Here is an item from July 13, 1912 issue of Moving Picture World about the opening of the Airdome next to the Grand Theatre:
“Olathe, Kansas. —Weldon & Wilson have opened what is known as the Grand Theater Annex, joining the Grand on the south. It is an open air theater forty feet in width. The side walls and back will be of galvanized iron. The booth is fireproof. This new play house will seat 500 people.”
The fact that Weldon and Wilson were operating the Grand in 1912 and the Gem in 1916 may increase the chances that those were the same theater. The pair sold the Gem in 1919, along with a second Olathe house called the Moneta Theatre. This was reported in the July 17, 1919 Olathe News.
The October 7, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World has an article about the Gem Theatre (which might have been the Grand with a new name, not the Gem on Park Street) which is headed “Olathe’s One Picture Show,” so the Lyric was closed by 1916.
I’m wondering if the Grand of 1912 might have been the same house that was operating as the Gem in 1916, described in the October 7 issue of Moving Picture World:
“Olathe’s One Picture Show.
“Olathe, Kan.— A city of 3,000 people, with 17 churches—and one moving picture show! That is Olathe, Kan. The picture show is operated by T. H. Wilson and W. W. Weldon, and they are said to be prospering. The Gem theater seats 521. It is closed in the summer, the pictures being shown in a pavillion, roofed, the sides of which are removed in warm weather. It has a hard maple floor, and is equipped with church pews and seats made to order. In the winter, the seats are removed, and Wilson & Weldon operate the pavilion as a skating rink and basket ball hall.
“But about the church pews—they are especially appropriate this summer, since the Methodist church, which was erecting a new structure, used the pavilion for its Sunday services. Olathe does not have Sunday pictures, so the business is not interfered with.”
The Plaza Theatre and its manager, L. W. Morris, were mentioned in the November 22, 1930 issue of Motion Picture News. The Plaza was not among the four houses listed at Great Bend in the 1929 FDY, but I’ve been unable to discover if it was a new theater or one of the other theaters renamed.
When the Oaks Theatre was demolished in 1977, the Pasadena Star News ran a brief article about the house, which has a couple of interesting lines. One is this citation of an actor named Ollie Prickett “…who remembers the old theatre. He recalls as a child being told about the building of the place as Talley’s Theatre.”
Mr. Prickett’s memory may or may not have been a bit garbled, but the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory did in fact list (without an address, alas) a Talley’s Theatre in Pasadena, along with five other houses. But then it also listed “Fischer’s Theatre, 75 N. Oakes St.” which also appears a bit garbled. Yet, if the street number was not a mistake, 75 N. Fair Oaks would have been in the Pasadena Masonic Temple, which had an auditorium upstairs which I can imagine the lodge leasing to Mr. Fisher, perhaps when he lost the lease on the house at 87, which by 1913 had become the Savoy. For at least part of its history the Savoy operated as a legitimate house, which could have been the policy in 1914. (A whole bunch of speculation, I know, but there’s not much to go on.)
Another line from the Star News article is this: “The theater was built in 1910 by Anthony Pearce, with some assistance from William C. Clone [sic] who, some years later, build Clune’s Theatre around the corner on Colorado Boulevard. The shows at first were patterned after those at the Burbank burlesque in Los Angeles.” Clune’s Pasadena actually opened in March, 1911, and I seriously doubt that burlesque was the policy at the Burbank as early as 1910, or at the future Oaks Theatre in prim and proper Pasadena for that matter, but the opening year of 1910 sounds about right.
There is another candidate for the location of the Tally’s Theatre listed in the 1914-1915 AMPD. A 1918 Pasadena directory lists a Crown Theatre at 29 W. Colorado. This was three years before Jensen’s Raymond Theatre, which was later renamed the Crown Theatre, was built. I’ve been unable to find any more information about this first Crown Theatre.
