Silent movies at Sipes' Cartoon
The Cartoon Hut at Sipes...seems like that thing almost never worked
and we would just goof around inside it till the fateful day I slipped off
one of the benches and split a lip. Mom banished us from that from then
on...guess it's better than being banned from the Cains.
In 1965 my family moved to 62nd Street in the Hidden Valley Estates neighborhood,
at the time one of the southern most streets in Tulsa. (Technically, at that
time, the city limits ended at 61st Street.)
I remember the Sipes Grocery Store at 61st and Yale (the
Holliday
Hills addition) had one of those Kiddie Movie Booths, and whenever
my mother did her grocery shopping, my brothers and I loved to go with her
so we could get free coffee and sit and watch cartoons and the old silent
black & white comedies.
Those same films were also distributed to Shotgun Sam's Pizza Parlors
and various other establishments and area restaurants in continuous loop
super 8 cartridges that played on special Technicolor projectors.
From 1965 until 1971 our across the street neighbors were the Hobsons. Many
of you know Jack Hobson who worked
in Tulsa Television from the mid 70s through mid 80s.
After the Hobson family moved the Dougherty family moved in and it turned
out that Jerry Dougherty, the father, ran the business that distributed all
those films throughout the city, out of his garage.
It wasn't long before Jerry found out I was into making 8mm movies and he
offered me a job splicing the broken films. I got $5.00 per splice, and $10.00
per splice if I had to open the cartridges to fix them. That was some radical
cash for a young teenager to be making, especially since those films broke
constantly!!!
Once I got my drivers license in 1974, I also began to go around picking
up old movies and delivering new ones.
It was during this period when I began to see the Laurel & Hardy talkies
on "Dr. Mazeppa Pompazoidi's Uncanny Film Festival
And Camp Meeting" and my appreciation for Stan & Ollie grew even
stronger!!!
You might say that was when I began a career in the multimedia field that
I still work in to this day!!
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(from Guestbook 84) David
Bagsby said:
Who remembers those Kiddie
Movie Booths that were scattered around Tulsa in the 60's and 70s?
The fringe benefit from this
job, besides the great pay, was I had a projector in my bedroom and a constant
supply of my favorite films to watch and share with my brothers and friends.
I truly came to appreciate and love the silent comedies, especially Laurel
& Hardy.
