In the mid-fifties a nation-wide re-release of the 1939 block buster, Gone With The Wind , hit the screens. In our small town, you could easily spot the sole movie theater on Main Street by the vee-shaped marquee that protruded over the sidewalk above the double doored entry. Movies remained one of the main sources of entertainment for children, teens and adults. TV had made its miraculous appearance, but it was iffy. A North Dakota blizzard could knock the antenna off the roof in one gust, and leave a family staring at snow on the screen as well as outside.
The letters on the marquee gave the movie title and dates it would be shown. Two different films played per week. One ran on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and the other on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday, of course, was church night and no movie would distract from that.
The heavy gray movie-reel canisters would be delivered by a semi-truck traveling state highway 52. The driver dropped them off at my dad’s service station, and then swung back out on his route. My dad loaded the canisters into his pickup and delivered them to the theater, receiving $1.00 as compensation.
Seeing Gone with the Wind as a coming attraction on the weekly movie schedule raised interest. Few people had ever seen it, but almost everyone had heard of it.
Carol and I went to the movies every Friday night and Sunday afternoon. We had just turned 13 and no longer qualified for the “children’s ticket” that cost 14 cents. Once you passed twelve, you had to purchase the “junior ticket” that had skyrocketed in price to 35 cents. We considered that outrageous and were still getting used to it.
Lying about our age was not an option. In our small town, everybody knew how old you were, what grade you were in, if you were on the honor roll, and any bad thing you might have ever done in your entire life.
At the ticket window, Carol would dig into her pink plastic purse, slap the quarter and the dime on the counter and complain loudly enough for all around her to hear, “I had to babysit over an hour for this.” We knew very little about “Gone With the Wind,” but we always went to the movies on Sunday afternoon, regardless of what was showing.
However, for another group of citizens, the movie was cause for alarm, and a small committee formed to consider banning anyone under the age of 13 from attending.
Their reason was specific. In the last scene Clark Gable said the four-letter word DAMN, when he delivered the line to Scarlett O’Hara as she stood on the winding staircase. In his deep Rhett Butler voice, he said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Those proposing the age limitation said, “Our children should not be hearing such language.”
They may have had a point. A cuss word from a big star on a big screen sounded pretty shocking at that time. But, if protecting children from cuss words was their goal, they had a big job ahead of them. Cuss words floated around every day for kids to pick up.
After all, in 1950s farm country, plenty of frustrating situations called for strong language—the combine broke down, the pressure cooker exploded, the price of wheat fell—AGAIN! They re-elected that jerk into Congress, when he’d never done a thing for the farmers. The need for a good cuss word came up all the time.
Kids overheard them, even when they were mumbled indistinctly, and immediately added them to their lexicon, though of course never repeating them where adults could hear.
Shit, cleaned up as BS, short for Bullshit, and Dammit were popular. My Ass!, a statement of disbelief, cleaned up to My Eye! Hell! became Hell’s Bells! Oh My God! was easily modified to Oh My Goodness! if there were children in the vicinity.
In 1950s small town Dakota, the F word was not around. You never heard it or saw it written anyplace. My dad was fond of the word SNAFU. He liked the sound of it, and it came in handy, in his work as a mechanic, fixing everything from ancient Fords to rattletrap trucks and the occasional house call for an ailing tractor, sitting stubbornly in the middle of a field. A lot of SNAFUS occurred in everyday life. One time when I realized the word consisted of letters, I asked him what they stood for and he told me immediately. “Situation Normal, All Fouled Up.” This acronym originally came from the military in WWII and they didn’t say Fouled. I don’t know if my dad ever knew the original F word.
My mother never cussed at all, unless you count “My Eye!” But she added an s to a four-letter word, and didn’t consider it bad language. She used it in consolation. A friend might be sitting with her at the kitchen table, relating how everything was going wrong—her daughter was pregnant again, the hail took out most of the barley, and that morning she had tripped going down the cellar stairs, and broken a jar of pickles she had just canned. My mom, would listen, nod sympathetically, and then say in a tender voice, “I know, it’s the shits.”
But, back to Gone With the Wind. By the time the movie arrived, the discussion had died down. People had more important things to worry about. Carol and I happily trotted off to the theater, each with our hard-earned quarter and dime.
It was the longest movie we had ever seen–four hours! Thank goodness for an intermission that gave us time to go across the street to the Café for ice-cream cones. By the time Clark Gable didn’t give a damn, we didn’t either. We were tired of sitting so long. Sunday supper awaited us at home and after that The Ed Sullivan Show would come on. (Provided the TV antenna hadn’t blown off the roof.)
***
Lucy Bell, former writing consultant and published author, is inspired by James Baldwin who said: One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. Lucy mines her own experiences with a preference for the humorous. She is currently working on a collection of essays titled “Most of It Was Fun.”
