Archive for August, 2007
August 29th, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
Imagine arriving at work and two-thirds of your employees are out sick. Now imagine that you are the manager of a large supermarket or a Wal-mart a Super Target. This is exactly the situation that America’s retailers and manufacturers face with the coming avian flu pandemic.
The avian flu will be a novel virus, one never seen before by the human immune system. The current disease of concern is the H5:N1 strain of avian flu. However, any novel avian flu will have the same effect as was seen in 1918. In 1918, one-third of the United States population fell ill. Half of these sick individuals required some form of institutional care (hospital, infirmary, or quarantined home care). Of those in institutional care, half developed severe pneumonia and half of those with pneumonia died. In short, 33% got of the total population sick and 8% of the total population died.
When these ominous numbers were scrutinized further, a far more dire picture evolved. Research into the 1918 pandemic, as well as pandemics before and since 1918, have shown that the majority of illness and death occurred not in the very old or the very young, not in the sick and infirm, but in those who are in the “prime of life”; those age 18 to 40.
Because of the way that novel avian viruses (pandemics) attack the lungs and cause “immune system storms”, the ultimate irony of a pandemic is that the younger and stronger you are the more likely you are to die. In 1918 fully two-thirds of all those who became ill were in the age range of 18 to 40. More distressing is the fact that 98 percent of all of those who died were age 18 to 40 years. In fact, those over age 55 had no greater rate of illness or death during the pandemic of 1918 than they did in any other flu season in the years immediately before or after that great pandemic. Similarly, those less than 18 years of age suffered no increase in death rate.
The implications for America’s retailers and America’s manufacturers are inescapable. Fully two-thirds of the active workforce will fall ill during the 16 to 18 months of the disease throughout the pandemic. Twenty-five percent of the young workforce (the 18 to 40 years) will die in that 18 months. Who will replace them? Where will American industry, America’s retail sector, and American business find employees?
America’s employers have become accustomed to a ready workforce. If an employer finds that they have a job vacancy, no worries! They have become complacent knowing that they can readily replace an employee with the help of such services as Monster.com and other job-matching tools. Take away 25 percent of the workforce due to death and two-thirds of workforce due to illness and you will see a dramatic shift in the balance of the employer-employee relationship. When there are not enough employees, salaries will rise, prices will rise, and customer service will fall.
The solution? Plan now.
1. Those of us who have sought jobs are all too familiar with the refrain: “I’ll keep your resume on file.” Now employers must do exactly that. This is the time for employers to not only develop a ready pool of applicants, but to stay in touch with them in the same way that they stay in touch with their most valued customers. Employees will find other jobs in the interim, but when employees become scarce, it is the employers who have shown a genuine interest in the person and the success of perspective employees who will prevail when the bidding wars begin.
2. Hire now across a spectrum of ages. Many employers concentrate their workforce in certain demographic age groups because they believe that their customers will identify better with these demographics or because of an age-based bias that convinces the employer that certain employees are better suited to certain work, certain work environments, or represent greater or lesser degrees of reliability. The coming pandemic lends a new variable to which employers must adapt. Employees less than 18 years of age and greater than 55 years of age are less likely to be ill during the pandemic and less likely to die. Providing a more homogonous mix of employee ages will statistically decrease the impacts of the pandemic on the wise employer’s workplace.
3. Finally, workplace health promotion programs and health benefits, as well as a strict adherence to hygiene and clean workplaces will decrease the impact of the pandemic on the employees, the workforce, the employer and ultimately the place of business.
We cannot avoid the coming pandemic. We cannot avoid the coming impact on men and women alike, old and young alike, rich and poor alike. But we can prepare now, we can make our jobs and our workforces resilient.
Dr. Maurice A. Ramirez is co-founder of Disaster Life Support of North America, Inc., a national provider of Disaster Preparation, Planning, Response and Recovery education. Through his consulting firm High Alert, LLC., he serves on expert panels for pandemic preparedness and healthcare surge planning with Congressional and Cabinet Members. Board certified in multiple medical specialties, Dr. Ramirez is Founding Chairperson of the American Board of Disaster Medicine and a Senior Physician-Federal Medical Officer for the Department of Homeland Security. Cited in 24 textbooks with numerous published articles, he is co-creator of C5RITICAL and author of Mastery Against Adversity. Dr. Ramirez invites comments at: http://www.disaster-blog.com
August 22nd, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
Document management is a term that can cause even tech savvy professionals to throw up their hands in confusion and exasperation. Why? It seems everyone has a different idea of what features and capabilities it includes. To simplify and eliminate unnecessary confusion we’ll skip the acronyms and break the system down into four basic components:
- Document Capture
- Document delivery and distribution
- Document workflow
- Document storage and retrieval
Document Capture
Conventional document capture involves printing a document and placing it in an organized filing system. Electronic document capture places the document in an organized file environment as well, but without resorting to paper copies.
