Max Fraley, with his library of movie memorabilia and books on cinema
Signal Tribune
Max Fraley is a self-described “longtime film fanatic.” But, considering he was walking by himself to go see movies when he was merely 6 years old, “lifetime film fanatic” is perhaps a better descriptor for the Indiana native who moved to Long Beach in 1958 and made his mark as a teacher and principal, then a bid-caller for auctions of cinematic memorabilia, then the spearhead of the Long Beach School for Adults Film Forum.
In that forum, Fraley, along with three other cinema aficionados, would present classic movies on a large screen for the public to experience. However, it wasn’t simply the vintage films themselves or that big screen that were the draws at this every-Friday-night event. What began as a film-analysis class for the School for Adults soon gained distinction as a movie-revival house that went above and beyond simply screening the films; Fraley and his cohorts would provide historical context and industry stories, and, numerous times, would even host stars of the movies themselves, including Detour star Ann Savage and MGM performer Betty Garrett.
Joining Fraley, the director of Adult Education for the Long Beach Unified School District, were: Ray Sharp, program facilitator for the Office of Multimedia Services; Rob Ray, lead programmer; and Randy Skretvedt, resource specialist.
In the mid ’90s, Fraley hired Sharp, a former actor and stunt man, to teach the film class, but word quickly spread about their excellent projection system. Fraley obtained a license to show the films on the school site, and, in response to the class’s growing popularity, they decided to open the screenings to the general public. They planned their first series of films to “test the waters,” relying on word of mouth and free publicity to bring in more film enthusiasts.
Their opening film in April of 1995 was the 1940 comedy-drama The Great Dictator with Charlie Chaplin. Seventeen years and eight months later, on Friday, Dec. 20, 2012, the forum ended its run with the 1937 musical-comedy 100 Men and a Girl.
The Signal Tribune: When were you born, and where are you from?
Max Fraley: Back in 1935. I’m a Hoosier. Grew up in a little town called Converse, Indiana. Little town— seems like it’s always a population of 947 people. I think that’s still what the city-limits sign says when you drive into town. But it’s a nice little town— great little town to grow up in.
Did you know everyone growing up there?
Oh, yeah. I graduated in the top 10 of my class. There were 10 in my class. So, you know how that goes. But it was really good. Everybody knew you, you knew everybody, and that’s just the way life is in a small town, especially in the mid-West.
So, when did you leave Converse?
Went to college. Well, first I went to Miami University in Ohio, then I transferred to Ball State. Got married— married my high-school sweetheart, and we’re still together. Then we went to graduate school in New York City. Went to Columbia to work on graduate degrees, then interviewed with a guy from Long Beach, California. I’d never been to California in my life. Thought I’d come out here; I had an aunt in the Valley, and I hadn’t seen her in a long time, and her son and I grew up together until they moved out here. So, I thought, “Well, I’ll go out there and spend a year or two.” Still here. We were fortunate that when we moved out here in 1958, we rented a house in Belmont Shore out on the peninsula— 65th Place. Stayed there for six years, renting. It was $100 a month.
Fraley said that, although he and his wife enjoyed living in Belmont Shore, purchasing a home in that neighborhood on a teacher’s salary was not feasible, so they eventually settled down in Huntington Beach, where they raised their family. However, he continued teaching in Long Beach.
Where all have you taught?
Well, I started out at Hoover Junior High School. It was almost a brand-new school. When I started out, I was in P.E. and taught English. I was a coach. And the Dodgers moved here the same year I did, in 1958, and it was funny— they were in New York, I was in New York, came out here from New York. And I couldn’t stand the Dodgers because I was a Cardinals fan. But I get out here, and, all of a sudden, they’re building these new homes in the Lakewood Country Club Estates, building them right and left, and, of course, they were very expensive. But a lot of the Dodgers settled there. Behind that was [Henry Russell] “Red” Sanders, who was [coaching] at UCLA, and so he had something to do, I think, with the development of those Lakewood Country Club Estates.
I was the [Hoover Junior High] baseball coach, and that was really great, because they came over and used our fields to work out during winter time. The Sherry brothers. Even Pee Wee Reese— he was old, but he was still part of the group. And Norm Larker, Stan Williams. Must have been almost a dozen of them that were in that era… it was great for the kids. They were all in awe of the Dodgers players.
