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Photograph courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright
My Cup of Tea: Friday night movie-goers collected a free set of dinnerware, a piece at a time, at the Garden Theater in the 1950s.
Remember When
A local movie palace handed out both dishes and memories
By Cookie Curci-Wright
Old dinnerware holds more memories than just about any of the antiques we own. Whether it's the fine china that graced Grandma's dinner table or that colorful set of Fiestaware that Aunt Minnie cherished through the 1950s, we remember family dinnerware with a bit more nostalgia than most of our treasures.
Many of these antiquated dinnerware sets are incomplete and stored in boxes in the back of china cabinets and kitchen cupboards. Patterns like "Ivy" by Straffordshire, "Currier & Ives" by Royal and "Buttercup" by Spode were all the rage of the 1930s, '40s and '50s.
However, the dinnerware that evokes my happiest family memories wasn't made of fine china, nor was it made by such companies as Spode, Mikasa, Straffordshire or Minton. It couldn't be purchased in any store, at any price. It could, however, be had for the price of a ticket to the Friday-night flicks.
The Garden Theater opened its doors in June 1949. The premier movie was Knock on Any Door, a classic film noir starring Humphrey Bogart. By the '50s, the Garden Theater movie palace was a Willow Glen landmark entertaining sell-out crowds every weekend. Like a lot of kids, I spent my Saturday afternoons and Friday nights rooted in its balcony.
I remember the grand marquee with its glowing red letters and dancing white lights, and the glass-enclosed ticket booth out front. Inside, the ornate walls were boldly bedecked in silver-white scrollwork gleaming against a deep red-rose interior. Soft lights were discreetly spaced along each side wall and aisle. Usherettes in braided velvet uniforms lit our way and guided us up the stairs to our pull-down, cushioned balcony seats. It cost a bit more to sit in the balcony, but the view was better and so were the seats, which lulled many of us to sleep by the end of the movie.
To encourage theater attendance, owner/manager Bud Lima offered a free set of dinnerware to his Friday-night faithful, to be collected, a piece at a time, over several months. With the purchase of a ticket, a free piece of china was handed out to each lady of the house. In order to accrue the desired set of dishes, local housewives religiously attended the movies on Friday nights. The novel china, decorated in a bright modernistic floral pattern, was irresistible to the housewives of the 1950s.
Mom's budding fascination with giveaway dinnerware grew in the summer of 1952 and blossomed through the fall and winter of that year. A person entering our kitchen in those days need only look in our cupboard, lined corner to corner with this fanciful dinnerware, to know that a giveaway dishware enthusiast was in residence.
I can spare no adjectives when describing our household's excitement for Friday night at the Garden Theater and the anticipation of acquiring another piece of china. The evenings, as I recall, went something like this: Dad, eager to get on the road, was outside warming up the family car, revving the engine impatiently in hopes of hurrying the rest of us along. Inside the house, Mom and the kids were putting the finishing touches on our wardrobes, scurrying about the house gathering our hats, gloves and purses. In those days, families "dressed up" for a night at the movies. Dad wore a tie and Mom a stylish hat, which she adjusted at least six times before leaving the house. Finally, just before Dad's patience wore thin, we'd dash from the house and climb inside the waiting 1949 Cadillac. We were raring to be on our way to the air-conditioned luxury and surrealistic atmosphere of the Garden Theater; to enjoy our Friday night ritual of hot buttered popcorn, ice-cold bon-bons, frothy sodas, two movie spectaculars, a cartoon, a news reel, coming attractions and, of course, a free piece of china.
Perhaps the reason housewives of the '50s were so keen to own a complete set of dishes has something to do with the fact that many of them were married during WWII, an era when few brides had time to have a wedding celebration, let alone register for a china pattern. Most war-time brides set up housekeeping with their grandmothers' hand-me-down chinaware.
"Dish night" at the movies wasn't anything new in the 1950s; it had been done before in the '30s. That's how Grandma acquired much of her china. Not that she had a complete set of any one pattern--far from it. Grandma's dinnerware was a colorful montage of traditional and modern. That was just fine with Grandma, who cared less about her dinnerware patterns and more about the food she served on her plates.
Today's household fashion guru, Martha Stewart, suggests her disciples use a different dinnerware set for each season and holiday. That's quite a contrast to our 1950s family, which considered itself fortunate to own one complete set of dishes. As for our glasses, many were provided by empty Skippy peanut butter and Welch's grape jelly jars. These mismatched glasses, imprinted with cartoon characters, adorned our dinner table throughout the 1950s. Mom's china, glassware and table settings might have lacked the Martha Stewart seal of approval, but they were loved by a generation of kids who thought Woody Woodpecker, Daffy Duck and Tom & Jerry glassware was as good as it gets.
Somewhere along the line, we became too sophisticated to set a table with mismatched china or to drink from jelly jars. I guess that was the fault of those ubiquitous 1950s TB families like Ozzie and Harriet, whose characters sat down to a fashionably set table every week and made us feel less than perfect for not doing the same. (We blame this TV family for just about everything; might as well add this to the list.)
The 1950s gave us the 45 rpm record, hula hoops, Barbie dolls, baseball cards, Frisbee discs and, best of all, "dish night" at the Garden Theater.
Whether we went there for the great films or the giveaway dishware, the Garden was a great place to be back then, and those Friday night and matinee memories keep me smiling to this day.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