Here is an excerpt from a “10 Years Ago” feature in the August 4, 2021 issue of the Madison Courier: “Thursday was a historic day in Marengo; it was the date of the last showing of a movie at the Rialto Movie Theater. ‘The Cable Guy’ marked a long line of Hollywood classics to shine across the silver screen of the 175-seat theater that opened more than half a century ago. The theater will now become Stone Canyon Country Music Depot, owned by Wayne Bullington.”
I haven’t been able to find any other references to a music venue of that name on the Internet, and in fact in the Google satellite view of the building the interior looks burned out, though the walls appear intact. In Google’s March, 2023 street view the masonry front looks freshly painted and the building (or its shell) bears a “For Sale” sign, though an opening in the door shows a bit of what looks like wreckage inside.
But in any case, the Rialto seems to have come back from its mid-1950s closure and survived for a long time. Oh, and Indiana Memory has a 1985 photo of the Rialto.
This theater was in the planning stage, at least, by 1916, when the November 4 issue of Motion Picture News reported that “Albert Lafrentz has purchased two lots in a prominent part of Ute, and will begin at once the erection of a brick building to be used as a moving picture theatre and opera house.”
It was listed in the 1926 FDY as the State, but by 1928 it was operating as the Star Theatre (Ute did not appear in the 1927 FDY.) It was listed with 300 seats through the 1930s. The April 20, 1946 issue of Showmen’s Trade Review reported the sale of the house: “Mr. and Mrs. Archie Mahoney have purchased the Star Theatre, Ute, from A. L. Lafrentz, who built the house in 1916 and has operated it since. Mahoney is a war veteran.”
The Star was still listed in 1951, in the last edition of FDY to which I have access, still with 300 seats. An item in Motion Picture Herald of January 7, 1956 said that “[t]he Star theatre in Ute closed with the New Year’s Day showing.” The May 11, 1957 issue of Boxoffice said that the Star had reopened under the sponsorship of the Ute Commercial Club, with two showings a week, on Wednesday and Saturday nights. I’ve found nothing later about the theater.
Incidentally, Albert Ludwig Lafrentz (January 26, 1885-October 30, 1955) is buried in Saint Clair Cemetery in Ute.
This photo of Elk Point shows the south side of Main Street with the Opera House building at the center. It is datable by the advertisement on the wall promoting an event, presumably at the Opera House, on Wednesday, June 24. The cars in the photo date from the early 1910s, and the year in that period when June 24 fell on a Wednesday was 1914.
Within a year, the vacant lot with a low fence in front of it (left of center) would become the site of a moving picture theater that appears on the 1917 Sanborn map. This had to have been the Florence Theatre, which was in operation by June, 1915. The modern address of the Florence is 118 E. Main Street.
If this house was built after 1898 then it was not Elk Point’s first Opera House. A Dakota gazetteer and business directory published by Polk in 1888 said that Elk Point “…contains a fine opera house, just finished, with a seating capacity of 500….”
A February 1, 1930 item in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported the destruction by fire of Fred Nearman’s cream station in Elk Point. The Florence Theatre was one of the neighboring buildings which suffered some smoke and water damage. Wilmarth’s barber shop was on the other side of the burned building. The cream station was a frame structure.
This weblog post presents some memories of Don Fowler, who grew up in Elk Point in the 1910s and 1920s, and he mentions the Opera House, and says that Wilmarth’s barber shop was on one side of it and a bank on the other. On the 1917 Sanborn, there are banks on both sides of the Opera House, but next to one bank is a small wood frame building housing a barber shop and lunch room, and next to that is this moving picture house at 118 E. Main.
What I suspect is that one of the banks closed and Wilmarth’s barber shop moved into its space, and the barber shop and lunch room became the site of Nearman’s cream station, in between the new barber shop location and the Florence Theatre. The improbably large seating capacity listed for the Florence in the FDYs of the 1920s was probably a mistake. The last appearance of the Florence in the 1935 FDY gives it only 220 seats, a plausible number that was probably true all along.
