As a city guy, I have been close to dogs, cats, fish and sometimes chickens but never had a fondness for horses unless they were running on a race track. I watched horses in parades; they are beautiful animals but lacking in potty training. At a race track, however, I loved to watch them run.
Dorothy and I took several trips to Keeneland, a Lexington, Ky., race track, and spent the day deciding which of the horses was going to return money for our $2 bets. Placing the bets and cheering the horses home made for a real fun afternoon for us. Dorothy nor I understood the racing forms so Dorothy placed her $2 bets on her choice of the jockeys. If she liked his name, she bet on him.
She ended one day with a reasonable amount of cash. The luck of the Irish, I suspect. I bet on horses with unique names. Frequently lost. One day, however, I ended with 31 cents more than I started. A day designed for bragging.
When I joined the Junior Chamber, I was a charter member and the youngest member — plus the most naive as well. When the group sponsored a horse show at Brown’s Run, I volunteered to help. I knew nothing, or even less, about horse shows. I was handed a shovel and told to go to the barn and use it. When my day was done, I still knew nothing about horses except they must eat a lot.
As a small boy, I looked forward to Saturday mornings. When Dad walked me to the Capital Theater on West Central Avenue to see the weekly installment of a continuing cowboy movie. The cowboy hugged and kissed his horse, but never showed affection for the girl in the show. I was inspired by the courage and horse sense of Buck Rogers and other cowboys who avoided girls. I told Dad I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up. He encouraged me but did caution that he didn’t think there would be many cows roaming in our neighborhood of Delpark, which was in the area of 14th Avenue and Yankee Road. He explained that if there were no cows to watch, a career as a Middletown cowboy didn’t have much future.
By the time I reached the seventh grade at McKinley Junior High, becoming a cowboy was a forgotten dream. I attended a party where “Post Office” — a game where a boy and girl touched their lips together ever so faintly — was played. Following the first time my lips touched real live lips belonging to a real live, properly perfumed girl my own age, I changed my career plans. I elevated kissing girls above smooching with horses. I haven’t kissed a horse since.
It was the Paramount on Broad Street where the elite — and those of us not so elite — went to see a movie. It was one great place and when it featured a Western movie, it reminded me of the way things were back in the days of the California gold rush, horse-pulled stage coaches and Wyatt Earp.
In the 1930s, it required 40 cents each for me and my gal to see a movie at the Paramount. On the walk to her home following the show, a 10-cent sundae stop at Elite’s in downtown Middletown was expected. Movies were superior. They became even better when talking pictures made the world scene in 1927 and “The Jazz Singer,” the first movie-length talkie, was shown at the Paramount. I was there. I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing. An actor on the screen speaking and I could hear him. Walking home that day, I made a mental note that I had been in the Paramount and witnessed an unbelievable advancement — from cowboys kissing horses to a singer speaking to an audience without being in the theater in person. Without a doubt, I knew I had just seen the most exciting progress in entertainment the world would ever see. Obviously I was very wrong.
Now I can sit at home, make a Skype phone call and — while we talk — see live on the screen my son in Kansas or the younger one in Kentucky. Or a new great-grandchild playing on her mother’s lap in California.
Frankly, I do miss the old movie houses Middletown enjoyed: The Family, The Strand, The State, The Capital, The Sorg and — best of all — The Paramount. I don’t go to a movie very often now. Today they just seem to be a horse of a different color.
Knight Goodman is president of Knight Goodman Inc. public relations firm. He formerly held management positions at Aeronca and The Journal, and was chairman of Middletown’s bicentennial celebration in 1991.