In 1972 a former resident of Covington saw the movie "The Last Picture Show" and it jarred many memories of his years as a youth going to see movies at the Star Theater. He wrote a feature story for the New York Times detailing his remembrances, and the St. Tammany Farmer re-published it.
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Ex-Resident Has Movie Nostalgia
Julian Smith, who as a young boy lived in Covington, recently wrote a nostalgic feature story for the New York Times which told some of his background here, particularly in the 1940's.
The article was prompted by his viewing the prizewinning movie. "The Last Picture Show", in hopes it would rekindle days when he attended the old Star Theater in Covington.
Smith, a teacher at Ithaca (N.Y.) College. is working on a study of US films. He is the son of Henry (Chicken) Smith. one-time Covington pharmacist now employed in Lake Charles.
His grandfather was the late Julian Smith Sr., who with his brother, the late Deed Smith, owned and operated H. J. Smith and Sons hardware store on Columbia street. He also is the nephew of Mrs. L. C. Heintz of Covington.
In the article, he relates that coming out of the theater in Ithaca where he saw "The Last Picture Show", "I remembered another theater in the little Louisiana town of Covington, where I grew up. It was called the Star, and it doesn't exist anymore. But the Star was my first picture show."
In the story, he mentions Peggy Dow, who was really Peggy Varnadow. Her father ran a chain of grocery stores-early supermarkets, located in Covington, Bogalusa, and maybe one other town. They were called "Whiteway" stores. Peggy was a pale blond, pig-tailed girl, a bit removed from movie-star maturity, when the family moved away.
Here, in part, is Julian Smith's story.
"I cried at my first picture show in 1942, and I still remember the scene that did me in and caused my father to drag me out. It was under water- a man in a diving suit was writhing in the tentacles of a giant octopus. And somehow I too was caught in the tangles of film, in loops of celluloid reality.
"My father swore I was too young to go to movies, but my mother, still too young in those days not to go herself, took me back a week or two later to see "Dumbo," a far more terrifying story (for a three-year-old) than that of a mere adult caught by a nightmare octopus. I wept for hours. My father was disgusted; my mother promised she would never die or leave me or be locked up like Dumbo's poor mad mother. And when she did die, a quarter of a century later when I had children of my own, I was moved far less.
"But back to the Star Theater. Tickets, as I remember, were 25 cents for adults, 14 cents for children under 12, and 9 cents for children under 7. Typically, you were given a nickel and-or a dime to present at the box office, and you traded your penny change for candy inside. It might be only a penny, but it got you used to standing in line, and a penny habit quickly became a nickel habit. Mr. Salles, the owner, was a dapper man with a kind of central casting European elegance, but he took the tickets himself and kept his eye on the popcorn sales.
How Old Are You Now
"Ah, how Mr. Salles had us all conned. The marvelous way he remembered birthdays—when I was about 6, he started reminding me to tell him when it was my birthday so he could give me a present. So each year I got a movie poster or a set of stills. It was years before I realized his solicitude was intimately linked to profit, for when you announced your birthday, out came the "present" and the damning question, asked loud enough so Mrs. Jahrus, the box office lady, could hear: "And how old are you now?"
By the time I was ready to make the big leap from 14-cent childhood to quarter adulthood at the age of 12, I had learned to keep my mouth shut. But Mrs. Jahrus knew or suspected and shook her jowls at me when I presented the dime and nickel, shook and stared so hard I dug deeper and found another dime, the one for popcorn, and entered manhood. Well, almost.
"The reason Mrs. Jahrus knew my age was not simply that she had a better memory than Mr. Salles, but that she was a real stickler for detail and fine at bluffing. Besides, she had also been my first-grade teacher, had taught me my letters during the day and guarded the palace of dreams at night.
Food Drive Donations
"Our school was not far from the Star Theater, and at least once a week during World War II we trekked over for an afternoon benefit showing of a purported literary classic like "The Prince and the Pauper" or a historical biography, as Sister Phillipina called them, like "The Story of Louis Pasteur." Instead of admission, we each brought a can of food, and these we stacked in the lobby of the Star to be shipped to beleaguered England or, after V-E day, starving Germany.
