Volume 10 , Issue 17

More About Newburg, MO

"When I returned to Oklahoma (from Newburg, MO) to attend college on the G. I. Bill, I began working as a projectionist at the Lakeside Theatre in OKC (Oklahoma City) which was a large suburban indoor theatre near Lake Hefner; a few miles west of the Britton, Oklahoma area where I'd been born and had spent much of my youth.

My youngest brother Allan also worked there. I had begun training him to be a projectionist at the tender age of 11. At that time he was too short to peer out the port-holes to see the 'cue marks' on the screen (that are located 8 seconds apart) to change from one reel to the next, so we stacked spare seat cushions upon the floor so that he could see the screen.

At the appearance of the first cue-mark he would flip on the motor switch to start the projector motor, and as it gathered speed he would then open the arc-lamp 'dowser' to permit the bright light to reach the opening into the projector, and then at the appearance of the second 'cue' he would switch the sound from the one projector to the other while simultaneously jumping off the stack of cushions onto the changeover pedal which caused a secondary 'light-gate' in the second projector to open while the 'light-gate' in the first projector would be closed (by automatic relay electro-magnetic solenoids).

A side-note: Child labor laws did not apply to family members working in a family operated business, but even though he was too young to work in a 'hazardous' occupation, so was I at the time, and we never got caught by any government inspector! My brother was put on the payroll as a projectionist by the time he was 13 years of age, and I had already trained him to service all the projection equipment in order to prevent a 'dark' screen for more than 15 to 30 minutes.

We could almost completely dis-assemble, inspect and clean, most parts of a 35mm projector and have them re-assembled within 10 to 15 minutes. That meant that we could do it and have the projector 'threaded up' and ready for the next 'changeover' during the 18 to 20 minutes that a reel of film was playing. The reason that the Lakeside Theatre folks hired me (as a projectionist while attending college full-time) was because I was the one who had trained their 18-year-old chief projectionist.

I'd majored in electronics engineering in college and shortly after leaving school was offered a job as a film editor at the OKC (local CBS affiliate) television station, KWTV (channel 9) and I worked there (as my daytime job) for nine years." -- Roy
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