If ever there were a golden age of scarey moviedom, the late '50's were it. William Castle and Hammer Films were at their zenith in those days, serving an unending junk food banquet of grade-B horror send-ups we kids couldn't get enough of. Frankenstein, The Mummy, Dracula, and a vast array of atomic-mutated bugs and lizards were the weekly fare offered for the Clearisil crowd's movie dollars.

Remember the original House on Haunted Hill ? Macabre ? The Creature From the Black Lagoon ? How about The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms , and Peter Graves versus what were undoubtedly the cheesiest special-effect monsters ever - the magnified grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End.

And, of course, there were those new kids on the block, the Japanese, with their impossibly huge, city-stomping pre-Jurassic Park behemoths. It was pure, scare-you-out-of-your-wits heaven for us impressionable pre-teens.

Times were doubly good for Denver Harbor's Venus Theater on Lyons Avenue: its only neighborhood competitor, the Globe, had ceased operations a couple of years earlier. As the decade drew to a close, the Venus stood alone, proud to serve the Saturday afternoon moviegoing needs of Podunk's juveniles. And we juveniles stood in line at the ticket window every Saturday afternoon, ready to be served.

Life was good.

In those days you could get into the Venus for 15 cents if you were under fourteen. So, for a quarter you could watch a double-feature, a newsreel, and a cartoon, and have enough left over for a nickel coke and a nickel bag of popcorn. Naturally, none of us ever aged beyond thirteen, and we all took on more and more of a bent-kneed, stooped posture as we mustered on succeeding Saturdays in front of the ticket window, under the scrutiny of the Ticket Lady.

"How old are you son?"

"Thirteen, Maam."

"Do you have any identification?"

"No, Maam."

"You certainly look tall for thirteen."

"Yes, Maam."

And so the weekly dance went, until new ownership arrived in the form of one "Captain Venus", and changed the rules to one price fits all. (Still not a bad deal, though, at twenty-five cents. And, truth be known, if you were daring enough, you could still climb up the outside drainpipe after dark and crawl in through the boys' bathroom window for free.)

No one knew who he was, where he came from, or anything about him at all. He was just a short, balding, bandy-legged fellow who showed up one day, posted an "Under New Management" sign, and promptly set about re-making the Venus in his own image of entertainment. We kids weren't quite sure of what to make of him. On the one hand, he had raised ticket prices. But on the other, he introduced an element of showmanship previously absent from our weekly cinematic forays.

Oh, he did the usual horror movie shtick: The fake coffin in the lobby ("Macabre"); the posted offer of $10,000 life insurance for anyone who died of a heart attack ("The Unknown Terror"); the battery-wired seats that were given a sudden jolt at appropriate moments ("The Tingler"). He thought up and did other things as well.

On one memorable occasion he stood atop the theater building before the scheduled Saturday opening - a bold, if bandy-legged, silhouette against an azure sky, his crimson Captain Venus cape fluttering - and unloaded a grocery bag of small slips of blank paper over an assembled crowd of a hundred or so slavering juveniles, into which he had mixed maybe a half-dozen actual free passes. The resulting free-for-all netted more than a few black eyes, and a busted tooth or two. Contemplation of possible parental legal action was no doubt responsible for staying the Captain's hand from any further rooftop free pass dumpings.

Another time between double-features he held a talent competition in the small floor area between the first row and the stage. There was the usual lineup of kids who thought they could sing, kids who thought they could tap dance, and kids who just wanted to show off. One of the entrants was Burt Capdepon, local legendary whip-handler extraordinaire. Burt was fourteen or fifteen and for some reason had taken up the art of whip-work, perhaps after having seen Zorro one screening too often. He could delicately pluck cigarettes from table edges and marbles from the tops of coke bottles, at a distance of twenty feet.

Being fourteen or fifteen, he didn't know any better; Captain Venus was an adult, and should have: Allowing a kid to flail a twenty-foot whip in a confined space filled with a wriggling mass of other kids has disaster written all over it. Thankfully, no one had his eye put out.

As I recall, Captain Venus reverted to more sedate rhythms afterward and let the movies - which is all we really cared about anyway - be the draw.

Somehow we survived the good Captain and are still here to smile on those days. Sadly, the Venus is not.

So it goes.