It’s unfortunate that Don Fowler mentions Elk Point’s movie house only in passing, not even giving its name, only saying that it showed silent movies. The ambitious Mr. Fowler, who in 1930 became the first of his family to enroll in college, probably didn’t squander his youth watching picture shows.
It’s possible the Florence ended up in the Opera House building, which sources I’ve seen indicate dated to 1891 or earlier. A 1915 building inspection listed the Opera House as being in poor condition, while the Florence was listed as very good, which might be expected if the building was nearly new.
The description of this house is inaccurate, but both the theater name and the building have a complex early history. A movie house called The Nickelodeon opened at 300 N. Water Street in 1906, and a house called the Crystal Theatre was operating in Decatur as early as July, 1908, and it was probably next door to The Nickelodeon, which appears to be in the same building. The 1908 Sanborn map shows two adjacent storefronts labeled “Electric Theatre” at 302 and 306 N. Water (302 is on the corner, so there is no 300 on the map.)
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists the Crystal without an address, but also lists a house called the Corner Theatre at 300 N. Water Street. The 1915 Sanborn map still shows the two adjacent storefronts now labeled “Motion Picture Theater”, and it still numbers them 302 and 306 Water Street.
One source says The Nickelodeon became the Colonial Theatre. The Crystal was called the Nasawan Theatre for a while before reverting to the Crystal name in 1911. It seems likely that the Crystal expanded at some point to absorb the former space of The Nickelodeon (the original space was far too small to accommodate almost 500 seats.) Unfortunately Sanborn maps of the location when the Crystal would have been alone and enlarged are not available.
In 1922 the Crystal came under the control of a Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Morrow, who opened the Morrow (or Morrow’s) Theatre, a different house, at 312 N. Water Street in 1929. The Morrow Theatre became the Bond Theatre in 1943. The Crystal was listed in the FDY through 1935 but was gone in 1936. I’ve been unable to find any theater in Decatur that was called the M & M.
The June 11, 1910 issue of American Contractor said that the theater being built at Holland, Michigan for Tim Slagh and A. Smith had been designed by Fred Jonkman. Jonkman must have been a local architect, as the only other reference to him I’ve been able to find is a 1930 newspaper article noting that he was a member of the Holland Common Council.
The final closure of the Ritz Theatre was the consequence of a late 1937 fire, reported in the December 22 issue of The Decatur Daily Review. The Crescent had been closed following an earlier fire in March, 1929. The house was reopened by an F. M. Mertz (Fred, perhaps?) in March, 1934, and sold to the Ritz Theater Company the following year. The December, 1935 remodeling had cost Ritz $8,000, a not inconsiderable sum for a modest, neighborhood house in a provincial city during the depression.
The former Strand Theatre reopened as the State Theatre on December 24, 1928 following a $100,000 remodeling job, according to an item in The Billboard of January 12, 1929. The Southwestern New York Theater Corporation had bought the house the previous summer and closed it for several months for remodeling. The company had also bought the American Theatre at East Liverpool and two houses at Steubenville.
The only two theaters listed in a 1916 Elk Point business directory are the Opera House and the Florence. I’d be inclined to think this was the Florence, if not for the fact that the FDY listings for that house, which begin in 1926, give it a capacity of 350, and this building seems too small to accommodate that many seats. Still, Florence is the only theater name other than Opera House I’ve been able to confirm in Elk Point during this era. Maybe the FDY simply got the capacity wrong, or perhaps the Florence moved to a larger building between 1917 and 1926.
This building could have been the location of one of the three theaters listed at Elk Point in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. They were called the Gem, the Lyric and the Yale. The Gem and Yale were gone by early 1915, but the Lyric was at least still standing, though closed, and had been joined by the Florence Theatre, which of course might have been a new name for one of the other two houses.
The Florence Theatre is one of three houses listed at Elk Point in the public building inspection section of the annual report of the Food & Drug Commissioner of South Dakota for the year ending June 30, 1915. The other two were the Opera House and a Lyric Theatre, the latter listed as closed. The Opera House and Florence were also listed in a 1916 business directory, but the Lyric was not. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory listed three houses at Elk Point: the Gem, the Lyric and the Yale. The Opera House was converted for movies in late 1915, according to items in issues of Moving Picture World in November and December that year. It’s possible that Florence was a new name for either the Gem or the Yale.
