For some inexplicable reason lately, I have been thinking about the movies theaters I frequented when I was a tween and a teenager.

Until about age of 10 I lived in rural North Carolina and my only solid memories of going to the movies were drive-in theaters with big bags of homemade popcorn and gloriously colorful Hammer horror.

After my father passed away, we move to Ft. Pierce Florida and soon started going to the theaters there.

The Sunrise Theater was just over two miles from my home on 32nd St and I walked the distance to see their presentations. The Sunrise was a single screen theater and the place I went to the most for my movie fix. I remember a number of fun Saturdays watching films like Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Race with the Devil, and The Towering Inferno in that darkened air-condition space.

Ft Pierce did have a multi-screen theater I seem the remember the name being the Village Twin, but I could be wrong about the name. It was just over three and half miles from my home and I also walked and sometimes biked to that theater for movies. It was there that I saw Jaws, Superman: The Movie, and Alien. I still have quite vivid memories of speeding home from Superman pumping the peddles hard with Willams’ iconic score playing in my head.

The final place to see movies in Ft. Pierce was our drive-in theater but as we had no family car, my mother did not drive, I only saw one film there. A Movie I was so desperate to see that I went on my bicycle to a drive-in, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

Movies have always been and always will be a major element of my life.