Margaret Howe, Cinema Cashier — A Peterborough Movie-Going History

A crowd flows out of the Paramount after a screening of the (restricted) Academy Award-winning *Tom Jones* (U.K., 1963) in May 1964. The ticket booth in which Margaret Howe spent so much of her working life is on the right. This is a detail from a larger photo; Trent Valley Archives (TVA), Examiner Collection, NYB Paramount Theater April 1964 to August 1964, 40584-4.

“Feminine Personnel – The girl in the box office – The cashier should be of pleasant personality and refined appearance. The better theaters furnish cashiers with silk blouses . . .” – Harold B. Franklin, “Motion Picture Theater Management” (1928)

*Examiner*, May 12, 1942, p.12. Every theatre needed a cashier or two or three, and as this ad makes clear, they preferred a girl or young woman.

From their early days the local theatres had their faithful and capable staff members. In the very beginning the person watching over the door and entrance tickets might well have been the manager/owner; but in just a very few years passed the role of cashier became seen as a woman’s job.

“Operators” or projectionists were almost always men; caretakers or maintenance staff (sometimes known as custodians) were men; ushers were usually men, although sometimes there were “usherettes.”

*Examiner*, Jan. 9, 1958, p.7. It seems that young women need not apply.

A glimpse of the face I long remembered. Margaret Howe, 1972. Courtesy of Bob Howe.

For years I carried around in my untidy mind the image of a woman with an oh-so-familiar face who sold tickets at the Paramount Theatre. One of the first things I wanted to do in my research on Peterborough moviegoing history was to track this woman down; and with some help I finally learned her name: Margaret Howe. She worked in the Centre, Paramount, and Odeon box offices from 1942 to 1976.

Her longevity on the job helps to explain why I have always remembered her face. I must have purchased a good many tickets from her, without thinking at all too much about the woman in the booth who was taking my coins (and later, dollar bills). And it is no wonder too that Margaret’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. Vina Howe, told me that this was a woman with “personality plus” – and she had a “beautiful smile.”

Margaret Howe in a photo that appears to have been taken at the Centre Theatre ticket booth. She was at the Centre from 1942 to 1948.

Margaret Jean Howe had her first day on the job at the Centre Theatre in 1942, when it was still under the management of Sydney Goldstone. It might have helped that the head usher at the time was her younger brother, Albert Warne; both of them lived in their family home, at 327 Downie St. It appears that Margaret began her work at the theatre as an usher (probably, at the time, called “usherette”), but very quickly moved into the cashier’s box.

In 1942 Margaret must have felt in need of a steady job. She was a widow with a nine-year-old old son. Margaret was born on Aug. 9, 1913, and remained a “Peterborough girl” all her life; her parents were Albert James Warne, Jr. and Jennie McClelland Warne (maiden name, Thompson). Her home as a baby was a house that her father had built at 327 Downie St., a stone’s throw from Charlotte St. – and she was still living there in 1943.

The Warne home, 327 Downie St., in the 21st century, just north of the near-triangular corner where Park and Downie streets meet Charlotte. The house at 327 Downie went up circa 1908–10. The building to the left, at the corner fronting on Charlotte Street, was in 1913 the site of a grocer, J. Everett Lillico (who lived at 325 Downie, an address that disappeared in the early 1920s); by the 1950s the building on the corner was the Parkway Pharmacy and Lunch. Google.com map.

*Union Publishing Co’s Peterborough Directory*, 1907, p.260.

Margaret’s father and his three brothers were prominent in the city’s business sector – the type of people known as “leading citizens.” Margaret’s father and grandfather had both been grocers. In 1901 her grandfather Albert J. Warne (1848–1917) had a grocery store at 599 George Street; her father, Albert Jr. (1874–1940), worked there at the time as a clerk. When Albert Sr. retired in 1910, Albert Jr. took over the grocery business. Margaret’s uncles – William Barron Warne (1876–1925), Ernest Victor Warne (1888–1971), and Stanley Charles Warne (1877–1955) – were involved in everything from jewellery and drug stores to boots and shoes and investment activities. Stanley began his work as a watchmaker with the Schneider Brothers (by 1904). Ernest V. started out as a jeweller but by the late 1910s was interested in musical instruments, phonograph machines, and recordings; he eventually opened a long-running music store.