In 1915 the Florence was operated by a Mr. Charles Bovee, who was still in charge in 1930 when the February 17 issue of the Sioux City Journal reported that part of the floor of the lobby of the Florence Theatre in Elk Point had collapsed while a crowd was waiting for the second show to begin. Ten people were injured. This article also notes that the theater had been named for Bovee’s daughter Florence, who witnessed the event but was not injured.
The December 25, 1926 issue of Exhibitors Herald had a list of theater managers who had participated in a survey determining the top moneymaking movies of 1926. C. L. Guillaume of the State Theatre, Elk Point, was among them.
Elk Grove High School’s 1961 yearbook said that a free forenoon show presented by the State Theatre had been among that year’s Homecoming events (homecoming being football-related, the event would have been held in the fall of 1960.)
The Texas Theatre operated in two different buildings in the late 1920s. The December 27, 1927 issue of Motion Picture Herald said that: “Mr. and Mrs. Walker opened their new Texas Theater at Grand Prairie Nov. 14th.” The Texas Theater that J. S. Walker was operating in 1926 when he was submitting capsule movie reviews to the trade journals was at a different location.
The May 7, 1927 issue of Moving Picture World had this notice: “GRAND PRAIRIE, TEXAS.— J. S. Walker, manager of Texas Theatre, has purchased two lots on Main street as site for proposed new moving picture theatre.” Just over seven months later Mr. Walker opened the new Texas Theatre. Walker had been leasing the original location, a former garage, at least as early as December, 1925, according to a lawsuit over the property (to which Mr. Walker was not a party.) I’ve been unable to discover the address of the original Texas Theatre.
The April 14, 1928 issue of Motion Picture News said that [t]he Palace theatre at Midland, Texas, is installing a new $7,500 organ.“ The Palace had also been mentioned in the "Dallas” column of the April 7 MPN: “Films of an oil tank fire ‘shot’ by W. H. Williams, manager of the Palace and Idle Hour theatres at Midland, are being shown in a Paramount News reel.”
Here is an item from July 13, 1912 issue of Moving Picture World about the opening of the Airdome next to the Grand Theatre:
The fact that Weldon and Wilson were operating the Grand in 1912 and the Gem in 1916 may increase the chances that those were the same theater. The pair sold the Gem in 1919, along with a second Olathe house called the Moneta Theatre. This was reported in the July 17, 1919 Olathe News.The October 7, 1916 issue of Moving Picture World has an article about the Gem Theatre (which might have been the Grand with a new name, not the Gem on Park Street) which is headed “Olathe’s One Picture Show,” so the Lyric was closed by 1916.
I’m wondering if the Grand of 1912 might have been the same house that was operating as the Gem in 1916, described in the October 7 issue of Moving Picture World:
The Plaza Theatre and its manager, L. W. Morris, were mentioned in the November 22, 1930 issue of Motion Picture News. The Plaza was not among the four houses listed at Great Bend in the 1929 FDY, but I’ve been unable to discover if it was a new theater or one of the other theaters renamed.
When the Oaks Theatre was demolished in 1977, the Pasadena Star News ran a brief article about the house, which has a couple of interesting lines. One is this citation of an actor named Ollie Prickett “…who remembers the old theatre. He recalls as a child being told about the building of the place as Talley’s Theatre.”
Mr. Prickett’s memory may or may not have been a bit garbled, but the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory did in fact list (without an address, alas) a Talley’s Theatre in Pasadena, along with five other houses. But then it also listed “Fischer’s Theatre, 75 N. Oakes St.” which also appears a bit garbled. Yet, if the street number was not a mistake, 75 N. Fair Oaks would have been in the Pasadena Masonic Temple, which had an auditorium upstairs which I can imagine the lodge leasing to Mr. Fisher, perhaps when he lost the lease on the house at 87, which by 1913 had become the Savoy. For at least part of its history the Savoy operated as a legitimate house, which could have been the policy in 1914. (A whole bunch of speculation, I know, but there’s not much to go on.)
