The story is written in the historical context of World War II, which started in August 1939.

Prior to that,
from 1938 to 1939, people were getting more and more worried about the possibility of war.
Everybody was watching Hitler get more and more aggressive against Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Internally, people were also watching Hitler start hunting Jews down forcing them to wear stars to
identify them, arresting Jewish men, putting Jewish families in forced labour camps There were a lot
of Jewish refugees around and more who were trying to flee Germany. The first paragraph of the story
makes reference to this. In general as well, before World War II started, there was a big depression
and the economy was very bad in 1939.
Craven stopped and read--there were still optimists it appeared, even in 1939, for nobody but the
blindest optimist could hope to make money out of the place as "The Home of the Silent Film."
This sentence is written after a paragraph that describes the poor state of a theatre rat holes, bad
seats that is very far away from town, so nobody would go there. The sentence in particular means
that the narrator thinks the theatre cant make money.