It's a funny world...little things make all the difference. This week, a gentleman passed away who really was the man who got me interested in poltics as a very young person. He used to run a movie theater across the Delaware from New Hope, PA where I grew up and he sent out a monthly bulletin about the films, but he also waxed poetic about the military-industrial complex, its machinations, and the assassinations of our President, his brother, and Rev. King. He was funny, erudite, and really really interesting. although I came from a politically aware family, his newsletter was the catalyst. Weirdly, his son serendipitously walked in one day as a patient - although I never saw the father in the last 40 years, I told the son to tell him that he'd been quite an influence.
http://www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/78847447.htmlArt Carduner, a pioneer in exhibiting foreign films in Phila.
By JOHN F. MORRISON
Philadelphia Daily News
morrisj@phillynews.com 215-854-5573
WORDS LIKE "curmudgeon," "eccentric," "iconoclastic" attach themselves naturally to an eccentric, curmudgeonly, iconoclastic character named Art Carduner.
Art was a man who certainly marched to his own drummer. He didn't hesitate to show films at the theaters he operated over the years that didn't appeal to the Hollywood-bred filmgoer.
The films he favored inclined to the esoteric, foreign films from directors that nobody but he - and the few serious buffs he appealed to - had ever heard of, often leaving his theaters nearly empty.
Well, after all, he didn't have a popcorn machine.
If he saw someone walking out of one of his films in disgust - or bafflement - he would run after them and insist they take their money back.
Art Carduner, who ran the Band Box, in Germantown, the Hill, in Chestnut Hill, the New Strand, in Lambertville, N.J., among others long out of business, and several used bookstores from New York to Philly, died Friday. He was 90 and lived in Germantown. He also reviewed books for many years for the Inquirer, the Distant Drummer and the Chestnut Hill Local to express his often acerbic, but always funny, opinions on many subjects.Art was a man of firm, if unusual, opinions. For instance, his great political hero was Al Smith, four-term governor of New York from the '20s and a candidate for president in 1928. "He liked his style, his speech, his political programs," said Sallie Van Merkensteijn, friend and associate in the book business. "He thought if Eleanor Roosevelt had been president instead of Franklin, we wouldn't have had a war.
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