Panida matinees were a show not to be missed

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to talk to Loralee Gray and she recalled, in her own words, some of the things that happened during a matinee at the Panida. Her father, Floyd Gray, owned the Panida, Lake, and the Motor Movie theaters and was the mayor of Sandpoint.

Question: Loralee, what do you remember about the matinees at the Panida?

Loralee: Saturday matinees were something else. With all the kids the din would just be outrageous, and you didn't want to start the movie until you knew everybody was looking at the screen. My dad would generally get up on the stage and we'd have a talk. He would talk to the kids and they would find out about theater etiquette. He was up there one time and he kept getting laughs at times that he thought were very inappropriate and he couldn't figure out what was happening. Well, my sons were behind him and racing back and forth across the stage entertaining their friends.

Question: Do you remember the theater etiquette?

Loralee: Oh gosh. Well, you had to keep your voice down to a degree that somebody five kids over couldn't hear you. So it was only the immediate two that you were to speak to. He knew he couldn't keep you quiet entirely, but he kept it down to a certain level. He would stop in the middle of a movie if they got too chaotic.

There was none of this running around with a flashlight identifying one kid because everybody was in trouble. If the movie stopped, we knew we were going to have another talk. Sometimes an hour and half matinee would take three hours before we would get through it. People knew when they brought their kids and left them that they were OK … We didn't let unaccompanied adults in a matinee just for the protection of the kids. The chief of police would come over sometimes, and if we happened to have the lights up he would talk about crosswalk safety and things like that. So going to the theater was a real learning experience.

Question: What reaction did your father get to his lectures?

Loralee: Some of my dad's best employees were the biggest troublemakers. If a kid actually got singled out and taken to the basement, oh boy, you know his friends would wait out there like he had gone to the dungeon. The kid would come back after an hour and half being talked to by Mr. Gray, or Mayor Gray, however they referred to him. Nine times out of ten, they would come up and his friends would ask, "What happened, what happened?" They would often hear, "He offered me a job," and he did.

He would take this kid that was destroying something, or was stealing things, and make them into the best employee you could imagine. I'm not going to mention any names but there are some that occupy some pretty important seats of government right now that turned into really productive citizens. A lot of people have come back to me and told me that incident, in the basement, changed their lives.

He was an amazing man and I was one lucky kid. There were a lot of lucky kids just to have known him. Yeah, I am also fortunate that my kids got to know their grandpa. It is fun, ever once and awhile, to talk to somebody that still remembers Mayor Gray. He would stand out in front of the theater, after the movie was going, and if cars went by too fast he would whistle real loudly and they'd slam on the breaks because they didn't know what it was, or where it came from, but it had the desired effect.

He would walk outside with a broom and dustpan and clean as far down the street as he needed to. He didn't wait for the city street cleaner or anybody else, it was his town, and his business, and he wanted it clean. That was one of his criteria whenever he hired someone.

If you walked in with your application in hand and there was a gum wrapper or something lying on the lobby floor and if you just stepped over it he wasn't so sure he was going to hire you. He rather take that kid he'd been working with in the basement. Yeah, you learned a lot, you learned a lot.