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An Old Fashioned Saturday Night
In August, Cambridge celebrated its third annual "Old Fashioned Saturday Night."
The weather was perfect, Model A Fords and other vintage cars lined the streets, people took rides on a horse-drawn hayrack, the band played polkas, marches, and songs that had tunes you could hum.
The merchants brought bargains galore to the sidewalks. The crowd was huge. People thronged the sidewalks and ate from a variety of food stands. Friends and neighbors met in little clusters and visited, as they made their way up the street. Kids played. There was a drawing for prizes of merchandise at 9 O'Clock. Everyone had a whale of a good time. The event was nostalgic for me---for the times in the '30s and '40s, when Saturday nights in a small town were events, looked forward to with anticipation, not unlike Thanksgiving and Christmas. I grew up in Plainview, about the same size a town as Cambridge. Both towns were (and are) farming communities. Before World War II everything revolved around the farmer. Farmers dictated the store hours, and were catered to in the extreme. But farmers, in turn, were loyal, and traded "at home."
In Plainview, a farm family's usual first stop was at one of the six grocery stores along the two blocks of main street, or the cream station, where they sold their cream and eggs and picked up their check for the week's shopping. Saturday night was the night to see people. By sitting on one spot on main street, sooner or later a person would see everyone in town, since all traffic moved through that two-block area. Some folks, who had retired to town, would park their car downtown in the late afternoon, so that they would have their spot on main street reserved for later--- when they could sit in their car and visit with friends as they passed during the evening. Teenage girls practiced the '30s version of "cruising." They would walk, arm in arm, in little groups, up one side of main street, cross over and down the other side. Each time they met a similar group going the other way they would stop to chat for a moment. These groups would invariably be followed, a few paces behind, by a like number of boys, trying to make conversation -- the girls pretended they did not notice. At Cambridge, in 2001, the Hobo (sugared) popcorn was one of the more popular attractions -- especially after the restaurant ran out of hamburgers and the City Center ran out of ice cream. Popcorn was extremely popular in Plainview in the '30s as well. In those days businesses were specialized. People bought their gas at the filling stations, their groceries at the grocery store. The drug store had a soda fountain, but did not serve food or coffee. The beer halls had beer, but no pool table. The pool hall did not serve beer. In line with this line of thinking, the theater showed movies, but did not sell popcorn. Popcorn was provided by a great old gentleman, whom we referred to as Popcorn Petersen. He had a gas-fired popper on a little cart, which he pushed from his home in the eastern part of town.
On Saturday nights he parked his machine outside the theater, and from that location he made popcorn for passers-by, and theater patrons, throughout the evening. In retrospect, that popcorn was the best ever -- large kernels, hot from the machine. And if you asked politely, Mr. Petersen would put on an extra shot of melted, real butter -- which soaked through the sack and made your hands greasy, but made that popcorn truly delicious. My dad's bakery was a few doors down from the theater. To take advantage of the Saturday night traffic Dad bought one of the first automatic cake donut-makers and installed it in the bakery show window. It was a beautiful machine, with glass windows, which allowed people to watch the donuts being dropped into the grease, move half way around a circle, flip, move the rest of the way around, then drop into a basket. The machine was a beast to clean (which was my job), but the sight of all that synchronized dropping, flipping and moving, had a hypnotic effect on passers-by, and combined with the exhaust fumes, which were piped out into the street, made those succulent little cakes darn near irresistible. Dad was sure that he had found the source of the expression, "Selling Like Hotcakes." The theater did good business on Saturday night. There was always a double feature, with cartoons, newsreel, and previews of coming attractions, so it was near midnight before the last patrons left the theater, but then that was about the time that people were ready to go home and only then could the stores close. It was (my Dad) Walter's custom to attend the movies on Saturday night. After working all Friday night and most of the day, Saturday, he was exhausted by show time, but he needed to be around when the bakery closed, so he chose to go to the movies. He invariably fell asleep somewhere during the first reel and missed out on the rest of the picture. He was self conscious about falling asleep during the movies, and hoped that no one noticed. But one time a woman tried to avoid buying a ticket for her good-sized youngster, saying that the boy would just sleep through the show. Mrs. Hoffman' s stem reply, in Walter's hearing, was, "Madam, Walter Sehnert has been sleeping through the show every Saturday night for years, and he never once has asked to be admitted free!"
Baber's Cafe, (in Plainview) at that time, had a large room, which on Sundays became a dining room. But on Saturday nights it was a dance hall, ringed with booths. The lights were low, the music sweet and hot, and the dance floor rocked. All the great bands were there, via their latest recordings on the juke box -- Tommy Dorsey, Russ Morgan, Guy Lombardo, and the rest. An entire generation of Plainview youths learned to dance, at Baber's, to the strains of "South," "The One O'Clock Jump", "The Beer Barrel Polka," "The Waltz You Saved For Me." The Institution that was Saturday night was a phenomenon, which was destined to end with the advent of good automobiles and good roads, and the move to larger farms and fewer farmers. After World War II people had more money. Everyone bought a beautiful new car as they became available, and needed an excuse to drive them. Farmers did not have to come to town just once a week. They could come every day, and could and did travel farther from their "home community." Business was spread out over all the days of the week, and Saturday became just another day. The crowning blow to Saturday night was television. By the early '50s many homes had television sets, and Saturday night had a good line-up of television fare. The magic of television brought new friends into the living room -- Uncle Miltie, Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty, wrestling heroes and villains, among others. To a large extent, these new friends replaced the fellowship of talking to old friends and neighbors in person. People chose to stay home rather than come to town on Saturday night. But our thanks to the good folks at Cambridge for bringing back "An Old fashioned Saturday Night" once more, and helping us remember again the fun, the fellowship, and the excitement that Saturday nights always generated during the bleak days of the Depression '30s, through to the end of World War II. Contains some excerpts from "Growing Up In Plain View," by Walt Sehnert