"The good and grateful citizens of Liverpool and Leipzig must have gotten the impression that Americans thrive on canned beets, lima beans, and green peas. The trick, you understand, was to snitch something awful from the shelf. But then there were those weird children, those true Christians, who deprived themselves of cling peaches in syrup, of fruit salad, of Vienna sausage, in the name of sweet charity.
"And there was the time we saw "The Good Earth" and each of us tried to outdo the other in chipping in to buy a Chinese baby. For the uninitiated among you, this meant there was a chart with little stars representing our individual contributions: a nickel bought a silver star, a dime a golden one, and $20 was the going price for a Chinese baby in those days.
We didn't actually get to take possession of a genuine Chinese baby, unfortunately, but we did get to choose the name under which "our" baby would be baptized. Twenty dollars, you see, was what it cost to save a baby from starvation and bring it into a mission where its body and soul could be saved with holy water. soap, and soup.
"Ah, it all comes back. Thank you, Peter Bogdanovich, for not doing it all for me in "The Last Picture Show," for making me remember. Now I recall right after the war, when the Italian film industry started exporting again, that for weeks the lobby of the Star bore a most seductive poster of a lush Italian woman in a gauzy gown over the legend "Coming Attraction."
"Then one night, my mother saw the previews of coming attractions, and she swore this was one Italian movie I was not going to see. I was at least 10 then, and the argument we had on the subject of what I could or could not see began to break the bonds of sentiment welded by "Dumbo" and "Bambi". My father told her not to bother fussing with me- the gossip at his drugstore, just down the street from the Star, was that the "Eyetalian" sex epic would be banned.
Italian Movie Madness
"The whole thing was so scandalous that somehow the outrage didn't get back to the good sisters at St. Peter's, for the afternoon before the film was to open we were all marched over to the Star to see the very same spectacle our parents forbade us, and it was all about the Christian martyrs and how they were treated by the pagan Romans, about virgins who refused to join the terrible orgies and were thrown half naked to the lions.
"Good old Mr. Salles—with an ear to the ground for prevailing community standards, he singlehandedly established the doctrine of redeeming social value. If the nuns brought the whole combined student body of St. Peter's and St. Scholastica's, could the rest of the community not but follow?
"Movies brought the world to Covington in those days, and Covington gave back what it could. I remember the excitement when a local girl, Peggy Varnadow, made her Hollywood debut back in the late forties. Peggy Dow they called her, and she was Arthur Kennedy's girlfriend in "Bright Victory."
"I saw Peggy just a few weeks ago, and she looked not a day older than the last time I saw her in the flesh in Covington 20 or more years ago. There she was, frozen in time on the Late Show, playing opposite Jimmy Stewart in "Harvey."
Harvey. Harvey ....That reminds me: Lee Harvey Oswald, a year or two behind me in school, lived in Covington in those days.
And Walker Percy, who won the National Book award for "The Moviegoer" 10 years ago, has lived in Covington for 30 years. Did he see most of the movies that led him to the conclusion that we find our reality in film, right there at the Star?
Maybe he went to the Majestic, the other picture show in town. It was on the same street as the Star and also belonged to Mr. Salles, but it was older and somehow less memorable, and so were the movies shown there.
"The father of my best friend, Jigger, was the last projectionist there, and when the Majestic closed for good during the Korean war (at the same time as Bogdanovich's last picture show), when the projectors had been carted away to the new drive-in, Jigger and I spent a happy afternoon sailing old phonograph disks from the projectionist's booth out into the cavern of the theater. The screen would never light up again, and we were trying to slash it with records, but try as we would, we couldn't get the thick old 78's to stay in the air that far. Jigger's dad raised hell, but Mr. Salles never did find out who made that mess.
"Mr. Salles is dead now, Mrs. Jahrus has moved to California, and the Star is gone forever. The building was gutted last year, and in the shell were crammed two smaller theaters, the Twin Cinemas.
"But it's the Star that glimmers in my memory, for of all my picture shows, it was the first, and will never be equaled by the plastic-fantastic of the shopping center cinemas that spring up around us as we all, movies and people, grow older."
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