A couple of years ago I bought a box of old newspapers at an
estate sale. Most are from the year 1919, and most are copies of the Oregonian.
Someone apparently decided to save all the wartime papers. Only hoarders do
that now, as none of our wars seem to end anymore. (Maybe the drug war is
winding down, we’ll see.)
So if you start to follow this blog, be warned that you’ll
see quite a few 96-year-old articles and adverts, rather like this one, for the Oregonian (Nov. 29, 1919) for a
Dorothy Gish feature.
I love the tag line. It seems very modern.
Dorothy Gish was the younger sister of Lillian Gish. The
sisters were introduced to D. W. Griffith by their friend Mary Pickford, and
both became stars during the silent era, though Lillian had the longer career
and received an honorary Academy Award in 1971; Lillian has been called “The
First Lady of American Cinema.”
Dorothy appeared in numerous popular comedies during the
late 1910s and the 1920s, many of which are now lost, but she only made five
films in the sound era; the last was Otto Preminger’s “The Cardinal,” in 1963.
Dorothy married a Canadian actor, James Rennie, in 1920, but they divorced in
1935, and Dorothy never remarried. She died in Italy in 1968, at the age of 70,
and is interred in Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City.
The People’s Theater, at SW Park & Alder in Portland,
Oregon opened in 1911, when the trade journal Moving Picture World quoted a
printed program that made clear that this theater had a social conscience:
“On Sunday, at the People's Theater we will put on an Edison
film entitled, ‘Children Who Labor,’ directed against those of the rich who
grind down the children of the poor. It is a very strong plea for action
against a great evil and ought to command the approval of the entire body of
the people. It also shows the good that pictures are doing throughout the
world, the Photo-play being always arrayed on the side of right and justice.”
(Always? Well, if true, that didn’t last long. “Birth of a
Nation” was only three years away.)
According to Gary Lacher in his 2009 book “Theaters of
Portland,” The People’s was named for the People’s Amusement Company, which had
run the first chain of Portland Nickelodeon machines. By 1920 the People’s had been
acquired by the Jensen-von Herberg theater chain, run by Seattle businessmen
Claude S. Jensen and John von Herberg. (By 1932 the firm faced boycotts of
their Seattle theaters for alleged union-busting activities.)
John von Herberg was born as Peter Coyle in Peru, Indiana, to
a Franco-American mother and an Irish-American father, and probably deserves a
blog post of his own, if not a book. For now I’ll just link to this article about von Herberg.
In the summer of 1929 the People’s Theater was renamed the
Alder Theater. (According to Julia Park Tracey, the theater was called the
Music Box at some point during the 1920s, a name that would be attached to a
number of Portland theaters in later years.) The photo below shows the theater
in 1930.
I’ll leave you with the fact that, in 1923, in addition to
the People’s Theater, the Jensen-von Herberg firm owned a second-run theater in
downtown Portland named the Blue Mouse. A quick search of Google Books reveals
that there were Blue Mouse theaters in a number of U.S. cities in the 1920s,
and at least one still survives, on Proctor Street in Tacoma, Washington; built
in 1923, the small theater is considered the oldest neighborhood theater in the
state of Washington. As part of a renovation in 1994, Dale Chihuly designed
neon mice as decorations for the marquee.
