1966: The Sound of Music

By Corinne H. Smith

1966:  I turned nine years old.  I was in Miss Brubaker's fourth grade class at Farmdale Elementary School (though she soon married and became Mrs. Crouse).  Daddy was 37, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my ninth birthday was “You Keep Me Hangin' On” by The Supremes.  Mom snapped this photograph.  You can see some changes in our living room.  We put up paneling, and we exchanged our old black-and-white television for a console entertainment unit that combined a color TV, a record player, and a radio with stereo sound.

     A lot was going on during the summer of 1966.  People were marching for civil rights in Mississippi.  The AFL and NFL were negotiating a merger agreement for a united football organization.  In our neighborhood, a new stretch of U.S. Route 30 just opened to traffic, from Rohrerstown Road to Prospect Road.  And The Sound of Music finally came to Lancaster County.

     The movie had been officially released more than a year beforehand, in March 1965.  But that didn’t mean that it automatically appeared in theaters in every market.  According to Cinematreasures.org, The Sound of Music “was among a number of prestigious productions given the ‘roadshow’ treatment, whereby a film was booked as an exclusive engagement in major cities and would play for many, many months before being put into a nationwide general release.”  And that’s what happened to us.  Oh sure, if we had wanted to drive 50 miles, we could have gone up to Harrisburg, where The Sound of Music had been showing nonstop at the Eric Theatre since the middle of July 1965.  But no, it wasn’t that crucial.  We had decided to wait.

     In the meantime, the movie set all kinds of box office records across the country.  It won five Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 18, 1966, including Best Picture of 1965.  And still it eluded us.

We could buy the soundtrack album months before we could see the movie itself

     When the Fulton Opera House announced that it would open The Sound of Music on Wednesday, June 22, 1966, we saw our chance.  School was out for the summer.  Mom and I could go to the 2 p.m. matinee.  Off we went, to stand in line and get reserved seats for the show.  $1.50 each.

     Every city and town has its traditional elegant theater of old.  The Fulton is the one for Lancaster.  Named after local legend Robert Fulton, it was built in 1852 on the foundation of a jail that pre-dated the American Revolution.  Across the decades, it had had its ups and downs as a venue for both film and live shows.  By the late 1950s, the Fulton was “repositioned … as an art moviehouse, with occasional stage performances.”  The Sound of Music hit the Fulton at the right time.  Soon the decision would be made to limit its offerings to live shows only.  Lucky us.

     Even though I was fairly young at the time, I have clear memories of going to this movie.  A lot of people were there.  We had to stand for a long time in a long line that wound down the sidewalk along North Prince Street.  It was hot, very hot.  (Turns out that we were a few days into a week-long heat wave that featured sustained daytime temperatures in the 90s.)  When we finally were allowed to enter, every empty seat filled up quickly.  The air was stuffy.  I don’t believe the theater was air-conditioned.  And when the projectors were supposed to start rolling, they were delayed by a mechanical problem.  We had to sit and wait for something to get fixed, perhaps for as long as an hour or more.  But I remember that the place was still packed.  Nearly everyone stayed.  We had all waited this long for The Sound of Music.  We weren’t going to leave.

     The movie sure lived up to its reputation.  Nothing could match the opening scene of the Alps on the big screen.  In an instant, we were flying from our seats in downtown Lancaster to a magical mountainous place, thousands of miles away.  It seemed as though we were in the congregation for the wedding, too.  The chords of the cathedral organ resounded throughout the hall, nearly shaking the walls around us, and Maria strode past us in white, down the aisle.  Then we were dragged into the chase scene.  Run, run!  At last we made our way up into the mountains again.  The music and the whole production were thoroughly magnificent.  For nearly three hours, we were in it, we were there.  I still get chills, remembering.

     In 1986, my father, my then-husband and I joined a tour group that traveled to Munich, Bavaria and Austria.  This time we had a chance to witness The Sound of Music settings ourselves.  The big estate that was used in the movie was in private hands, but we could see the mansion from across the other side of the water.  The gazebo had been moved off the property so that tourists could take pictures of it and dance through it themselves.  Some of our fellow travelers did just that.  Downtown Salzburg looked familiar, as we passed the same fountains and walked through the same city squares that Maria and the children had skipped across.  And the Alps!  Wow.  Nothing can quite prepare you for them.  It was magic, again:  Life imitating Art imitating Life.  Who could imagine such beauty?  And really, we felt as though we’d already been here.

     Maybe it’s because of our own German heritage and musicianship that we have adopted “Edelweiss” and “The Sound of Music” as family standards.  Both songs have been played at recent funerals of Hosfeld relatives.  Our ancestors didn’t come from Austria, and they arrived in America well before the time of the World Wars.  But somehow The Sound of Music has ended up being our story.  How did Hollywood do that?