Movies and Parking Meters.

Garberville looking North, Late 40's, note all of the utility lines overhead. click to enlarge

Back in the late 40’s there was only two lanes of traffic in Garberville, with angle parking, but Garberville being the progressive town that it was decided that they needed more room for traffic, so they made the parking along the side of the street parallel to traffic, and added an outside lane through town, and they put in parking meters. I’m not sure when they did all of that, but that was the way is was in the late 50’s. I don’t remember the speed limit, but I think that it was faster than it is now. I remember that there wasn’t any stop signs.

The road through Garberville was called the Redwood Highway, you know it better as Highway 101. In the mid 60’s, when the freeway bypassed Garberville and the traffic was reduced, they took the extra lane out, and made the center line into two double lines about four feet apart, and they could not be crossed at any time without getting a ticket. They renamed the street Redwood Drive, and they went back to angle parking. The parking meters were removed before that because of public outcry.

In the early 80’s all of the utilities on Redwood Drive were undergrounded, and the street was repaved, and the center line was changed to a double yellow line, to allow ingress and egress to driveways and service stations. It was a major accommodation to Garberville traffic. What you should know, and it seems that nobody does know, is that it is against the law to cross a double yellow line to enter a parking space.

Back in the late 50’s the parallel parking spaces had parking meters, I don’t remember the denominations of coin that the meters took, but I think that they had a slot for a penny, a slot for a nickel, and a slot for a dime. Everybody hated the meters, and cussed them endlessly. I forget how long you could park, but if you put the right amount of coin in, you could crank it up to maximum time. People would drop extra coin in the slot, and if it looked like your time was about to run out, some good citizen would turn the handle and the meter would swallow the extra coin and add minutes. I’ll bet that you are wondering why I’m telling you all of this stuff… Later.

The Garberville Theater looks, on the outside, almost exactly like it does today. The Garberville Theater used to run a Saturday Matinee for the town kids. And it was only 25 cents to get in. The kids could only sit in the general seating, they weren’t allowed in the loges. Only adults were allowed there. The theater usually showed something like cartoons, or a cowboy movie, or something spooky like “The Blob” or “The Mantis”. but it was always just for the kids.

The evening show was quite different it had feature movies, like “Casablanca“, or the “African Queen”, or a good John Wayne movie. The adults sat in the loges, and the kids sat in the general seating. The kids could sit in the loges if accompanied by an adult, be we usually wanted to sit down front with the other kids. They had a “Nursing” room in the back for moms with squeally babies. Babies were allowed in free, but they had to go to the nursing room with the mom if they made any fuss. It always seemed to me like there was a baby making noise somewhere in the theater all the time. Each isle had an usher to help you to and from your seat with a flashlight, and if you got out of line the usher would shine her flashlight at you and embarrass you in front of your friends.

You are still wondering about those parking meters aren’t you?

When we wanted to go to the Saturday matinee, we would walk down the street, look all around and when nobody was looking we would whack the back of the parking meter with the heel of our hand, and the extra coin would puke out. Almost always we could get enough coin to take two of us to the matinee. But, we had to be sneaky, if the other kids figured it out they would have beat us to it. So my cousin Jim and I almost always went to the Saturday matinee. We were the only ones in town that missed those meters when they took them out. Damn!