Once Upon a Saturday Night

Modern movie watchers, regardless of what movies they watch, all have one thing in common: they’re incredibly spoiled. The latest films are available the moment they leave theaters, if not before. This wasn’t always the case. For most of the 20th century, if you missed a picture in theaters, it could be years before you had a chance to see it again. As the alumni and parents who attended Tabor’s first homecoming day discovered, the school had a resourceful group of cinephiles.

The Marion weather on October 10, 1927 was perfect. The sky was clear and the temperature hovered in the low 60s as the guests roamed campus, touring the buildings and mingling with students and faculty. Dinner was served banquet style in the school’s sparkling new cornerstone, Lillard Hall. Headmaster Walter Lillard presided as toastmaster while music instructor Edward Albertin led the group in songs between courses. The meal ended with a spirited rendition of the alma mater and alumni and parents were invited to join the students for one last event.

Everyone poured into the gymnasium in the original Academy Building on Spring Street shortly before 8:30 PM. The Tabor students were familiar with the ritual. The guests, however, must have been surprised to find the gym set up like a movie theater. Together they proceeded to enjoy The Road to Mandalay, the 1926 American silent film drama directed by Tod Browning. For the guests, it was a treat to see such a popular film so close to its theatrical release. For the students, it was what they had come to expect on Saturday night. The screening, as always, was hosted by the school’s most revered club.

In 1919, a handful of students approached Lillard about the possibility of showing motion pictures in the gymnasium. Lillard liked the idea and worked with the boys to procure a screen, projector, and projection booth. Half of the costs were covered by a generous benefactor; the other half was secured with a bank loan. To repay the debt, the group devised a plan to open the screenings to the public and charge admission. The plan stalled when they learned they would need a special license from the town. Undeterred, they found another solution.

“Since there is no license required for private performances,” the 1926 Fore ‘n’ Aft recounted, “it was decided to organize a motion picture club and thus overcome the difficulty. It was in this way that the Robat came to be known as a club.”

The Robat Club quickly became one of the most important studentrun groups on campus. Its members organized, promoted, and hosted film screenings every Saturday night. Membership was coveted and highly selective. In any given year, three to six senior officers were tasked with selecting and obtaining films, managing the club’s finances, operating and repairing the projector with a faculty advisor, and supervising the “heelers,” the junior officers who would one day take their place.

“This club is looked up to as the most interesting at Tabor because the chief purpose of it is to give good wholesome amusement to the Tabor sailors in the form of moving pictures,” read a description in the 1921 yearbook.

For many decades, Robat, which is Tabor spelled backwards, had a near monopoly on Saturday night entertainment. Its officers were carefully selected as individuals who their peers trusted with this solemn responsibility. Buy-in from students and faculty fueled the club’s success and brought the community closer together. Ticket packages were sold for $1 apiece, which allowed Robat to pay off its debt by 1926. From that point on, the club steered its profits to other areas of school need. The Athletic Association was a frequent recipient of surplus funds. Debt free, the club’s officers also looked for ways to invest in the cinematic experience they were delivering to their fellow students.

“The grade of films shown has improved annually until this year when the committee has been able to procure strictly up-to-date pictures,” boasted the Robat page in the 1926 yearbook. “The overly sentimental type of story has been carefully avoided and only the best presented.”

Over the years, movie night at Tabor featured many iconic titles. The Sea Beast, which was filmed in New Bedford, was a favorite with students in 1928. In 1940, Grapes of Wrath had a contemplative effect. “Many of our regular moviegoers were surprised to find a film which stimulated thought—in fact, demanded thought,” wrote a Log reporter. The Great Escape had students on the edge of their seats in 1963 while Three Days of the Condor captivated its audience in 1976. “There wasn’t a dull moment,” The Log’s film critic observed.

Robat officers had a long leash to select films, but they weren’t completely free from oversight. James Wickenden, Tabor’s Headmaster from 1942-1976, enjoyed attending the screenings but occasionally intervened when the content wasn’t up to his standards.

“My husband was very strait-laced,” his wife Nancy said in a 2011 interview. “And twice, to my knowledge, he shut off the movie in the middle, because it got a little sexy! I remember everybody was furious at him, but he was a real stickler. But most of the time the movies were pretty innocuous. We had a lot of Westerns.”

Beyond movie night, film gradually asserted a larger presence in campus life. In the fall of 1930, beloved math teacher John Kern, who also supervised the Robat officers as the club’s projectionist, hosted a special Sunday evening in the Lillard Living Room. He shared footage from his summer trip to Europe before treating the boys to clips of the baseball team’s spring training in Virginia. “Tabor Students See Themselves on the Screen,” The Log headline read. There would be much more of that moving forward. In 1933, students marveled at newsreel footage of the Tabor Boy’s intercoastal journey to the Chicago World Fair, which had been filmed and given to the school by Fox Movietone News.

