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watched the stuffing in full again and then finally departed. That was how it was done in those days. Movies may have had published starting times, but those times were usually irrelevant to us. As I got older, I would be dropped off at the Elm or at another local theater with a friend or friends and would be picked up again at some appointed time. Admis- sion to the Elm was twenty-six cents, a price the increase of which does not appear to have correlated with the increase in the price of a slice of pizza, and I was given sufficient money not only to be admitted but also to buy food, which inevitably consisted of a box of candies called Root Beer Barrels and a box of salted but unbuttered popcorn. On a typical Saturday afternoon, there would be two movies, a number of cartoons, and “coming attractions,” which were, as we all know, actually previews of coming attractions. Children were seated in the balcony when the program was more geared to adults than to kids. The reverse would occur on some Saturday afternoons, when cartoons only, hours of them, would be shown in a “Cartoonorama,” and we were permitted to sit in the lower-level seats, which we had no idea formed what was called the orchestra. Older ladies dressed in white patrolled the aisles and bore flashlights that they pointed at you to shut you (and often me) up. For whatever reason, these ladies were known as “matrons.”
Finally, on our tour of the intersection of M and Ocean and envi- rons, we come to the northwest corner of those thoroughfares, which was directly across Ocean Avenue from our house. It was occupied by a large, full-service Texaco gasoline station, a fact that I think would not have been memorable, except that I subsequently learned that Texaco was the sponsor of Milton Berle’s very popular TV show.
As if the presence of a gas station across the street did not make the area active enough, when we first moved to Ocean Avenue—and until right before we moved to East 23rd Street—trolley cars would go clang- ing along in front of our house. (Thus, as noted in Chapter Four, the lesson of my father’s third story was not likely to have been “Avoid trol- ley cars at all costs.”) The trolleys rolled from Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay, fifteen long blocks away, to somewhere near Ebbets Field, far to the north, where the Brooklyn Dodgers, formerly the
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