The Town Crier: First time at the Wink (part one)

Published 8:15 am Friday, May 2, 2025

From the silent film era to the late 1950s Dalton had more than one movie theater going. At one point in the 1950s there were three movie theaters downtown, the Dalton Theater in the building where the Oakwood Cafe is now, the Crescent Theater on Hamilton Street and the Wink Theatre, where it remains to this day.

But the Dalton Theater closed and the Crescent burned down so when I came around, the Wink was the only “movie palace” left. There were a couple of drive-In movies on the outskirts of town, but if you wanted that classic “going to the movies” experience, it had to be the Wink.

The Wink Theatre was built around 1940, just before World War II and during the height of movie attendance in America. Attendance hit the all-time peak of 80 million people going to the movies weekly in 1946. The war was over and there was saved-up money to spend. It would just be a couple of years after that when TV came on the scene and movie crowds have never been the same. But when I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the movie-going experience was still one of the top ways to get entertainment in your life.

My mom says she first took me to the Wink when I was only 18 months old as a type of experiment to see how I would react. She stuck me in the seat and told me to wait there while she went for popcorn. She was a young mother and in retrospect can’t believe she left me by myself during her concessions run.

Back with the popcorn, she said I sat there watching the whole movie, and so she and my dad took me to the movies with them all the time after that. I was “movie crazy” and never squirmed.

She thinks the first movie she took me to was Jules Verne’s “Mysterious Island.” The movie came out in December of 1961 so I would have been 20 months old when we went. Either I was a couple of months older when I saw my first film or the first film wasn’t “Mysterious Island.” Either way, I got to watch the hit movies on the big screen from a very early age. I can actually remember seeing the film at the Wink even from that early of an age. If you’ve not seen it, it’s got a daring escape during the Civil War using a hot air balloon during a raging storm, a giant crab (about the size of the Wink Theatre!) that attacks, and giant honey bees that seal up one of the heroes in the honeycomb. I remember these moments all distinctly.

In retrospect, I’m not sure my parents thought it all the way through as to what impact that adventure fantasy would have on such an impressionable mind, but they kept taking me and I kept taking it all in. There were so many things I first saw at the Wink on the silver screen. When you’re a young kid and still learning about the world, you’re not always sure about where the real world ends and the movie world starts.

At the age of 3 I saw my first James Bond movie, “Goldfinger,” followed the next few years with “Thunderball” and “You Only Live Twice.” The first couple of Bond movies I was so young I just watched and wondered. By “You Only Live Twice” I was 7 and knew a little about the Cold War. I could follow the plot and watch NASA launch rocket ships and knew that if 007 didn’t crack the case there’d be trouble.

On the big screen it was the first time I had seen Japan. Bond goes there to investigate and explores a lot of locations from Tokyo to Yokohama to small fishing villages.

I had been taught you don’t hit girls from the time I was old enough to make a fist, so imagine my shock when the bad guys poison one of the female Japanese spies that are working with Bond. My mom told me that she figured if anything was too grownup for me it would just go over my head, and she wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t until I was a teen and saw “You Only Live Twice” again that I managed to figure out why Bond had kissed that mean girl working for the bad guys.

I first saw Disney films at the Wink. They were wonderful animated classics like “The Lady and the Tramp,” “Winnie the Pooh” and “The Jungle Book.” Those are timeless classics that I’ve loved my whole life and they showed me, although I couldn’t have put it in words then, that animation could be a feature length work of art. They had more heart, resonance and depth than the wonderful in their own way but limited fare I saw on Saturday mornings. The Disney features, without a single anvil dropping on anyone’s head, showed me things could be more.

Another film that was science fiction but really made you think about future advances in science fact was “Fantastic Voyage.” It’s the story of a group of scientists who are shrunk to the size of microbes and injected into the body of an injured politician, along with their cool “submarine.” They have to navigate the body to his brain and using laser beams clear up a life-threatening blood clot that is inoperable with traditional means.

This was the first time I had seen how the body works. It came out in the fall of 1966, my first-grade year. That Christmas I had to have surgery on my foot, and because I had seen science at the Wink first, I wasn’t afraid.

Next time: John Wayne movies.

Mark Hannah is a Dalton native who works in the film and video industry.