the Temple of Tickle Britches

1927-1973 | Harris Theater | 602-606 S Main St 📍Findlay, Ohio

1906-1927 | Majestic Theater | 602-606 S Main St 📍 Findlay, Ohio

DEMOLITION PLANNED

By DAVE DUDLEY | Staff Writer

Progress. You can ignore it and look the other way, pretending that some things will never change. Or you can learn to live with it, accepting eventual obsolescence as inescapable.

 By this time next year that theater, which has witnessed the development of the movie industry from its infancy, will be gone. Its replacement — a parking lot.

“When a theater burns, like the old Marvin Theater (once located across from Center Street on North Main Street), you’re sorry.” Don Smith, a projectionist in Findlay for almost half a century, said. “But when you tear it down brick by brick, It’s a different thing.”

—Don Smith, Findlay Projectionist

Smith is, of course, sorry to see the 68-year-old theater go.

 “It’s progress, I guess, but I hate to see it go. It is the last real for sure theater in town,” he said.

 Although the theater was used primarily as a movie theater for many years, the Majestic was built in 1906 as a legitimate theater to present stage shows. Two years later short, silent films were first shown in the theater, and after 1911, when the first projection booth was added, films were to provide the mainstay for the theater.

 “In the early days houses were kept in better repair, there was a little bit more showmanship involved,” Smith said.

“This type of entertainment is gone.”

 Remnants from those early vaudeville days can still be found at the theater, which was closed for good after Tuesday’s last film showing.

Behind the screen is a high-ceilinged backstage area where painted scenery drops were lowered to provide settings for live shows. Of the road shows which played at the theater only one poster remains on the backstage walls, advertising the long since forgotten “A Man From the Old South.”

 Beneath the backstage area are the dressing rooms, virtually empty but for an old love seat cradling plastic roses.

 The second balcony, where theprojectors are located, has been closed to the public for years, and the benches – which provided the lowest priced seats are thick with dust.

Nestled in a corner of the second balcony is a small room, where a generator once used to power spotlights for stage presentation is located.

 Pencilled on the door frame to that room are samples of early 20th century grafitti, such as

 “Eddie Courtney at The District Leader” and

 “Edward McClain, 930 Shinkle St., Sept. 1, 1909.”

 Sadly, little remains from the theater’s minstrel show days, lost somewhere in

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 the conversion from a legitimate theater to a movie house.

 Although live shows at the theater continued until the early 1950s, the costs involved in bringing road shows into the theater became much more prohibitive through the years: Local amateur groups turned to other stages to display their talents.

 “The Harris was no longer necessary,” Smith said. “There were other places to fill the need.” Regardless, the profits from showing movies kept the theater going.

 In 1915 the Majestic Theater became one of a number of theaters presenting Paramount films. Local musicians provided the music for those silent films, and in 1923 the six-piece Majestic Orchestra was formed for that purpose.

Pipe organs also provided the music for some of those silent films.

 In 1927 the Harris Amusement Co. of Pittsburgh acquired the theater lease, changed its name to the Harris Theater, and completely remodeled the theater.

 The next year the company secured exclusive rights to Vitaphone, described “as the most wonderful device of the century in the field of synchronizing motion pictures and sound” and in 1928 the first “talkie” was shown in Findlay.

A month later audiences saw Al Jolson as “The Jazz Singer” at the Harris.

In 1930 the Harris company added another innovation, a nightly 15-minute broadcast for theater-goers of the popular “Amos “n’ Andy” radio show.

 In the early, 1930s Warner Brothers acquired the lease, which continued until the 1960s.

 But the signs of age were already evident in the theater. The roof, part of which was blown off in a 1907 wind storm, was in very bad condition. Although still structurally sound, the theater is just too big to economically heat.

 Stern Ohio Theaters of Bowling Green, which holds the lease to the theater, decided the theater had outlived its usefulness and built the new Cinema World with the idea of closing down the Harris.

 The owners of the building, Wilson’s Inc. of Lima, have plans of tearing the entire building down to provide additional parking space for Wilson’s Sandwich Shop.

 And although older theaters in large cities have been kept going as showplaces, the Harris decor is not ornate enough to warrant preserving the theater.

 “It is a utility house, never something that anyone thought of worrying about,” Smith said. “It was built as a theater, and that’s all it ever was.

“It was a wonderful place for the kids. It’ll be bad for them because they just can’t get out to the shopping center by themselves. It’s going to leave a big hole in that downtown.”

 

NewspaperArchive by Storied

Findlay Republican Courier, February 20,

1974 Pg. 1, Findlay, Ohio

https://newspaperarchive.com/findlay-republican-courier-feb-20-1974-p-1/