By Regina Villiers. Originally published July 10, 2002 in The Suburban Life, added July 13, 2016.
Jim Eichmann, now with Cincinnati Bell, started working as an usher at Camargo Theater at the age of 14.
The building that housed Camargo Theater was a magnificent, old building with atmosphere. After the theater closed in 1967, the building became a top restaurant in the area, the Madeira Manor.
Back in March, Jim Eichmann, a former usher at the Camargo Theater, a bygone movie house in Madeira, took a crowd of people on a trip to the past, as he talked to the Madeira Historical Society.
Before he entered the room, the lights were extinguished as he led a woman to her seat in the dark, using a flashlight as he once did as a teen-age usher.
Old-timers in Madeira remember well the Camargo Theater as a family-friendly place to meet your friends or to take your date. Parents remember it as a baby-sitter. At Saturday and Sunday matinees, you could drop off your children and know they’d be safe till you returned to pick them up when the movie ended. And parents could trust the movie, too. They knew the subject and the dialogue would be suitable for their children.
Eichmann started as an usher at age 14 to earn money while attending school at Moeller. He also worked at the home of the movie house owner, Robert “Red” Strauss, doing odd jobs and cutting grass. He usually earned a dollar an hour. He also delivered the Suburban Life newspaper for additional income.
“Mr. Strauss was like a father to us ushers,” Eichmann said. “He watched after us and taught us responsibility. He taught us presentation. We had to wear ties, shirts and jackets. We knew we represented the theater.”
The ushers did everything. The worked outside, before and after the shows. They sold tickets, and then helped patrons to their seats.
They were in charge of crowd control, toning down kids if they got too noisy. “The empty candy boxes became noisemakers,” Eichmann said. No gum and no soft drinks were sold at the theater, but there was lots of popcorn and lots of candy. Some of the candies sold were Dot Drops, Junior Mints and Juji Fruits.
At the meeting, Eichmann passed around a box of candies, allowing the audience to choose one, to taste again he sweet days of their youth.
The popcorn was delivered to the theater already popped, in a half-dozen huge bags. Prior to the shows, the usher would bag it up in small bags to be sold.
The theater scheduled general movies on Wednesday and Sunday nights. Special matinees were shown on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The price of admission was 75 cents for adults and 35 cents for children. Special movies were shown on Tuesday and Thursdays, costing 50 cents each.
Some of these were “Naughty Marietta,” “Rosemarie,” “May Time” and “Girl of the Golden West.”
Some of the movies Eichmann remembers showing were “Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion,” “The Shaggy Dog Story,” “That Darn Cat,” “101 Dalmatians” and “My Fair Lady.”
He remembers one movie with an adult, for the times, theme. Now it would seem quite tame. It was “The Sandpiper,” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It produced the hit song, “The Shadow of Your Smile,” made popular by singer Tony Bennett.
The Camargo Theater closed in 1967. The grand old building then became Madeira Manor, a restaurant with a long, successful run that also evokes nostalgia among Madeira residents.
Jim Eichmann no longer lives in Madeira and is light years away from his days as an usher at Camargo Theater. He’s now a sales vice-president for Cincinnati Bell.
But his days of ushering were a building block of his life. He remembers it as a time of family, friends and having fun. “Madeira’s family culture helped me begin my life, “ he said.