Documents enter the electronic filing system, now increasingly called the “document management system,” in several ways. External documents can originate almost anywhere: from trading partners, media sources, research institutions, government and regulatory agencies, to name a few. These documents normally are captured using document imaging, or scanning devices, using optical character recognition technology. Internal documents most often originate as output from office productivity solutions, such as document printing and check printing systems. Other sources are incoming faxes and incoming email documents.
Historically, there have been two methods for channeling internal documents into the document management system: raw data could be printed and then scanned into the archive system; or the data could be exported as a PDF file. External paper documents, including hard-copy faxes, usually are scanned into archives. E-mail documents normally enter the system in their electronic form.
A host of factors impact corporate archiving requirements. Not least of these are legal, financial and compliance matters but customer related considerations induce their own mandates. In all cases, companies must know where their information resides. For archives to be useful and successfully maintained, a comprehensive and precise indexing system procedure is mandatory.
Parallels exist in the traditional file cabinet processes, which typically are sectioned of by departmental and/or file type and which employ alphabetical and hierarchical file structures, and in the library industry’s Dewey decimal system. The contemporary imaging/scanning/OCR solution is electronic but in most cases it still involves extensive manual indexing, which can be time-consuming and error-prone.
A far better solution is to employ software solutions that employ automated document capture processes that interact with the document management system to apply indexing automatically as documents are captured – at the time of production, for internal documents, or as they are scanned into the system.
Document Delivery/Distribution
Until recently, paper documents have moved about an organization via the company mail system. While this is still commonplace, an increasing amount of document delivery and distribution is being accomplished electronically, with document delivery via email or intranet postings and alerts.
Document distribution to external recipients still relies heavily on postal delivery, but over recent years, communication with trading partners and other outside parties has transitioned to electronic document delivery and distribution methods: electronic mail, authorized intranet access, webforms and in the case of financial transactions, the banking industry’s Automated Clearing House (ACH) network and Financial-EDI.
Electronic document and delivery introduces efficiencies and cost savings not realizable only a couple of decades ago. ACH payments, for example, reduce per-payment costs of more than $2.00 using preprinted check forms and IT department check printing, to mere pennies. Savings stem from the eliminating of printing costs, forms inventory and handling, personnel costs, post-production and mailing charges.
The savings are similarly dramatic for general/special-purpose documents.
The following examples provide a general idea of the difference in costs between physical and electronic document delivery and distribution.
Document Distribution Costs by Delivery Method
- Mailed $0.80 per document x 10,000 volume = $8,000
- Manual Fax$0.60 per document x 10,000 volume = $6,000
- Automated-fax $0.25 per document x 10,000 volume = $2,500
- Emailed$0.03 per document x 10,000 volume = $300
- Mailed document costs include paper, toner, labor, envelope, labor, and postage.
- Fax document costs include paper, toner, labor, and phone call to fax.
- Auto-fax document costs consist of phone charge for cover page, average-length document.
- Email document costs are negligible.
Consider also that the comparatively high costs of the printed documents referenced above are generated on plain paper on laser printers from templates within electronic document delivery and distribution methodologies. As such, they already represent reductions of more than half from the cost of producing business documents using preprinted form. Documents generated using these conventional processes, like conventionally printed checks, can easily approach $2.00 per delivered document versus a relatively few cents using electronic document delivery and distribution.
The cost implications are significant and rapid ROI is apparent.
Document workflow
In concept, workflow embraces many areas of corporate activity, from the assembly line to the business office. In office, it is concerned primarily with the creation and management of business documents – most specifically document routing, document approval and document versioning. Examples might include the development of marketing materials or engineering specifications, both of which often involve the input of multiple individuals at various touch points.
Workflow challenges have always existed, and now, electronic workflow environments exist which erase most of the complications and confusion endemic to the handling and flow, not only of paper documents but also those of manually executed electronic document workflow models.
