South Bend Movie Memories Discovered in a $1 Scrapbook

A $1 scrapbook from 1940-41 reveals a childhood collection, a city's cinema culture, and an unexpected connection decades later

BY KEN BRADFORD // POSTED NOVEMBER 16, 2025

Some years back, I joined a small crew on an archaeological exercise outside the old Oliver Mansion.

I wouldn't call it a dig; it was more of a scrape. We all were assigned a square spot in a grid and were given tools that allowed us to peel off about a sixteenth of an inch of dirt at a time.

In my grid, I uncovered a glossy white item that resembled a small tooth. “Probably part of a broken button,” the leader said. And that was the best we could do with six amateurs looking in the dirt for two hours.

It's something I remember when I take my occasional stab at historical research. It's a scrape, not a dig. And most recently, that's what I did with a crumbling movie scrapbook I received as part of an online auction.

The scrapbook was at the bottom of box of books I had won with a $1 bid. I had no idea what it was, so I needed to know more about it.

This is a habit of mine. Sometimes when I buy from a used-book store or a thrift shop, a previous owner leaves a trail of information. A bent corner could lead to a favorite passage, or it could just be where a reader paused on a single late night. A passage highlighted in yellow might have ended up in a school essay or in a book discussion group.

I've found a business card of a family counselor that presumably was used as a bookmark in a Ray Bradbury novel. Once, I found inside a back cover a series of numbers subtracted from the original 20.00. My guess is that the owner had just $20 and was trying to figure if he could afford dinner, dessert and maybe a pack of cigarettes.

For this scrapbook, that sort of mystery was gone in the first few pages — the first sixteenth of an inch of this scrape. The owner has used a pencil to write in cursive his name, Samuel, and his South Bend address. This is on the inside front cover near another entry, printed in ink, that states Start 1940 End 1941.

With internet resources, it isn't hard to determine that Samuel compiled this scrapbook containing movie information from those years when he was 9 and 10 years old. And I realize that I actually met this person about 45 years later when we both wrote for the South Bend Tribune.

My first mission, for now, was to see what Sam collected and maybe try to understand why.

Most of us filter what we think we know about others by remembering our own experiences. When I was 10 years old, in 1964, I too was a collector. As I recall, my brothers and I had two shoeboxes that we filled with baseball cards. Some of those came from packs that my mother allowed us to buy at the Park & Shop on Mayflower and Edison roads. I've seen wrappers from 1963 Topps baseball cards on eBay, so I know they came in 1-cent or 5-cent versions. The wrappers alone — no cards included — are listed for $400 or more.

Others in our collection came from the back of Post Cereal boxes, which often had a dozen collector-sized cards printed there. If we were shopping with Mom, we might go through the boxes of Alpha-Bits or Post Toasties until we picked one that had a Willie Mays or Harmon Killebrew among those cards.

The lesson applicable to studying Sam's scrapbook is that our collections don't necessarily reflect our favorites. If my Topps pack included a Sherm Lollar or a Dutch Dotterer, they went into the box.

And so it is that I can't judge Sam for the first photos in his book — Fred Astaire, Groucho Marx, William Powell, Warner Baxter, and Joan Crawford. The Astaire photo appears to be from a slick magazine — maybe Life or Look or the Saturday Evening Post. The others, more yellowed with age, came from a newspaper.

I had heard of all these people except Baxter. It turns out he portrayed Jay Gatsby in the 1926 silent film, “The Great Gatsby.” During the filming, he became friends with Powell, who portrayed George Wilson, Gatsby's murderer. Baxter was at his friend's side in 1937 when Powell's wife, blonde bombshell Jean Harlow, died of kidney failure at age 26. Harlow expired while filming “Saratoga” with Clark Gable.

On that same page are advertisements for movies at the State Theater (“Santa Fe Trail” starring Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland, with Ronald Reagan as a co-star, and “Sandy Gets Her Man,” starring Baby Sandy with Una Merkel and William Frawley) and the Palace (“Footsteps in the Dark,” starring Errol Flynn and Brenda Marshall, plus “Washington Melodrama,” starring Frank Morgan).

Tickets were 10 cents for children at both theaters with adults 20 cents at the State and a quarter at the Palace. William Frawley, by the way, became better known two decades later as Fred Mertz in the “I Love Lucy” TV show.

The State building still stands, vacant after decades of neglect in the 200 block of South Michigan Street, a few doors north of CJ's Pub. The Palace was in the building now hosting one of South Bend's crown jewels, the Morris Performing Arts Center. I saw Jackson Browne there a few years ago, as well as the Moody Blues and Crosby Stills & Nash.

In 1940, there were at least nine functioning movie theaters in South Bend alone. In addition to the State and the Palace, movies were shown at the Armo, the Colfax, the Granada, the Indiana, the Oliver, the River Park and the Strand.

By the time I was old enough and my parents had enough money for me to see movies, there were just five — the Colfax, Granada, River Park, State and Strand. The Strand later became known as the Avon Art Theater, which had a deserved reputation for its artistic pornography. Don't ask how I know.

I remember my three brothers and I saw the Beatles' “Hard Day's Night” at the State in 1964. That's also where we saw “John Goldfarb, Please Come Home.” Twentieth Century Fox had won a lawsuit against the University of Notre Dame, which felt it was poorly portrayed in that notoriously stupid movie.

The Colfax was the first theater in our area to show “sound” movies when it opened in 1928. Its zenith might have been in 1940, when it was among local theaters all gussied up for the premiere of “Knute Rockne: All-American.”

It closed in 1977 and, after years of sporadic attempts to save it, the Colfax was demolished so the Tribune could expand. A major renovation created, among other things, a large conference room with a secluded office in that spot.

I inhabited that office briefly, playing my Neil Young CDs and practicing hacky-sack, when the Tribune decided I needed to be secluded in 2001. I enjoyed receiving visitors there to discuss the nuances of good writing and the pleasures of being unpopular.

My time there was long after Sam's Tribune career. After he closed the book on his 1940-41 clippings, he graduated from Washington-Clay High School, Indiana University and Washington University's law school. He returned to South Bend, raised a family and served the community in many ways before his death in 2021 at age 90. I suppose his scrapbook is among many things that didn't find an immediate home after his earthly belongings were distributed.

It turned out that his devotion to movies was not just a childhood hobby. In the early 1970s, he began a part-time gig with the Tribune as a movie reviewer. I recall seeing him in a meeting of feature department contributors, but I'm not sure if we ever spoke.

If you're interested in reading some of his reviews, I suggest getting a subscription to newspapers.com. A favorite of mine is from Jan. 22, 1978, that begins: “1977 was not a brilliant year for Hollywood as far as the production of films was concerned.” He said he had trouble finding enough films to choose for his annual Top 10.

But on that list were “Rocky,” “Star Wars,” “Annie Hall,” “Network” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

Golly. Those seem like a big step up from “Sandy Gets Her Man” or “John Goldfarb.”

As I return to the scrapbook, I realize I'm still on Page 1 with 95 more to go. I see there's a full-page photo of movie star Ronald Reagan and a magazine story about Judy Garland and her first husband. I wonder whatever happened to him.

It already feels like I've found more than a button.