Remembering Topper, Trigger and Champion

I learned to love shoot-'em-ups -- what my father used to call "horse operas" -- at the East End Theater on 25th Street on Church Hill.

I read the other day that they're going to fix up the now-decrepit old building and turn it into an apartment house. Junk trees are growing from where we used to sit in the dark and root for the guys in the white hats. Graffiti is all over the walls and the roof is a mess.

Hopalong Cassidy wouldn't care.

Neither would Roy Rogers or Gene Autry.

But I do. I'm delighted to hear that the building will live again, even if it's not as a magical portal to the land of the cowboys.

The old Art Deco theater first opened its doors in 1938. It was probably no more than a dozen years later that I took to riding my bike from 24th Street to the East End Theater for Saturday morning cowboy movies. I'd leave my bike outside on the sidewalk with all the other kids' bikes.

Yes, it was safe to do that 60 years ago. When the movie ended, my bike was always right where I left it.

On Saturday afternoons, we'd go back home and play cowboys and Indians in somebody's back yard with our cap pistols ablaze. As boys will, we specialized in over-the-top death scenes when one of us got "shot."

Cowboys were a big deal then. Was there a house in my neighborhood without a picture of a kid in the family in a cowboy suit and cowboy hat riding a pony at that "pony farm" on Cary Street?

(I think it cost a quarter to ride one of those ponies and then pose for a picture. Just for perspective, you could buy a six-pack of Cokes for a quarter in those days.)

And Hopalong Cassidy, who wore a black hat -- he was the exception among the good-guys -- and his horse, Topper, fed right into our adolescent fantasies. So did the singing cowboys, Roy Rogers (horse: Trigger) and Gene Autry (horse: Champion).

And that's what they were: fantasies. The West was never like that, and real cowboys didn't pour out their pent-up emotions by singing songs around the campfire.

But those fantasies set our imaginations on fire.

Sometimes there would be a drawing at those Saturday morning cowboy movies for a shiny new bike. I was never a winner, but I once knew a guy who knew a guy ...

So I am glad that the East End Theater will live on.

So will my happy memories of sitting in the dark watching cowboy movies with my friends on Saturday mornings.