In document routing applications, for example, documents can be circulated in a variety of ways. Ad-hoc routing is based on human decisions and judgment. A linear document approval routing system moves documents along step-by-step as phases or stages are accomplished – an invoice or purchase order approval cycle, for example. Rules-based routing adds logic to the equation and circulates the documents according to prescribed conditions. Parallel routing systems essentially “broadcast” the documents to all concerned – for example, a request for comments on a request for proposal.
In an automated electronic workflow environment, most document routing, document approval and document versioning steps can take place untended, using general, imbedded or application/content specific rules.
One of the most valuable attributes in an electronic workflow environment, for example, is document version control, where many hands may be involved in the building and refining of a business document. It is easy to envision the chaos that can result when many people have a hand in modifying an original document, working independently and often saving their changes in new document versions. Not many versions down the line, it can become difficult to separate original documents from successive versions.
While working in the electronic environment in itself provides the opportunity for considerable document version support and control it still leaves the collaborators responsible, which is often unacceptable for uncomplicated projects. Today, however, advanced workflow solutions are available that automate workflow processes, freeing workers at all levels to focus on their creative activities.
Document Storage and Retrieval
To assure their most useful life, documents must be stored in such a way that document search and retrieval are quick and uncomplicated. Too often, documents (or “content”) are scattered throughout organizations, created by single individuals or small groups and held in their computer files or remote databases. Much useful information remains isolated in “information silos,” with valuable corporate intelligence unavailable to others.
Corporate content management systems that centralize corporate data and which centralize document search and retrieval have been around for more than two decades, and with varying degrees of success. The upside is their potential to maximize the value of corporate information. The downside has been their proprietary nature, which has led to often unaffordable purchase and implementation costs; and their complexity in document storage, search and retrieval activities, which often has led to resistance by those who stand most to benefit from their use.
More recently, solutions employing web-based technology for document storage and retrieval – corporate intranets and browser search tools – have emerged. Because of the simplicity of their architecture and the fact that document storage, search and retrieval is accomplished using technology that almost everyone is familiar with, such content management solutions often can be acquired for as little as 10 percent of the cost of proprietary predecessors. Equally important, their web-based design virtually eliminates resistance, since anyone able to search the web is immediately able to search the corporate content solution.
By centralizing document storage, document retrieval procedures can be implemented using indexing or full-text search. Currently, indexing is most often applied to documents manually and individually but technology has become available that allow documents to be indexed automatically as they are generated and archived.
Consolidating corporate content using web-based document storage also provides an opportunity to establish intelligent document retention policies. The key is the availability of simplified storage and retrieval techniques and superior document visibility. Document retention decisions can be complex, one reason being that there are few hard-and-fast rules about what to save and for how long. Another is that different documents have different functions, with the functions often determining their retention span. For example, documents related to patents or legal discovery would be expected to be retained for indefinite periods of time — much longer, say, than paid utility bills.
The important thing is to establish a document retention policy: that alone provides a degree of legal protection under the concept of “good faith.” Once established, the policy should be reviewed regularly for the adequacy of it’s retain/purge procedures and to assure the effective capture and availability of all business documents.
About ACOM Solutions
ACOM provides document management solutions to midsize organizations, helping them manage critical documents, cut costs, and improve service since 1983. Document management white papers, case studies, and free evaluation software can be found at http://www.acom.com/document_management/
August 18th, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
Whichever blend of coffee you prefer or whatever type of equipment you are using to prepare the coffee the objective is the same. To release the coffee oils and soluble coffee compounds into solution in the final beverage.
Not all the soluble compounds are desirable particularly tannin so it is important to brew the coffee is just the right manner to produce the perfect cup.
Although it is possible to extract as much as a third of the mass of coffee from the grounds the optimum amount is about 20%
There are six important factors to consider when making fresh coffee.
1. The coffee grind – By this we mean the particle size of the coffee grounds. This varies typically from largest to smallest thus: coarse, medium, fine and espresso (or very fine)
Over-extraction can occur if the grind size is too small for the method and equipment used resulting in a coffee being bitter and too strong. If the size is too large then under-extraction will occur resulting in a weak wishy-washy coffee.
Typically one would use a coarse grind for a coffee pot, medium grind for a cafeteria (French Press), medium to fine for a typical filter drip machine and espresso grind for an espresso machine.
