Living Atop the Fallon Theatre

Last week, I brought you excerpts from Mary Walker Nevada Lambert’s memoir of growing up on Maine Street, Fallon, Nevada, during the 1930s.  She remembered the details that make a place “home”: its characters — like Depression-era hobos and a local Madam from the “red-light” district — and the many acts of kindness that made her childhood memories happy ones. Fifty years later, during the 1980s, Diane Gauthier-Novak rented a room above the Fallon Theatre, where she raised her children and observed, literally with a bird’s eye view, life on Maine Street outside her upper-story window. (see “In Focus,” Volume 21).  

Gauthier-Novak arrived in Fallon with five children, looking for employment. As she explained, “I decided to place a ‘Want to Rent’ ad. On my way to the newspaper office I got sidelined when I noticed a brand-new business opening its doors—Manpower Temporary Services on South Maine and Stillwater. I walked in, filled out a job application, and took my typing test while sitting on a packing crate, hunched over a large, energetic IBM Selectric typewriter which swayed precariously atop a stock of carboard boxes.

…That led almost immediately to…a six-hour stint working at the ‘Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle Standard’…which quickly morphed into a full-time job taking classified advertising.” She took an ad for a rental, placed by Fallon’s then-Mayor, Robert Erickson. “I innocently asked if the rental was near the center of town, was told it was as close as you can get, and arranged to view the place.”

Her adventure living atop the Fallon Theatre in the middle of town was about to begin.

Gauthier-Novak: “Although I had taken my children to every Disney movie and animated film shown in Fallon, I had never noticed or even suspected that the theatre actually included an apartment….While moving into a new house is exciting and sometimes traumatic to children, my brood was positively speechless when first I led them into the theatre and up the stairs to their new home. My ‘Won’t this be great fun?’ attitude was met by stunned skepticism broken only by a sudden bone-shaking screech from outside our front window—Fallon’s fire-alarm/noon whistle. Formerly just a distant noise to be ignored, now it was something to be reckoned with. We were not only very close to but on eye-level with the beast and it was loud! ‘You’ll get used to it,’ I promised, and indeed they did. Eventually we reached the point where we could listen to the alarm, track the fire trucks as to direction and distance, and come up with a pretty accurate estimate of where any given fire might be, all without leaving our beds.

…Life had its little ironies in our theatre home. Many times guests we’d invited would call from a pay phone because they could not find the door leading to our apartment, yet somehow so many theatre-goers found the little hidden doorbell button that we finally had it disconnected. Some people would stand outside pushing the button, wondering what it was supposed to do while those of us upstairs were covering our ears and wincing.”

Nonetheless, she and her children lived for many years in an apartment that smelled like popcorn with a front window view of the Labor Day Parade, the Christmas tree lighting, and many street fairs.

Her son Rich remembered that they couldn’t really hear the sound effects of blockbuster movies until “Titanic” arrived. At that time Surround Sound had just been installed in the theatre, and “in our large back bathroom we could vaguely hear that giant ship sinking every night for months.

…Would I still raise my children in a theatre in the center of town. Absolutely.”

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