The Sunrise Theater

The Sunrise Theater
By Gwendie Roberts Camp


My memories of movie theaters all converge on the Sunrise Theater on Second Street in Fort Pierce, Florida, the town where I grew up, or, more accurately, the town where I spent my first eighteen years. No other movie theater really comes to mind. Probably because as an adult I haven’t often gone to the movies, whereas as a child going to the movies was one of only a few places we ever went for an outing. That and visiting relatives and going to the beach were about it. So, as a small child, my father and mother would take my sister and me to the movies on Sunday afternoon as a family, as if “the family that movies together, stays together.” The funny thing was, we always went when Daddy decided to go, which meant that often the movie had already started and we had missed the first few minutes—or more. Usually we would stay on and watch those beginning minutes after the intermission. The time between the showings gave my father a chance to chitchat with half the people who were leaving. He’d even go out into the lobby so he wouldn’t miss anyone. He’d grown up in that town and knew practically everybody. In fact, sometimes we’d run into one of his unmarried brothers or sisters (my aunts and uncles) and they would treat Mary and me to a candy Sugar Daddy or to a comic book from the drugstore next door to the theater.

By the time I was in junior high school, my sister and I were allowed to walk downtown on Saturday mornings by ourselves, and join all the hordes of other kids to watch the “serials”—Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and sometimes old reruns of Shirley Temple. My sister, younger than I and a real pest, would cry when a horse got shot out from under a rider. She’d say, every Saturday as we entered the theater, “I hope no horsies get killed today.”

The high school years relied heavily on the Sunrise Theater as a respectable place to take a date. As it was a one-picture-theater, there was no choosing of what picture to see. All those who went on a date on Saturday night saw the same thing—unless you went to the drive-in theater, but that’s another story entirely, and it didn’t qualify as a MOVIE theater, as no one ever remembered what they saw there anyway.