2. Freshness and quantity of coffee – Coffee beans should be stored in a cool dry place out of direct sunlight and ideally kept in an airtight container. The coffee should be ground to order as ground coffee will lose some of its subtle flavors and aromas if is left exposed to the atmosphere for very long.
It is vital to use the recommended dosage of coffee depending on the equipment being used. Using less coffee but increasing the brewing time will not result in a standard brew but create an over-extracted drink. Using more coffee than recommended but a quicker infusion time will result in an under-extracted coffee.
3. Temperature and water quality of the water – Always use fresh cold water to start off the brewing process. Ideally the water should be filtered to remove unwanted taints and odors and be very slightly hard.
Water should be used that has just come off the boil and be approximately 95-98 degrees Celsius for optimum extraction of coffee. Too hot can scald the coffee and too cool will result in under-extraction.
4. The infusion time – The length of time that the hot water is in direct contact with the coffee grounds is crucial in producing the perfect cup. In reality this is determined by the equipment being used to brew it, so always follow the manufacturers guidelines.
As a rough guide however consider the following.
10-30 seconds for espresso grind 3-6 minutes for fine grind 6-8 minutes for medium grind 8-10 minutes for coarse grind
5. Brewing method employed – Basically there are three different methods employed to make coffee. These are steep & strain, filter infusion and pressure infusion.
Steep and strain simply involves putting hot water in contact with coffee grounds in a pot or container until under extraction has occurred. The resulting brew is strained to isolate the coffee liquor.
Filter infusion is common in many applications and uses a filter basket filled with coffee grounds that has hot water added from above. The infusion time is relatively short as the water infuses briefly with the coffee until the liquor passes thought the basket into a flask or container below.
Pressure infusion – Hot water is forced under high pressure though a small tablet of compacted grounds to produce an individual serving of coffee. This is the standard method of producing espresso.
Again it is imperative to use the right method with the correct type and grind of coffee.
6. Cleanliness – Coffee contains oils that will leave a tarry residue on equipment that can contaminate and spoil the taste of subsequent brews. Daily washing and cleaning of equipment is an absolutely vital part in producing the perfect cup.
Have fun – producing a great tasting cup of your favorite coffee should be an easy and enjoyable task.
For more information about coffee and coffee making equipment visit http://www.cafebar.co.uk
August 9th, 2007 -- Posted in Story |
Over forty years ago, a movie theatre didn’t need to be located in a shopping mall to attract sufficient patrons. As other small, privately owned businesses had done before them, small-town movies theatres survived — and, in some cases, even thrived — for several decades. One may still occasionally find independent theatres grinding away in small towns located far enough away from metropolitan areas, but one is more likely to find abandoned buildings with empty marquess that often resemble the rusted prows of old ships. Some old theatre buildings serve as shells for churches and small businesses, but even many of these buildings wear such skimpy camouflage that someone passing through town can easily guess the role they once played as a local center for a shared community experience. After the nature of the community changed, after the local people began identifying with the national television community, the local exhibitors stepped up the public spectacle through promotional showmanship in order to revitalize not only its role in the community but often the local community spirit itself. These converted marquees remind us not only of abandoned ships but of shabby circus tents that remain long after the circus has left town; they may bear few traces of their former role in the community rituals, but the memories of the personal efforts of local showmen to keep the circus alive in the face of cultural change will keep that circus and the knowledge of the cultural significance alive within us.
Before people relied so heavily on automobiles, and before they were afraid to walk more than a few city blocks, many towns of less than a thousand people had their own theatre which residents often labeled “the show house” or “the picture show.” Residents of the western Illinois town of Carthage, for example, saw two show houses in its business district not long after the beginning of the 20th century, but only one of them survived for long. The Woodbine Theatre, named after the crawling vine that grew on the east side of the brick building, was not the first theatre in the town of over three thousand people, but the showmanship of its owner caused the competition to go out of business.
The first Woodbine was converted into a theatre in 1917 by Charles Arthur Garard. C.A., as he was called, had already operated a local dairy and a downtown ice cream parlor which offered five-cent ice cream sodas, confections, five-cent crushed fruit souffles, and a tobacco called Garard’s Royal Blue. He was a shrewd businessman, but he was also a fanciful dreamer who needed to be held in check by his pragmatic and even shrewder wife. Bertha, who often accompanied the silent movies shown in his theatre with her piano, kept him from selling the theatre and drifting off into other projects, such as the growing of grapefruits in Florida. When C.A. died, she took over as proprietor until her youngest son, Justus, became old enough to help her.
