Chapter 1

My cousin, Jimmy Murphy, one of Uncle Donald's sons, had serious girlfriend problems over in New London, so Uncle Donald sent him to live with my Aunt Betty and my cousin Lenny for a school year. It was in the fall of 1955, and cousin Jimmy was 15 years old. His girlfriend was 17, and was almost five months pregnant with what she claimed was Jimmy's baby. Jimmy was a year older than I was, but I was taller than him, and we were both going into the ninth grade, so we hung around together some once school started up again. Jimmy was a serious womanizer, according to him, and claimed that he wouldn't survive without a steady parade of sexual meetings with girls. This was during the period when Ray and I were involved with the Gordon sisters and their cousin Clara, and we certainly didn't want Jimmy horning in on any of that action. I came up with the idea of telling Jimmy about the Saturday matinee's over at the Bijou Theater. This was a legitimate source of meeting girls, reminiscent of the Spanish custom of the promenade. With the promenade, eligible bachelors and maidens would walk in different directions around the circular walkway in each of the town squares on a Sunday afternoon after church services let out. All the girls had chaperons and the bachelors could only hope to see and be seen prior to a formal announcement of courtship where they could then start their serious wooing. In Groton, the rules were less structured, but the basic ritual was similar.

Fifty cents bought you admission into the matinee, and the next four hours could be spent in pursuit of feminine companionship. Girls almost always sat in groups of twos and threes, and expected to be approached during the movies, by boys wanting to get to know them. There was no adult supervision, but the other girls acted somewhat in the capacity of chaperons for each other. Over the years, legends grew about the phenomenal success that certain boys had met with in the Bijou, or, more often, after the movie had let out and the boys walked home with the girls that they'd picked up in the movie house. I had only recently started attending the matinee, and then only when there was no snow to be shoveled and no caddying work either. For a couple months, Jimmy and I went to every Saturday matinee together. We were a team and would approach pairs of girls and sit on either side of them, trapping them between us, so that we could each hit on our girl without the other acting as a wet blanket and killing whatever progress we might be making. I'm not saying that no one watched the movies, but most of the kids, from thirteen to around seventeen at least, were there looking for some social interaction. Jimmy and I were a good combination, and we worked well together in our girl pursuit endeavors. I always sat to the left, because I was left handed, and Jimmy took the right side. Neither of us was that concerned about how the girls actually looked, because that wasn't how anybody kept score. The goal was simple and straight forward. You tried to get as far with the girl as you could before the house lights came up at the end of the second feature. If you could talk your girl into splitting off from her girlfriend to go sit somewhere with you alone, that was a very good sign because it meant that she was open to the idea of a make out session with you. Nobody was under any illusions about what was going on there in the theater, and you almost never heard of any girl being talked about for what she did or didn't do, under cover of darkness, at the matinee. It was a pretty good system, and more than one successful marriage began with a chance meeting in the Bijou Theater.

By our third Saturday, Jimmy and I had meshed together well as a team. We had developed some simple hand signals so that we could silently let each other know how we were each faring with our girl. It wasn't unheard of for the two girls to switch places with each other during the middle of a movie. It was also not unusual for guys to give up and move on to more promising territory, if things weren't developing well for one or both of them. As a general rule, if you hadn't settled in with someone by the middle of the second movie, you might as well give it up because it wasn't going to happen on that particular day. I think it was about the fourth or fifth Saturday that Jimmy and I were at the Bijou together that we happened across June and Debbie. Jimmy had spent time with Debbie once before, but she had been with her older sister then, and nothing much had happened between them on that occasion. I knew June slightly from school, and I knew that she was one of the rich kids of our school, so I was a little surprised to see her at the movie theater because it was located in a seedier part of town. We sat down next to the girls while the serials and the short subjects were still playing, and it didn't take very long for Jimmy and Debbie to start to snuggle together. I tried talking with June, doing my best to keep her occupied so that Jimmy could get Debbie to head off to the back of the theater for some make out time.

"Do you come here every Saturday Jackie?"

"Well, if I'm not busy working, I do, but that is all of the summer and a lot of the winter too. I like to come though when I have the time."

"This is my first time here, but Debbie told me how much fun it was, and I wanted to come see for myself." She then turned over to look at Jimmy and Debbie, watching as the two of them were in a clench and kissing each other with some intensity. "That's pretty fast isn't it?"

"Not really, Jimmy and Debbie have sat together before. I know he really likes Debbie too." In fact, I could have said that about any girl that Jimmy had been sitting with. He really didn't seem to care what the girl looked like. We'd talked about that several times and he always gave me a weird look when I brought up a girl's appearance as if it mattered. "Everybody does it though, that's how we all learned how to kiss." She looked right at me as I was talking, and then she turned back to watch Debbie and Jimmy some more. I was watching also, and I saw that Jimmy already had his hand just under Debbie's boob and was slowly inching upwards with no protest from her. "Should we maybe move and give these two lovebirds some privacy June?"