The increasing prevalence of film also enabled new learning opportunities. Guest speakers started bringing their own reels to load into the projector. In 1934, a representative from Ford Motor Company mesmerized students with a movie about the history of the automobile and mass production. Throughout the 40s and 50s, the naturalist photographer Cleveland Grant delivered lectures paired with “exotic technicolor movies” of birds and big game wildlife. Edward Rowe Snow, the marine historian known as “the flying Santa” for the gifts he airdropped to the children of lighthouse keepers, visited campus in 1966. His engrossing presentation, The Log reported, detailed famous Atlantic shipwrecks and included a film with “a sequence of the sinking Andrea Doria as it slipped beneath the surface of water. This sequence is the only one in existence and is considered to be almost invaluable.”

The influence of the Robat Club reached its peak in the 1960s. Its officers were natural leaders, many of whom served on student government and captained varsity teams. The scope of the club’s duties expanded to include taking attendance at mandatory events and serving as an advisory council for the student body. While these responsibilities were added over time, the reverence and gratitude the Tabor community felt for the club existed from its earliest days.

“The fact that the movie is put on by the students and for the students should mean a great deal,” wrote a Log reporter in 1929. “It should promote among the students a feeling that the movie is theirs and that they should have some pride in it.” This notion of holding stock in a shared and cherished tradition proved useful when the club found itself in a dire moment.

“The Robat Committee is faced with a serious problem which involves the pleasure of the student body,” a Log writer declared in the November 1930 issue. “The committee is now on their last list of silent pictures that can be obtained since the producers have ceased to make silent pictures. Any suggestions as to the solution of this problem will be welcomed by the Robat Committee.”

The end of the silent film era meant the Robat’s equipment would soon become obsolete. In a gesture that demonstrated the club’s significance to school life, the student body pledged to buy season tickets during an All School meeting that September. The following month, The Log ran a quietly significant headline: “Robat Club Buys Sound Equipment.”

“The new [sound] attachment is the very latest model by Western Electric for small theaters,” the reporter wrote. “It was decided to obtain the very best, and this model is assured to be one of the very best, costing twenty-four hundred dollars.” The substantial investment was equivalent to roughly $44,000 today. More upgrades followed.

In 1936, the addition of a second projector made screenings more efficient. “From now on, there will be no long moments of anxious waiting for Tabor audiences between reels,” the Robat’s yearbook page noted. Ten years later, the class of 1946 presented the school with a new 16mm projector as its senior gift. “The regular projectors used for the Saturday night movies are too large to take the film on which we record our sports activities and other events of which we would like to have a permanent record,” a Log reporter explained. “It is expected that more movies of our activities will be recorded in this way now that there is a means of showing them.”

This prediction proved accurate. Since the second half of the 20th century, students have increasingly used video to document various aspects of the Tabor experience as well as to pursue their own filmmaking. Technological advancements have also changed how movies are watched on campus. By the mid-1970s, most, if not all, of the dorm common rooms had televisions. VCRs reigned in the 80s and 90s, only to be supplanted a decade later by DVD players. Today, it’s Netflix et al. Each of these developments have had the effect of making movies more accessible than any previous development. For movie lovers, it’s a great time to be alive. But one consequence of modernity is that it’s diminished the collective need to consume movies en masse.

The Robat Club’s last year was 1972. Movies never disappeared from school social life, but they lost their Saturday night monopoly as Tabor’s return to coeducation in 1979 coincided with an increased appetite for more weekend activities. In the post-Robat years, several organizations helped fill the void. There was a film society that sponsored regular screenings and Dick Duffy’s, class of 1956, Captain’s Club often showed movies to boost fundraising. Science Teacher Gunter Suckert later hosted “Saturday Night at the Movies” before passing the baton to Tinker Saltonstall and the Movie Committee in the 1980s.

To this day, the community still finds ways to bond over the shared experience of watching a movie. These range from casual events, like outdoor waterfront screenings in the fall and spring, to structured gatherings. TaborX, the school’s new Saturday experiential learning program, includes a group called Movie Club that explores teen life as depicted in classic films such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Back to the Future.

One of the most compelling moments of communal cinema in recent memory occurred on MLK Day in 2015. After breakfast, the entire school met at the flagpole in front of the Stroud Academic Center where they boarded buses and made the short drive to the Wareham Flagship Cinemas. Together, they proceeded to watch Selma, director Ava DuVernay’s powerful civil rights drama. The film had a profound impact on everyone. Students and faculty used the afternoon to reflect and share their reactions during lunch and group discussions.

From the dawn of the medium, film has been a central part of life at Tabor. It has entertained, it has educated, and it has often done both at the same time. The Robat Club’s earliest members might struggle to relate to the way we watch movies today, but they’d have no problem understanding the reason.