Through Ten-Year-Old Eyes by Susan Van Kirk

 

When I was eleven or twelve, I read a series of books by the French author, Jules Verne [1828-1905]—Journey to the Centre of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. Verne was considered the writer who built the foundations of science fiction by combining science and adventure.

 

As an adult, I’ve never considered myself a science fiction reader, and why I would read these books and enjoy them at that early age seems strange. Until now. While cleaning closets, I came across the journal I wrote in hardly legible cursive back when I was ten years old. The topic of that journal was an amazing vacation to the East Coast.

 

The world of 1956 was far different than the world now. It’s important to know, too, that my father managed the drive-in theater my great uncle built, and he loved movies and magnificent old movie theaters. Our trip occurred in November between my father’s two seasonal jobs—managing the drive-in theater and tax accounting. That meant missing school, so my older brother and I took our homework with us. We grew up in the town of Galesburg, Illinois, and we hadn’t seen the rest of the world. That was about to change.

 

Glancing through my journal is an education in misspelling: Olny, the Libirty Tunel, trolling cars, Naraggra falls, President Isonhower, toum of the unknown sourger, riffell bulits, and Davey Crottets hatet. (I must remember to stop complaining about my grandchildren’s spelling or hide this journal forever.)

 

As an adult looking back, I’m dumbfounded by all the places we saw. Stopping in Pittsburgh first since one of my father’s WWII army friends lived there, we next crossed into Canada to see Niagara Falls, and then drove on to New York City. We took a subway and an escalator, two modes of transportation I’d never seen or used. Our adventure took us to the top of the Empire State Building, the window at Dave Garroway’s “Today” show, and the Arthur Godfrey and Gary Moore Shows. I learned what a teleprompter was. My ten-year-old self always wondered how those television people memorized all those lines.

 

We went to the Rockefeller Center and the United Nations and took the NBC tour. Then it was off to Washington, DC, and the Smithsonian, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the Lincoln and Washington Monuments. We also went to the FBI where they showed us how they took fingerprints and shot guns. [Little did I know this would come in handy as a future mystery writer.] The trip ended with Washington’s home and then Gettysburg. At that time they had only an electronic board to show visitors how that three-day battle occurred…very crude by today’s productions.

 

I laugh at the items that caught my eye as a ten-year-old. Our New York City hotel didn’t have a 13^th

floor because it was unlucky; a man guarded the gate at the end of the driveway at President Eisenhower’s home; and we ate in a crazy place called an automat in New York City. The tollway we took to the East Coast was part of a huge building project after WWII named after Eisenhower. How amazing that it took only one man at the gate of Eisenhower’s farmhouse to guard the place.

 

So back to science fiction. While we were in New York City, we saw a new movie downtown at the Rivoli Theater, a bold experiment in film-making that had debuted the month before, October 17, 1956. Of course my father knew about it. The film grossed $33 million, ran 102 weeks, and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. It used stereophonic sound distributed in a new format. Todd-AO used thirty frames a second and was incompatible with the old 35-mm standard of twenty-four frames per second. It cost $6 million for a producer named Mike Todd to make.

 

But what I remembered the most was sitting in that huge theater and seeing an amazingly wide curved screen. Yes, curved. A tall curtain covered the gigantic screen, opening after the musical overture finished. I sat enchanted for 179 minutes.

 

The name of the movie was Around the World in Eighty Days.

 

As I watched the new PBS version of that film over the last few weeks, I marveled at how they  updated the story. While the two versions were vastly different, I found myself remembering that trip so long ago and the wonder of that movie in the elegant, masterpiece of a theater. I must have gone home and read those Verne books cover-to-cover after seeing that film. Today, reading that journal of a naïve, misspelling ten-year-old reminded me of my love of books and films to take us out of our humdrum lives to magical places. That was a gift my parents gave me long, long ago.

 

Do you have a memory that explains why you love books and/or film?