Justus recalled in June of 1981 how his father never really had a chance to enjoy any substantial returns from the theatre for ten years after he converted it. “We would’ve been out of business if it hadn’t been for talking movies,” Justus said, the earliest of which “were very hard to understand.” The Woodbine was the first theatre in the area to show talking pictures, which were sound-on-disc like Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone system (shown in the black-and-white TV promos for the 1955 film HELEN OF TROY and included in the DVD and VHS copies of that film). The first sound films were “only part-talkies. They would use some dialogue, then [the characters] would soar into song.” Because sound equipment was expensive to install, he and a friend Oliver Kirschner constructed their own sound system. Cast-iron record turntables were cast at an industrial plant sixteen miles away in Keokuk, Iowa, and attached to the projector drive. Since sound projectors operated at 34 frames-per-second, they revised a way to speed up their projectors to synchronize the film with the soundtrack on the record. Occasionally, “the needle would jump out of the groove,” and the projectionist would have to “pick it up and set it on the right groove by watching carefully and following the sound.” He recalled that they had to do this for two or three years until the advent of sound-on-film. Whenever the needles would jump from one groove to the next because of over-modulation, the customers would patiently wait for the projectionists to synchronize the record with the film.
The introduction of sound-on-film, which Justus recalled was here to stay by 1933, required that he, like other exhibitors, insert an expensive sound head into the projector. Because some films were released as sound-on-disc and some were released as sound-on-film, such as Fox’s Movietone system, many exhibitors had to choose between one system or the other. “Consequently,” said Justus, “we weren’t playing any Fox pictures. Paramount came out with the records and Fox with the sound-on-film.” Once he installed the sound-on-film system, he no longer used the disc system because he was never “able to completely overcome that wavery noise. The music would go up and down.”
Although C.A. died shortly after the sound-on-disc system was working, he never saw the business at his theatre improve. Justus saw a gradual improvement “along about 1937.” This increase in patronage came about not because many small-town citizens were interested in the latest technical improvements or in having their lives enriched by the imaginative visions of such geniuses as Orson Welles; they merely wanted entertainment that would whisk them away from their humdrum lives — and an excuse to get out of the house. They didn’t expect to be surprised by the plot or ending and didn’t really want to be intellectually challenged. They were as excited about seeing their favorite romantic leads involved in the latest routine star vehicles as they were about seeing the burning of Atlanta.
The fact that GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) was a hit in Carthage may or may not have been the result of Justus renting the side of a barn where he and his friends pasted up a 24-sheet display touting the popular classic. Many of the films that we today regard as classics were, at the time, little more than run-of-the-mill programmers. CASABLANCA (1942), for example, was merely a modest romantic thriller with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman acting as stand-ins for our exotic fantasies; they turned the attention of small-town patrons away from their personal issues while the caricatured Nazi villains provided targets for their anger. In most instances, what was playing at the local theatre was irrelevant, whether it be a film like WIZARD OF OZ (1939), which initially did disappointing business but was later perceived to be a classic, or films with appropriate titles like SMALL-TOWN GIRL (1936). It was a community activity that was as vital to the town as the Saturday night band concerts when the white-painted wooden bandstand was hauled to the center of Main Street.
An activity that Justus promoted in his small town to help improve theatre patronage was bank night. Bank night was a gimmick that worked like this: the patrons would register in a large book, and attached to each registration form was a numbered tag which Justus or an employee placed in a large drum. The drum was hauled out in front of the theatre audience after the first showing on Tuesday nights where a local merchant or other prominent citizen would draw out a number and announce it to the audience. If the person holding that number sat in the theatre at that moment, he or she would claim the money. “If not,” Justus added, “the money was put into what we called bank night and held over until the next week. We’d add fifty dollars a week.” A fifty dollar night would hardly pay for the showing, and the theatre wouldn’t start making money until the jackpot reached around $200 or $300. “Then we’d fill the theatre,” he said, and this didn’t include “all the people who came down and gambled in the afternoons.” Of course, a weekly winner would have wiped out the business, so Justus, like other independent exhibitors, took a gamble with this particular gimmick.
