Creepy Classics & Monster Bash News

Some of my earliest memories of watching movies and learning about them still resonate in the back of my skull. It is a fascination with the moving picture and spooky movies.

My maternal grandfather worked at Grove City College managing the recreation building there. Across the campus road was the college library. He would check out big hardback books from there and treat me to them when I visited. I was maybe four or five at the time. He would show me photos in those books of his favorite movies and actors. Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and Lon Chaney!

He told me he had worked at the local theater, along with his older brother (nicknamed "Jitters"). When they were still pre-teen they would post window cards of current movies for the Guthrie Theater and change out posters and lobby cards. Many years later I asked him if he ever saved those posters from the silent era that he had posted. He said he hadn't. He did just what the theater manager told him to do. After they were taken down, take them out back of the theater and throw them in the ditch! Ouch.

Since I liked the scary movies, I asked my grandfather what movie scared him back in those days when he was a kid. I expected THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, or something like that. No, it was WINGS (1927), a war picture. Why? He said he walked into the theater after it had already started and heard the roar of planes! It was the first "sound" movie he had ever experienced. It made him jump. It was one of the first experimental sound films with no audible dialogue, just the sound effects. New to audiences back then.

His brother, my great uncle, went onto be a lifelong theater projectionist in Florida.

My dad, Tom Adams, also worked in the theaters and had a similar experience with movie posters. Just after high school he worked at a local theater janitor as a second job at night. He would sweep popcorn, clean the stuck candy on the floors, and empty the trash. In an early apartment he had a ceiling water leak so he rescued thrown away posters at the theater. He would attach them to his water stained ceiling with the plain backs facing down. Problem fixed, ceiling nice and white again. Posters, considered garbage, went to good use. Oh, my.

When I was about nineteen years old I was working at a local radio station. Making very little money as a DJ. I applied for a nighttime job at the local theater chain. I was trained as a projectionist dealing with very dangerous carbon arc projectors. My training was at one of the theaters and at a co-owned drive-in theater in Bellefonte, PA (next town over from State College, PA). I loved it, but loved radio more. I was offered a full-time job at the local Top 40 radio station and my theater career ended after just about a month. But, I too, like my grandfather and father had my brush with working in the theater business.

Movies have been in the blood for me. In particular horror, mystery, and science fiction. It all still resonates in my soul.

Ron Adams 
Ligonier, PA 
June 2026