Strand Theater
Chillicothe,
TX
79225
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The last picture show (Joyce Whitis, Mar. 25, 2007)
“Five or six years ago they had a big shin dig up in Archer City when several hundred movie buffs motored into town. Scattered among the guests were movie stars, Jeff Bridges and Cloris Leachman, who played in The last Picture Show, a movie that first opened in 1972. The occasion for this celebration and a trip down memory lane, was the first showing of that movie in the town in which it was depicted nearly 40 years ago. The movie wasn’t popular in town in ‘72. This time would be different. Folks had matured so they said.
You remember that Archer City’s Pulitzer Prize winning author, Larry McMurtry, wrote that book about growing up in a small Texas town. Everyone assumed that the Show was about Archer City where McMurtry lived and went to high school. Therefore practically everybody there was more than shocked when they read in that book that the high school basketball coach’s wife had an affair with one of the students. That was not a Texas thing to do and it ruffled more than a few feathers. And then there was that scene where the lovely Cybil Shepherd and her friends went skinny dipping in a pool in Wichita Falls.
My Lord! What next?
That was the way we thought 40 years ago, and my dear, times have changed. Today it seems that an awful lot of teenagers are proud to parade across a computer screen and unblushingly reveal activities that would have sent their mothers underground for life. Not only do these children get vocal but their language would melt industrial strength paint right off the farm machinery.
Everybody at that party in Archer City seemed more than happy to lay down a couple of hundred to see the 37-year-old movie, The Last Picture Show. This time it was almost in the original movie theater. Actually the picture show which was the subject of the book and resulting flick, burned sometime in the mid-sixties. This showing of the film that has become a classic was next door to the old Royal Theater. The new building, built behind an old storefront, is now a performing arts theater.
I can’t help but wonder what arts will be performing in Archer City. Maybe book reviews. The town has close to half a million hard copies. McMurtry himself owns three warehouses packed to the rafters and as if that wasn’t enough, somebody put in his own bookstore.
I have a strong attachment for that little town with the beautiful old courthouse and the streets, mostly deserted, except for tourists with armloads of books, moving from book warehouse to book warehouse. My memory zips back to a cool fall evening in 1945. Football is in the air, Texas High School Football, that is. Chillicothe’s Eagles are about to take on Archer’s Wildcats and our pep squad is marching to its own drum down Main Street. There isn’t much traffic, there never is, and when a car comes up behind us, we just saunter to one side of the pavement and march on.
When our line passed the Royal Theater I remember shouting to my best friend, “The Strand is bigger than that.” I was referring to The Strand Theater in Chillicothe where everybody that I knew saw every show that came to town. The “hubba hubba” crowd (that was before cool, and bad and in the ‘40s meant really hot stuff) sat on the back row and we never let the younger kids infringe on those seats. The back row, though not stated publicly, was reserved for high school seniors to sit and hold hands, sigh and maybe steel a kiss when the usher wasn’t looking.
Like the story line in The Last Picture Show, my hometown was also centered around the movie theater. That’s where you met your friends when you were in grade school; where your beau took you on your first date; where you watched that other world unfold on a flat piece of canvas and its power could transport you to some beautiful, romantic place far away where only the handsome and brave lived.
Movies were an education for my generation, not just entertainment. Gone With the Wind set my heart pounding and ignited a fire inside and a love for my Southern heritage that has never been extinguished. I’ve seen that movie probably 50 times and every time I cry with Scarlet at the end. Stagecoach brought us John Wayne. Judy Garland took us by the hand and led us through the Technicolor land of dreams and we closed our eyes and clicked our heels and knew that we had been transported to a wonderland. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers sang their way into our hearts because the good guy always won. In our world that was the way it was.
On trips “back home” I always stop in Archer City to buy a book or take yet one more picture of what remains of the old Royal Theater. In Chilli the Strand is long gone, cleared off by a giant yellow machine with a tremendous front-end loader that just cranked up and pushed the source of all our dreams into dust. I still have a piece of it though. Once, after the building had stood vacant for a long time, staring out at the street like an old woman who forgot where she was, I went inside and sat down in all the dirt that had collected on the seats in the back row, I sat there all by myself for quiet awhile and thought about those wonderful years and all the friends I knew and with whom I shared moments in time. Many of those friends are buried in the little cemetery outside of town, others I lost track of and have no idea of what roads they took in life. After awhile I got up and ripped a piece of art deco molding from the wall and walked with it back to my car.
That red and white trim is nailed to the wall in my utility room and it gives me pleasure to stare at it and remember how it was in the 1940s at the last picture show in town. I could write my own book about that."
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From the 1970s a photo of the Strand in Chillicothe.
Yes, it’s gone; only the broken curbside steps remain.