![]() ![]() ![]() (And the mere thought of Duds evokes an image of a lone box caught in a narrow spotlight, like a frame from Eraserhead-but this was the candy counter at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax, whose memories I hold for another day.) The most baffling candy sold there were Gold Nuggets-the gold-encrusted bubble gum that came in a “canvas” sack. The candy shop was in direct competition with The Eagle for our allowances, but I don’t remember anyone being stopped for bringing in outside candy, which I generally preferred to the dusty Necco Wafers or glutinous Raisinets the Eagle sold. ![]() After school we flocked to the candy store next door to the box office, stocking up on trading cards (baseball cards for those who cared about such things, Odd Rods for those like myself who preferred monsters) candy buttons that you peeled from paper strips sugar necklaces that dissolved against your skin, becoming disgustingly sticky ornaments. On weekdays, the theater was camouflaged among ordinary buildings and kept its secrets close. Every day that walk took me past The Eagle. Eventually we moved to a house on Norwalk Avenue, only a few blocks from Eagle Rock Elementary, so I could walk from home to school. As a kindergartner, I joined the mob of older kids and trudged to Monte Vista Elementary daily for a couple of years. ![]() There we joined a pack of children, some of them foster kids and some just there for the day like us. My mother was a teacher at Glassell Park Elementary, and every morning she dropped me off with my younger brother at a sitter’s house in Highland Park, on her way to work. We had moved from an apartment in Glendale to a shabby house on the hillside on College View. And right around here, my recollection of that specific day begins to blur into a montage of every movie I saw at The Eagle between the years 19, age five through ten, when I lived in Eagle Rock. Funny and frightening, the jumble of images take precedence in memory over the behavior of the crowd. The movie? Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I remember the candy and the parentless dark and the anticipation of the overamped crowd, waiting for the movie to start. A tumult of children swarming over seats, running up and down the aisles, screaming and laughing and pelting one another with candy. My earliest memory of the place is one of total chaos-a wild commotion in the dark. Of course, I had never seen The Eagle empty or quiet. It was huge! Even taking into account the absence of seats, the fact that some of the walls were now simply scaffolding and the floor a maze of trenches and mounds of excavated earth, it was difficult to reconcile my memories of an intimate movie house with this vast, dark memory palace. The details I remembered were accurate but the scale of it had eluded me. My memories were so vivid that I approached the visit with guarded enthusiasm, expecting to find it somehow reduced–smaller and shabbier than I remembered, in the usual way of childhood memories. Having recently moved to back Los Angeles after leaving in 1970, I was delighted to learn that The Eagle, the theater of my childhood, was being restored by the Vidiots Foundation and ecstatic to be given a tour of the work in progress. Nothing else mattered unless it blocked my view. My eyes were fixed on the luminous screen. And as a kid, I didn’t spend much time thinking about the areas I couldn’t see. Then again, my memories are mainly of darkness, of far corners lost in shadow, a ceiling mostly imagined. “It’s just as I remember it” is never how it was.Įntering the cavernous interior of The Eagle for the first time in more than fifty years, plunged into darkness on a glaringly bright afternoon in September 2021, I can’t believe it was always this enormous. ![]()
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