The Warne enterprises: a family very much in business

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Margaret Warne married Eric William Howe in January 1932. It was a quiet ceremony (with Rev. David Wren officiating) at Trinity United Church, a block or two from where she lived. She was eighteen years old and still in the middle of a high-school course, taking Special Commercial at PCVS; Eric was twenty. Born in Peterborough in 1911 (his Scottish father, William, a carpenter, had immigrated a year earlier), Eric worked as a draftsman at the CGE. He was known locally for his hockey skills, playing for the Peterborough Intermediate team, the St. John’s junior OHA team, and in the city league; he was said to be a “hard hitting, clean player.” After a short motor trip the newlyweds settled in to make their lives in Marg’s family home on Downie Street. Their son, Robert (or Bob), was born April 10, 1934.

Eric died suddenly in November 1937 after complications following an appendicitis operation. Attesting to his popularity, hundreds of friends turned out for the funeral.

Marg’s son Bob later remembered how his mother had struggled through the 1940s and 1950s after Eric’s death. The Downie St. household suffered another blow in 1940 when Marg’s father, Albert James Warne Jr., also died, at age sixty-five. Her father-in-law, William Howe, died in August 1944. Despite strong family support, those years around the end of the Depression and during the Second World War were difficult, to say the least. In 1944 Margaret also worked with the Wartime Housing office, which oversaw the city’s newly constructed wartime houses. She was most likely also still taking her regular shifts in the Centre ticket booth.

In 1948 Margaret Howe became the “opening cashier” at the newly established Paramount (December 1948). Over the years the work offered a little security to her life, and to Bob’s upbringing. The pay was not overwhelming – perhaps 75 cents to a dollar an hour in the 1950s – but the work was steady and long-lasting. For many years she shared the ticket booth with Winnie Mitchell, who did the opposite shifts. At some point she officially became head cashier.

Around 1970–71 Marg moved next door to the Odeon, but a couple of years later was back at the Paramount. Perhaps she was working back and forth in both theatres, which were under the same ownership.

Marg never went to the movies, Bob said – she “was working all the time.” But then Bob was able to get into the pictures for free, and he went to almost every show, sometimes more than once. With the help of his mother, he said, he sometimes sneaked in the back door for the 6:30 movie and was gone by the 9:30 showing. The manager was “very very good to us,” he said, and treated them well.

*Motion Picture Daily*, Jan. 6, 1953, p.6. Sharp eyes helped, too: in the 1950s cashiers in Ontario were told more than once to be on the lookout for phony quarters.

Bob’s main memory of the movies – in addition to seeing lots of cowboy pictures at the Regent – was the Paramount lineup that stretched around the block, going from the theatre doors south to King and Water streets. He remembered, for instance, being in the long lineup and wondering if he’d be able to get in because for him it was a “freebie.” Bob said that the Examiner had a popularity contest for downtown workers in the late 1960s or early 70s, and Margaret won.

Margaret would continue to live with her mother, Jennie, and care for her as she aged, until Jennie’s death in 1971. The three of them — Marg, her son, and her mother — stayed on at Downie St. until around 1950, when they moved to a house on Hunter Street West, still in roughly the same neighbourhood. By 1961 they were living at 497 Gilmour Street — not far from the original home on Downie and just up the block from Uncle Stanley Warne’s home at no.466.

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Margaret Howe died at Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto, on Jan. 31, 1977. She had remained working at the Paramount until the illness took over. The Peterborough Common Press commented on this “Native-born and lifelong resident” who had been an “employee of the Paramount Theatre for many years” and “a member of Trinity United Church.” She was only sixty-three years of age, but she would be long remembered for that welcoming smile and for offering entry to countless motion pictures in the friendly confines of the downtown theatre.

Many thanks to the late Bob Howe and his wife, Ida, for asking me to their house to talk about Margaret Howe and for passing on some photos to me. Bob Howe died on August 16, 2018.