So, I stayed at Hoover for 17 years, then moved to Wilson [High School]. I was sophomore basketball coach at Wilson and a counselor, then left, went up to Puget Sound at a place called Gig Harbor for a semester, thinking that we might stay up there. Well, forget that— the first winter that came along, we were on our way back to California.
Fraley in front of a French movie poster for the Sergio Leone spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
I loved both those schools. Lindbergh was one of the best neighborhood-family positions I ever had. It was just terrific. At Franklin, we had so many ins and outs. There were just an unbelievable number of transfers in and transfers out. But, still, a good experience. Great staffs at both schools. Then eventually the opportunity came up to go to the adult school in the evening program, and I knew about it because it was at Wilson… then they had opened up a new site out on Orange and the 405 Freeway, sort of a bungalow type of thing. And that’s when I got the job as the adult-school principal.
Right around that time was when I started getting interested in, “Well, what am I going to do when I retire?” I’d been in the district for 30 years. I thought about auctioneering because I’d known auctioneers in the past. Back in Indiana, in my neighborhood, there was an auctioneer, and I’d gone to a lot of auctions when I was a kid and growing up. And then I’ve been an auction buyer for a long time. So I thought, “You know, I think I can be an auctioneer.” So I went to auctioneer school in Missouri. I looked it up, found out what the best auction school was and went back there, got my training to be a bid-caller and then came back here with the thought that, “Well, I’ll be a principal for three or four more years, and then that’ll be it.”
Fraley’s wife, who had been working for the school district, had to quit that job to help run the auctioning business Fraley started while he did the bid-calling. Fraley’s specialty in bid-calling, naturally, was with movie-related memorabilia— a “calling” he fine-tuned as he worked with Executive Collectibles Gallery in Newport Beach and the Corona-based collectibles company Odyssey Group/Publications.
They’d lease out a hotel or a big auditorium somewhere, and we’d have a big, two-day auction and sell nothing but movie posters and autographs and props that they’d used in movies and so forth. And we did well— very, very well. In fact, we were the first ones— I was the bid-caller now, I didn’t own the company or anything. I was just their bid-caller. But I knew the business; I knew what I was selling. More so than what they did, really. They relied on me for a background of the lifetime of knowledge of going to the movies. I’ve always done that, ever since I was a kid in Converse, Indiana, where we had a little walk-in movie, and that was one of the primary entertainment things in town. They changed the reel four times a week.
Would you describe that theatre?
Well, there’s not a lot to do in that little town of 947 people, unless you played sports, which I did, or unless you played music, which I did, or be in plays, which I did. Everybody did that.
What sports did you play?
Basketball, baseball and ran track… late spring, summer, early fall, you didn’t have that much to do, because we didn’t have things like summer leagues and stuff of that type. You were on your own. But movies— this guy would bring in— he, his wife and their three girls would roll up the projector, and he’d rent the films, and he’d ride over from Peru, [Indiana], which is quite a way, and he would lease this empty lot right in the heart of town, put up a plywood fence around it, brought in park benches and [put] sawdust all over the ground, because it would get muddy… and every Wednesday night, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, he’d have a different movie, and it cost 10 cents, and, when I got to be 12 years old, it cost 14 cents, but I still went.
My folks found no harm in me seeing all these movies. They weren’t like they are today. [It was] cowboys galore and all that kind of stuff. But I became passionate about movies, and I became very knowledgeable, started reading and getting magazines and anything I could that had to do with movies. I was 6 years old, and I’d just walk three blocks downtown and go into this outdoor, walk-in movie. But so did all the farmers and everybody else. The place was usually pretty well filled up—the park benches, you know? And, every once in a while, he had some really good films. It was just something to pass the time, but some of us— I had some buddies— were very into that type of thing, and I carried that with me all this time.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Fraley joined a trivia group. He also competed in a local newspaper’s trivia contest for more than a decade (for which he says he frequently ranked on top, thanks to the “sponge” in his brain that easily absorbs loads of information and also steered him into the world of television game shows.)
I remember on The Joker’s Wild, one of the big questions that won me some pretty good bucks, for those days… was a question about the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, and I knew what the colonel’s name was and who played the role and how it came to be, and it got me into the finals.
More about Fraley’s life will be published in next week’s issue of the Signal Tribune.