Another gimmick to bolster limping ticket sales involved the distribution of sets of silverware one piece at a time until the patron had collected an entire set. These sets — knives, forks, spoons, and ladles — were easier to handle than dishes; dishes were shipped in barrels and often arrived broken. Unlike today, exhibitors actually made the bulk of their profits from ticket sales. The limited offerings of the concession stands in small theatres — long before the days of hot dog warmers and cheese-covered tortilla chips — provided only a small percent of the revenue. The best years for ticket sales, added Justus, were during World War II.
While Justus was an officer in the Navy in 1943, a fire started in the furnace and consumed the entire theatre. His uncle, prominent architect Edgar Payne, drew up blueprints for a wider, single-floor theatre, and construction began immediately under Kirschner’s supervision. The new building had no balcony, but it did contain a soundproof cry room on the second floor. The seating capacity of the theatre was 500 seats, and this was later reduced to 350.
In the late 1930s, Justus remodeled an older building into a theatre in Dallas City, Illinois, sixteen miles north of Carthage. The theatre, he recalled, had a “beautiful front lobby with walk-up front steps” which “later became illegal because it was a fire hazard.” The Dallas Theatre made a profit during World War II but , he added, was the first of his three small-town theatres to “dry up.” A quonset hut theatre was constructed in the river town of Warsaw after World War II. It outlasted the older theatre in Dallas City, but it never, according to Justus, made money. A large theatre circuit made him a considerable offer in the early 1950s for all three of his theatres, but, despite the gradual shifting of populations away from small communities, he declined. He said that he just didn’t want to get out of the theatre business.
Television contributed to changes in the rural communities, particularly when nearby Quincy acquired a TV station in the early 1950s, but a shift away from the shared experience of small-town living was equally to blame. Justus’ theatres lost customers no faster than many other local businesses, such as furniture dealerships and dry goods stores. Despite efforts of theatre exhibitors and other merchants to keep their integral roles alive in a shrinking community, transportation facilitated the migration of residents to urban areas where they established suburban communities complete with ubiquitous shopping centers and malls. New theatres cropped up inside these shopping areas, later becoming twins and multiplexes, but they generally failed to offer patrons any sense of participating in communal rituals. Watching films projected by automated equipment while seated among strangers in a shoebox-sized shopping mall theatre (in some urban areas) bore little resemblance to the experience of watching a movie with neighbors and relatives at the local “show house.”
Patrons in small communities did not have to wait sixteen weeks or to drive around the city for a new film because the small theatres ran several changes a week. Justus recalled that his own theatres would run “a Sunday-Monday movie, a Tuesday bank night, a Wednesday-Thursday, then a Friday and Saturday. We got to the point where we were open three days a week. First it was Thursday-Friday-Saturday-Sunday; then it was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.” The Carthage community supported the theatre during the week nights in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the Warsaw Theatre dwindled down to Saturday and Sunday showings, sometimes with a different film each night. Students from the local four-year liberal arts college in Carthage kept Friday night attendance strong at the Woodbine, but high school football games severely limited Friday attendance in Warsaw.
Another factor that “made it so tough for the little towns,” according to Justus, was that the independent exhibitors “couldn’t get the product until it had played the bigger places,” such as Quincy, which is about forty miles south of Carthage, or Keokuk, which sits just across the Mississippi River on the southeastern tip of Iowa. Because he was an independent, he had to wait six weeks to play a film that was booked first in Quincy, Keokuk, or at other nearby circuit theatres. “If we could’ve played the film the next week,” Justus added, “Why, the people would have stayed home to see it. But they knew that we weren’t gonna have it for awhile. So they’d go to Keokuk.”
Among later gimmicks employed to stir local community interest were Halloween midnight shows and four features run each New Year’s Eve, but the biggest seasonal event in Carthage was the annual series of merchant-sponsored Christmas films. Before each Christmas season, Justus purchased a Filmack trailer for the merchants, and a salesman from St. Louis sold the merchants a spot on the trailer for $37.50. The merchants were also given tickets or complimentary passes for the theatre that were good any time, but the Christmas films — usually chosen for the children of those parents who were encouraged to do Christmas shopping in town — were shown free to the community. The popcorn, of course, wasn’t free. I can remember stuffing sacks full of popcorn and handing them across the glass counter to pushy patrons who had to pay. . . not $3.00. . . but ten cents.
