Another Theater Tale

    The majestic Fox Theater in San Francisco, and the one upcoming attraction whose display I never forgot! Amazingly, someone coincidentally took and preserved a record of that particular ad art that mesmerized me as a child of seven!  The year was 1961.

    Based on the information I was able to glean from the various online forums and sites dedicated to San Francisco history, 'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea' was one of three summer films my family and I caught at the Fox that season.

     The attention grabbing artwork was already up ond the side of the movie palace by the time we all went to see 'The Parent Trap' playing a couple of weeks prior, but the moment my family stepped off the trolley, or walked the few blocks from Van Ness Avenue and Market Street, and I first laid eyes from across Market on the U.S.O.S* Seaview [Holy cow! Sixty five years later, and I just now caught the pun!!] there was no way this kid was was gonna let his parents refuse to take them, er, me to see the flick! Just look at that menacing squid! 

    Besides, my twin sister Georgene and I would turn seven just ten days before the opening. What a perfect birthday treat! I'm sure my sister was just as excited. However, of our two older sisters Yvette and Angie, Yvette the eldest was the who talked to me the most about looking forward to the movie.

     Boy oh boy, what a film it was! Although, the only downside was my having to "go" in the middle of the feature. My daddy wasn't too happy about that, as he walked me to the restrooms in that palatial theater. I well remember even on the way and back, trying to catch glimpses of the onscreen action through the various aisle entry doors we passed! Luckily, in those days, you could just wait to see the film play again and leave "where you came in" or in this case leave after watching the scene you missed the first time, although it did mean watching the second , now totally forgotten feature ('Sniper's Ridge') as well.

 

The Fox Theater (June 23-29, 1961) Courtesy of OpenSFHistory.org
Slide image color-balanced, touched-up, and cropped by me.

 Kudos to OpenSFHistory.org, the San Francisco Public Library, NewBank Inc., the San Francisco Chronicle (1865 - 2017) digital archive, and Blogger's San Francisco Theatres.

 

 

The following background information was copied directly from my image file. The raw text merely awaiting to be edited into this post:

From OpenSFHistory.org: The Fox Theater, June 1961 (sometime between the 23rd and 30th of the month when 'Snow White and the Three Stooges' was on the bill.

I forgot to save this touch-up (TU) image file to my laptop and Google Photos when I initially posted it to social media. 

Fortunately I able to retrieve the post and securely download the JPG to my device and Google storage.

Curiously, the reason I went searching to find the picture on my laptop was because my re-cropped and cleaned-up copy of the tarnished and scuzzy, original Open Sf History.org image, was in turn used by someone else.

Fair enough.

My version of the picture now sits on a Blogger site lovingly dedicated to all the San Francisco theaters that ever were, entitled 'San Francisco Theaters'.

Fox lineup from June 30 to August 31, 1961, and those films (✔) I saw at the theater.

✔ 'The Parent Trap'
June 30 to July 20, 1961

Walt Disney's 'Nikki: Wild Dog of the North'
July 21 to August 1, 1961

✔ 'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea'
August 2 to August 15,1961

Jules Verne's 'Master of the World'
August 16 to August 24, 1961

✔ 'Alakazam, the Great!'
August 25 to August 31, 1961 

 

 *(United States Oceanographic Survey)

 

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