Another line from the Star News article is this: “The theater was built in 1910 by Anthony Pearce, with some assistance from William C. Clone [sic] who, some years later, build Clune’s Theatre around the corner on Colorado Boulevard. The shows at first were patterned after those at the Burbank burlesque in Los Angeles.” Clune’s Pasadena actually opened in March, 1911, and I seriously doubt that burlesque was the policy at the Burbank as early as 1910, or at the future Oaks Theatre in prim and proper Pasadena for that matter, but the opening year of 1910 sounds about right.
There is another candidate for the location of the Tally’s Theatre listed in the 1914-1915 AMPD. A 1918 Pasadena directory lists a Crown Theatre at 29 W. Colorado. This was three years before Jensen’s Raymond Theatre, which was later renamed the Crown Theatre, was built. I’ve been unable to find any more information about this first Crown Theatre.
Here is an excerpt from a “10 Years Ago” feature in the August 4, 2021 issue of the Madison Courier: “Thursday was a historic day in Marengo; it was the date of the last showing of a movie at the Rialto Movie Theater. ‘The Cable Guy’ marked a long line of Hollywood classics to shine across the silver screen of the 175-seat theater that opened more than half a century ago. The theater will now become Stone Canyon Country Music Depot, owned by Wayne Bullington.”
I haven’t been able to find any other references to a music venue of that name on the Internet, and in fact in the Google satellite view of the building the interior looks burned out, though the walls appear intact. In Google’s March, 2023 street view the masonry front looks freshly painted and the building (or its shell) bears a “For Sale” sign, though an opening in the door shows a bit of what looks like wreckage inside.
But in any case, the Rialto seems to have come back from its mid-1950s closure and survived for a long time. Oh, and Indiana Memory has a 1985 photo of the Rialto.
This theater was in the planning stage, at least, by 1916, when the November 4 issue of Motion Picture News reported that “Albert Lafrentz has purchased two lots in a prominent part of Ute, and will begin at once the erection of a brick building to be used as a moving picture theatre and opera house.”
It was listed in the 1926 FDY as the State, but by 1928 it was operating as the Star Theatre (Ute did not appear in the 1927 FDY.) It was listed with 300 seats through the 1930s. The April 20, 1946 issue of Showmen’s Trade Review reported the sale of the house: “Mr. and Mrs. Archie Mahoney have purchased the Star Theatre, Ute, from A. L. Lafrentz, who built the house in 1916 and has operated it since. Mahoney is a war veteran.”
The Star was still listed in 1951, in the last edition of FDY to which I have access, still with 300 seats. An item in Motion Picture Herald of January 7, 1956 said that “[t]he Star theatre in Ute closed with the New Year’s Day showing.” The May 11, 1957 issue of Boxoffice said that the Star had reopened under the sponsorship of the Ute Commercial Club, with two showings a week, on Wednesday and Saturday nights. I’ve found nothing later about the theater.
Incidentally, Albert Ludwig Lafrentz (January 26, 1885-October 30, 1955) is buried in Saint Clair Cemetery in Ute.
This photo of Elk Point shows the south side of Main Street with the Opera House building at the center. It is datable by the advertisement on the wall promoting an event, presumably at the Opera House, on Wednesday, June 24. The cars in the photo date from the early 1910s, and the year in that period when June 24 fell on a Wednesday was 1914.
Within a year, the vacant lot with a low fence in front of it (left of center) would become the site of a moving picture theater that appears on the 1917 Sanborn map. This had to have been the Florence Theatre, which was in operation by June, 1915. The modern address of the Florence is 118 E. Main Street.
This house became the Roxy in 1927. It’s recent opening was noted in the July 2 issue of Moving Picture World.
