MVLS I Spy Oral History Interview

Scotia Theater, Glenville, NY- Part 2
Part 2: Audio Excerpts | Current Photo | Historic Picture

Transcript of audio excerpts

Interviewers: Carter Sullivan & Megan Purtell
Speaker: Richard Sullivan

My name is Megan Purtell. I'm in Scotia-Glenville High School, 9th grade.

My name is Carter Sullivan. I'm in Lincoln Elementary, in 5th grade.

And I'm Dick Sullivan, the object of this interview. I'm gonna talk about the old Ritz Theater in Scotia and also the Scotia Library and the area around the library that is in the Village of Scotia.

RITZ THEATER

D. Sullivan: OK, let me tell you what I can recall about the Ritz Theater. One of the things we frequently get asked by young people as adults is "Where were you on the day that. . ." You can fill that in with lots of things, like, moving into my era, "Where were you on the day Franklin Roosevelt died?" "Where were you the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor?" - Well, I was in the Scotia Theater seeing a Sunday matinee, in fact probably having paid 10 cents.

The theater was always great fun for kids, not all kids went, but I certainly went as often as I could. Sometimes they had BINGO games in the theater and the manager would stand up on the stage and he'd read off the numbers and you'd put marks on your card and if you were real lucky you'd win a prize of some kind or another. Then I remember them occasionally having events for the kids where the kids got up on the stage and performed. I had a friend who was from Finland and he got up and he sang that famous Gene Autry song "South of the Border".

Then, too, on Saturday afternoons they always had serials - serials the kind where your hero was always getting into trouble and then escaping from the trouble, and they'd usually have 8 or 9 episodes, something like that, ten. I remember my real favorite was one call "The Green Archer". Maybe it was simply because of my fondness for the color green. Also "The Green Hornet". The front of the theater in those days had a barbershop on one side and a jeweler on the other side and across the street was the Empire Supermarket, which burned down in the early 1940's.

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