tunnel to reappear at the back of the crowd.
When I was there the U.S. Theater seemed to be run by the same company as the Fabian while the Majestic played mostly (or exclusively) Spanish language films. The Fabian usually got the bigger films and we often got the teen beach flicks, horror films and such. But when the Beatles movie Help! came out it came to the U.S. and it packed the place for months. The ushers loved that because the music never got old like the scripts of those B-flicks did (I remember Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in The Comedy of Terrors).
Then … the Dave Clark Five, one of the British Invasion bands that followed in the wake of the Beatles and Stones, came to the U.S. theater for a personal appearance to pump up their film Having A Wild Weekend. This was meant to be just a run on stage to show their faces and long hair and to take the mic long enough to say “ ‘ello luvs” and then run off and get in the bus to go to do the same in Passaic and on and on. But at the U.S. Theater something went wrong.
One of the girls who had packed the place and stood on their seats screaming at the top of their lungs had managed to get past the line of police, guards, and ushers to jump up onto the stage and throw her arms around one of the lads (Lenny, the cute one).
Their American manager was on stage with them at the time and he pulled the girl off of poor Lenny but one of the Paterson policemen didn’t like the way he handled it (they were said afterwards to have been getting angry about the overall approach to the job by the similarly dressed security guards who they thought were being too rough with the Paterson girls). Anyway, this cop grabbed the manager guy and one of the band’s security guys tried to hold back the Paterson policeman. That did it. Several cops came to the defense of their fellow officer and … well, I watched as they put this guard up against the screen and hit him several times with what looked like a blackjack.
The band and everyone was delayed from their trip to Passaic while things were taken down to the police station to be straightened out.
Ah … the U.S. Theater … and my teenage years. Both gone.
When I was a student at Eastside High School in 1965 I also worked as an usher at the U.S. Theater. It wasn’t much of a job really. It was one of those jobs, like being a waiter or waitress that was exempt from the minimum wage because, like them you were thought to gain much of your income from additional tips. But the days of tipping ushers had passed so we were paid 70 cents per hour to wear a jacket (dark ones in winter and white in summer) and carry a flashlight and tell unruly kids to put their feet down and stop disturbing the girls in front of them.
We would walk into the lobby off Main Street and then open a door there in the lobby to go downstairs to the room where we changed. From there we could follow a long tunnel just under the right aisle all the way to the back of the screen. By this time, this underground passage and the rooms off of it with their dust covered collection of posters and such was the playground of the teenage usher boys but clearly it had served a theatrical purpose in earlier times. I always assumed that those were dressing rooms and I imagined stage magicians disappearing in a puff of smoke and then running through the tunnel to reappear at the back of the crowd.
When I was there the U.S. Theater seemed to be run by the same company as the Fabian while the Majestic played mostly (or exclusively) Spanish language films. The Fabian usually got the bigger films and we often got the teen beach flicks, horror films and such. But when the Beatles movie Help! came out it came to the U.S. and it packed the place for months. The ushers loved that because the music never got old like the scripts of those B-flicks did (I remember Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in The Comedy of Terrors).
Then … the Dave Clark Five, one of the British Invasion bands that followed in the wake of the Beatles and Stones, came to the U.S. theater for a personal appearance to pump up their film Having A Wild Weekend. This was meant to be just a run on stage to show their faces and long hair and to take the mic long enough to say “ ‘ello luvs” and then run off and get in the bus to go to do the same in Passaic and on and on. But at the U.S. Theater something went wrong.
One of the girls who had packed the place and stood on their seats screaming at the top of their lungs had managed to get past the line of police, guards, and ushers to jump up onto the stage and throw her arms around one of the lads (Lenny, the cute one).
Their American manager was on stage with them at the time and he pulled the girl off of poor Lenny but one of the Paterson policemen didn’t like the way he handled it (they were said afterwards to have been getting angry about the overall approach to the job by the similarly dressed security guards who they thought were being too rough with the Paterson girls). Anyway, this cop grabbed the manager guy and one of the band’s security guys tried to hold back the Paterson policeman. That did it. Several cops came to the defense of their fellow officer and … well, I watched as they put this guard up against the screen and hit him several times with what looked like a blackjack.
The band and everyone was delayed from their trip to Passaic while things were taken down to the police station to be straightened out.
Ah … the U.S. Theater … and my teenage years. Both gone.