LIVERMORE FALLS – When Maynard Veinotte was growing up in the 1940s, he would take his fishing pole and get on his bike every Saturday morning and ride the roads to look for bottles to get movie money for that afternoon.
“I’d do a little fishing and a little bottle hunting,” Veinotte, of Jay, said Friday.
Veinotte, who grew up in Livermore Falls, said the movies cost 10 cents, but you had to get a little extra money to buy some candy to eat and some hard candy to throw at your friends.
His type of movies starred Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers, he said.
Veinotte stood by a row of classic cars dated from the 1930s and 1940s as he and others reminisced about the downtown decades ago.
It was part of a celebration called Main Street, USA, 1946.
There was a mix of past, present and future, as people walked the streets looking at exhibits and chatting.
In 1946, Central Maine Power had advertising touting electricity in homes, men’s and boys’ sweaters cost $3.50, and a year’s subscription to a weekly newspaper was $1.50.
The Dreamland Theater is long gone, but the memories live on.
On Friday, movies were being shown at Murray Hall instead.
People sat in the dark there eating popcorn and watching the stars of the “Our Gang” and “Little Rascals” series act out their antics on the projection screen.
“Its good, really good,” Amber Richards, 11, of Livermore Falls, said as she left the theater. She had just watched the “Follies of 1938.”
Jake Ouellette, 14, of Livermore, walked up Main Street with his friends wearing an Air Force uniform.
He and other students were involved in the 1946 project.
“It’s pretty cool,” he said, as he continued on.
Gary Desjardins stood on the sidewalk and pointed out where the hot spots used to be.
Besides Dreamland Theater, there were a couple of barbershops, a toy shop, drugstores, hardware stores, a bank, furniture stores and food stores. And at one time there were seven barrooms and four cobblers, said Denis Morin, who grew up in Lewiston and now lives in Jay, where his grandfather had lived.
There used to be trees on both sides of the streets.
“It was cozy,” he said. “There was a little bit of everything.”
In a vacant storefront, Livermore Falls eighth-graders showed how they had traveled 164 miles and had tested Androscoggin River water from Livermore Falls to Errol, N.H.
Another group imagined that the town in the year 2065 would have a mall, the “Thunder Theater,” a jail, a three-story Chuck Wagon Restaurant, Club Booty, a clothing store, JC Sports and a bank.
Nelda Bond, 53, of Livermore Falls, sat on a wall and looked over the downtown.
She used to walk three or four miles from Berry Hill in Livermore to the movie theater with a group of friends. The Dreamland closed in the 1970s.
Bond said she used to help her grandmother shop for groceries.
“Everything has changed,” she said, except the bank.
There was a lot less stress back then, she said.
Her grandmother used to ask her to hold her pocketbook and watch her millions, Bond said.
“She’d only have $1 or $2 in it,” Bond said. “But you could buy a lot of groceries with it. I’d go back to those days in a heartbeat. Those were the good days. They really were.”
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