If this house was built after 1898 then it was not Elk Point’s first Opera House. A Dakota gazetteer and business directory published by Polk in 1888 said that Elk Point “…contains a fine opera house, just finished, with a seating capacity of 500….”
A February 1, 1930 item in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reported the destruction by fire of Fred Nearman’s cream station in Elk Point. The Florence Theatre was one of the neighboring buildings which suffered some smoke and water damage. Wilmarth’s barber shop was on the other side of the burned building. The cream station was a frame structure.
This weblog post presents some memories of Don Fowler, who grew up in Elk Point in the 1910s and 1920s, and he mentions the Opera House, and says that Wilmarth’s barber shop was on one side of it and a bank on the other. On the 1917 Sanborn, there are banks on both sides of the Opera House, but next to one bank is a small wood frame building housing a barber shop and lunch room, and next to that is this moving picture house at 118 E. Main.
What I suspect is that one of the banks closed and Wilmarth’s barber shop moved into its space, and the barber shop and lunch room became the site of Nearman’s cream station, in between the new barber shop location and the Florence Theatre. The improbably large seating capacity listed for the Florence in the FDYs of the 1920s was probably a mistake. The last appearance of the Florence in the 1935 FDY gives it only 220 seats, a plausible number that was probably true all along.
It’s unfortunate that Don Fowler mentions Elk Point’s movie house only in passing, not even giving its name, only saying that it showed silent movies. The ambitious Mr. Fowler, who in 1930 became the first of his family to enroll in college, probably didn’t squander his youth watching picture shows.
A 1909 Polk business directory lists an Idle Hour Theatre, Maher & Hanson, proprietors, at Elk Point.
It’s possible the Florence ended up in the Opera House building, which sources I’ve seen indicate dated to 1891 or earlier. A 1915 building inspection listed the Opera House as being in poor condition, while the Florence was listed as very good, which might be expected if the building was nearly new.
The description of this house is inaccurate, but both the theater name and the building have a complex early history. A movie house called The Nickelodeon opened at 300 N. Water Street in 1906, and a house called the Crystal Theatre was operating in Decatur as early as July, 1908, and it was probably next door to The Nickelodeon, which appears to be in the same building. The 1908 Sanborn map shows two adjacent storefronts labeled “Electric Theatre” at 302 and 306 N. Water (302 is on the corner, so there is no 300 on the map.)
The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory lists the Crystal without an address, but also lists a house called the Corner Theatre at 300 N. Water Street. The 1915 Sanborn map still shows the two adjacent storefronts now labeled “Motion Picture Theater”, and it still numbers them 302 and 306 Water Street.
One source says The Nickelodeon became the Colonial Theatre. The Crystal was called the Nasawan Theatre for a while before reverting to the Crystal name in 1911. It seems likely that the Crystal expanded at some point to absorb the former space of The Nickelodeon (the original space was far too small to accommodate almost 500 seats.) Unfortunately Sanborn maps of the location when the Crystal would have been alone and enlarged are not available.
In 1922 the Crystal came under the control of a Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Morrow, who opened the Morrow (or Morrow’s) Theatre, a different house, at 312 N. Water Street in 1929. The Morrow Theatre became the Bond Theatre in 1943. The Crystal was listed in the FDY through 1935 but was gone in 1936. I’ve been unable to find any theater in Decatur that was called the M & M.
The June 11, 1910 issue of American Contractor said that the theater being built at Holland, Michigan for Tim Slagh and A. Smith had been designed by Fred Jonkman. Jonkman must have been a local architect, as the only other reference to him I’ve been able to find is a 1930 newspaper article noting that he was a member of the Holland Common Council.
The final closure of the Ritz Theatre was the consequence of a late 1937 fire, reported in the December 22 issue of The Decatur Daily Review. The Crescent had been closed following an earlier fire in March, 1929. The house was reopened by an F. M. Mertz (Fred, perhaps?) in March, 1934, and sold to the Ritz Theater Company the following year. The December, 1935 remodeling had cost Ritz $8,000, a not inconsiderable sum for a modest, neighborhood house in a provincial city during the depression.
