from The Courier-Tribune
Chip Womick
Staff Writer
ASHEBORO — For decades, the Sunset Theatre was the place to see movies in Asheboro. The movie house, which opened on March 6, 1930, was also the place to work.
Where else could a guy or gal get paid to eat popcorn and watch movies?
Howard Lemonds, who worked at the theater for about four years while he was in high school, said he used to know how many times he’d seen “Gone with the Wind,” the silver screen classic that debuted in 1939. He figures he’s seen it hundreds of times.
Lemonds, who is 87, started out selling popcorn at the theater (he also worked some shifts at the Capitol down the street, another movie house owned by White Amusement Co.) when he was about 15 and a student at Fayetteville Street School, which stood where Carolina Bank and the Summit Apartments stand today.
Then he became an usher, which was tantamount to assistant manager, Lemonds said, helping people to their seats and then standing at the rear of the theater during the show, flashlight in hand, ready to assist any customer who needed it — say a woman with a crying baby. It was from that vantage point that Lemonds saw many movies.
“It was kind of a second home,” he said. “The theater was usually crowded, especially the Sunset, because that was the premier show in Asheboro.”
He recalls traveling around the county when he was “just a kid” in a Model A Ford pickup truck, helping sign painter Edgar Cheek when it was time to change billboards advertising new movies.
In the days when he sold popcorn, the popcorn machine was set up on the sidewalk in front of the theater. Not all customers were movie-goers.
“I’d tie up traffic downtown delivering popcorn to people in cars,” he said. “People just riding by would smell that nice aroma of the popcorn and stop and get two or three boxes.”
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