The midnight Halloween showings of horror double-features were the ones that I found to be particularly fun. Justus often ran double bills like THE FLY and THE RETURN OF THE FLY and AIP’s I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN (1957) with UA’s THE RETURN OF DRACULA (1958). For the latter, in Warsaw, I shaped white cardboard into a castle which covered the left exit. Above the exit, appropriately enough for Halloween, was a clock which advertised a local funeral home. (I often wondered why funeral home clocks were displayed in small movie theatres in those days. Were patrons being reminded that their lives were ticking away while the films were flickering on the screen?) I stretched a wire from the projection booth to the exit, located immediately to the left of the screen, and draped a white bed sheet over a clothes hanger. During a high point of one of the films, I stood in the exit doorway with my girl friend and jerked on the string attached to the hanger, intending to pull my ghost down to the exit over the heads of the audience. The ghost emerged from the small projection window on cue, but the hanger became hung-up on the wire and refused to travel as I had intended. I tugged on the string and it snapped, so the projectionist gave the hanger a push. When the houselights came on at the end of the feature, I saw my intended deus ex machina suspended in plain view in the center of the auditorium. Maybe this failure was why Justus limited all of my future promotion efforts to the lobby and outside the theatre; maybe he decided that I had been influenced too much by the gimmicks of such master showmen as William Castle (for such films as THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, THE TINGLER, MR. SARDONICUS, HOMICIDAL, and THIRTEEN GHOSTS). Of all of the Castle films that Justus played, I can only remember the colored glasses for the original THIRTEEN GHOSTS being particularly effective. [Further details about horror movie promotions can be found in the companion article BLACK-AND-WHITE HALLOWEEN HORROR HITS: I WAS A TEENAGE UNDEAD WITCH, which is available online.]
These are only a few examples of promotional machinations that were necessary to boost ticket sales for the second-run films shown by independent, small-town exhibitors. Many of the earlier gimmicks, such as bank night and merchant-sponsored Christmas shows, brought in a few extra dollars, but it is doubtful whether the later and more flamboyant gimmicks greatly affected ticket sales. BOXOFFICE magazine and press sheets for the individual films offered exploitation tips, many of which required the ordering expensive supplies, but the struggling independent had to primarily rely on his own imagination to create makeshift, inexpensive promotions.
Justus Garard* claimed to be one of the last independent exhibitors in the area to go out of business. The Woodbine Theatre in Carthage was sold to the neighboring auto dealer in 1969 and eventually converted into a showroom for new cars. The interior of his theatre, when my brother and I saw it shortly after it had been gutted for this purpose, resembled the interior of the small-town movie theatre in the superb and touching Italian film CINEMA PARADISO (1989). The Dallas and Warsaw theatres, although closed long ago, still resemble movie theatres; the latter, used as a storage area for antiques, still has its prow of a marquee that juts out over the sidewalk. Not much has changed in the river town of Warsaw, but on Saturday nights, without the bandstand with local citizens playing instruments while kids skip around it, and without the glittering marquee of the old movie theatre, Main Street seems much darker, and a lot lonelier. Perhaps only a few independent exhibitors, like those in small, midwestern towns like Carthage and Warsaw, resorted to the above-mentioned gimmicks, and perhaps the death knell for the mom and pop theatre operation had been sounded long before the staging of many of the later promotional efforts, but like the sailors on ships which many of these still-existing theatre fronts resemble, the tenacious independents refused to go down without a fight.
[Note: *Justus Garard's statements were taken from an interview conducted by Sam Garard in June 1981 at a Daytona, Florida, cinema draft house owned by Sam at the time. I am indebted to both my father who passed away in May of 1988 and younger brother for the information which supports my own recollections. Some of these memories have been utilized as background for my novels WATERFIELD and CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.]
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Charles J. Garard is a writer and professor of British literature, American literature, mythology, and film studies. He has taught for two colleges, two community colleges, and two universities (most recently a university in Anshan, China). His nonfiction book on film POINT OF VIEW IN FICTION AND FILM: FOCUS ON JOHN FOWLES is available from Amazon. His interests include mainstream fiction (with his father’s movie theatres forming the background of two novels), science-fiction time travel, and horror; he is now working on a novel about Atlantis and is gathering his notes for a novel about China. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.