The former Strand Theatre reopened as the State Theatre on December 24, 1928 following a $100,000 remodeling job, according to an item in The Billboard of January 12, 1929. The Southwestern New York Theater Corporation had bought the house the previous summer and closed it for several months for remodeling. The company had also bought the American Theatre at East Liverpool and two houses at Steubenville.
The only two theaters listed in a 1916 Elk Point business directory are the Opera House and the Florence. I’d be inclined to think this was the Florence, if not for the fact that the FDY listings for that house, which begin in 1926, give it a capacity of 350, and this building seems too small to accommodate that many seats. Still, Florence is the only theater name other than Opera House I’ve been able to confirm in Elk Point during this era. Maybe the FDY simply got the capacity wrong, or perhaps the Florence moved to a larger building between 1917 and 1926.
This building could have been the location of one of the three theaters listed at Elk Point in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory. They were called the Gem, the Lyric and the Yale. The Gem and Yale were gone by early 1915, but the Lyric was at least still standing, though closed, and had been joined by the Florence Theatre, which of course might have been a new name for one of the other two houses.
The Florence Theatre is one of three houses listed at Elk Point in the public building inspection section of the annual report of the Food & Drug Commissioner of South Dakota for the year ending June 30, 1915. The other two were the Opera House and a Lyric Theatre, the latter listed as closed. The Opera House and Florence were also listed in a 1916 business directory, but the Lyric was not. The 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory listed three houses at Elk Point: the Gem, the Lyric and the Yale. The Opera House was converted for movies in late 1915, according to items in issues of Moving Picture World in November and December that year. It’s possible that Florence was a new name for either the Gem or the Yale.
In 1915 the Florence was operated by a Mr. Charles Bovee, who was still in charge in 1930 when the February 17 issue of the Sioux City Journal reported that part of the floor of the lobby of the Florence Theatre in Elk Point had collapsed while a crowd was waiting for the second show to begin. Ten people were injured. This article also notes that the theater had been named for Bovee’s daughter Florence, who witnessed the event but was not injured.
The December 25, 1926 issue of Exhibitors Herald had a list of theater managers who had participated in a survey determining the top moneymaking movies of 1926. C. L. Guillaume of the State Theatre, Elk Point, was among them.
Elk Grove High School’s 1961 yearbook said that a free forenoon show presented by the State Theatre had been among that year’s Homecoming events (homecoming being football-related, the event would have been held in the fall of 1960.)
The Texas Theatre operated in two different buildings in the late 1920s. The December 27, 1927 issue of Motion Picture Herald said that: “Mr. and Mrs. Walker opened their new Texas Theater at Grand Prairie Nov. 14th.” The Texas Theater that J. S. Walker was operating in 1926 when he was submitting capsule movie reviews to the trade journals was at a different location.
The May 7, 1927 issue of Moving Picture World had this notice: “GRAND PRAIRIE, TEXAS.— J. S. Walker, manager of Texas Theatre, has purchased two lots on Main street as site for proposed new moving picture theatre.” Just over seven months later Mr. Walker opened the new Texas Theatre. Walker had been leasing the original location, a former garage, at least as early as December, 1925, according to a lawsuit over the property (to which Mr. Walker was not a party.) I’ve been unable to discover the address of the original Texas Theatre.
The August 20, 1938 issue of Motion Picture Herald listed the Palace at Midland as one of 34 houses closed that summer by R. E. Griffith Theatres.
The Idle Hour makes its first appearance in Film Daily Year Book in 1927. The 1926 edition listed only the 250-seat Rialto.
The April 14, 1928 issue of Motion Picture News said that [t]he Palace theatre at Midland, Texas, is installing a new $7,500 organ.“ The Palace had also been mentioned in the "Dallas” column of the April 7 MPN: “Films of an oil tank fire ‘shot’ by W. H. Williams, manager of the Palace and Idle Hour theatres at Midland, are being shown in a Paramount News reel.”