Noting the recent news coverage on the 50th anniversary of the sit-ins to integrate eating places and other businesses in downtown Oklahoma City, Bob Eufinger was reminded of another landmark downtown in 1954.
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Not many people are aware of it, he said, and perhaps more people should be.
Bob was 23 that year and assistant manager at the Criterion Theater, one of downtown's luxury movie palaces when downtown was the center of commerce and culture and society.
He loved that job. The glamour of the beautiful building and the mystique of the films were irresistible. Movie theaters were the foundation of community life in the 1950s.
A couple on their first date went to the Criterion, Eufinger said, and no man came to an evening showing in anything other than coat and tie.
He remembers three theaters on the northeast side of the city for black clientele, but other local theaters were segregated.
The first federal civil rights legislation appeared in 1954, the same year the Criterion closed briefly for renovations.
Patrick McGee had come from Colorado to operate what would become the Cooper Foundation Theaters, including the Criterion, the Plaza, the Capitol and the Ritz, among others.
When the renovations were finished and the theater reopened, McGee gave passes to the construction crew, some of them were black.
Eufinger recalls the phone calls to the theater from black people checking if the offer was for real, and also the calls that promised such reactions as torch marches down Broadway.
In the end, McGee and his staff casually admitted black customers, and what happened was nothing. No demonstrations, no protests, no racial incidents inside the theater, nor protest parades.
Just movies and appreciative audiences and an open door for a future with equality.
By 1958, Eufinger said, when the sit-ins began, his thought was: "What's the big deal? We've been doing it all along.”
Eufinger is 76 now. He's spent a career in medical technology, but occasionally revisited the theater profession. He loves the memories of the movie palaces and vintage Oklahoma City history. At his age, he's finding fewer folks who share those memories.
Still, he said, "It was quite an adventure.”
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