On Wednesday nights, there were band concerts in the courthouse park bandstand. The serious listeners occupied the park benches, while casual-goers sat in their cars pointed toward the bandstand and honked loudly after every number.
California thought up the drive-in church, but Osceola had invented drive-in concerts decades earlier.
Saturday night was the big night around the square. The merchants were the busiest when all of the farm people came in to do their week’s shopping.
Every night there were two shows at the movie. The big kids and a few responsible adults went to the late show because everybody knew that proper Mid-westerners were supposed to go to bed after the 10:15 news on WHO radio. Saturday night was the exception.
The Lyric moved in 1935 to its handsome new building on the west side of the square, the first air conditioned building in town; reason enough to go to the movies on one of those torrid Iowa summer evenings.
The north side show reopened as the Osceola Theatre and Osceola became a two movie house town. Once could see eight movies a week, excluding double features.
Near each theatre there had to be a malt shop and the drug stores soda fountains also stayed open late enough to catch the trade leaving the early show at 9:15. There was a pool hall and several beer parlors that weathered the years better than other social institutions. And, for a while, there was a bowling alley on the west side.
For folks who didn’t have the quarter to go to the movies, there was still incentive to get out of the house on a summer evening. You sat outside and tried to catch a breeze or maybe fanned yourself with a cardboard fan advertising Webster’s or Miller’s funeral homes.
It was for times like these the iron-slatted benches around the courthouse park existed. There, you could at least share your misery with others.
Halfway through the evening you might amble over to one of the three drugstores and buy a double-dipped cone for a nickle and ask for a glass of ice water to go with it, and if you were lucky, pick off a chair at one of those round tables and bask in the cool breeze of the store’s electric fan, as long as your conscience permitted.