Sometime
in the early spring of 1985, a group of civic leaders headed by Loren Adgate of
the then First Security bank, Ron Storey and one or two of his officers at the
rival Ionia County National Bank and several leading industrialists met in a
downtown restaurant to discuss the need to do something about improving the
area’s public schools. The impetus for
the meeting was due to a crisis of sorts when one of the leading manufacturers
threatened to pull up stakes and move elsewhere if the community didn’t do
something about its schools since the enterprise depended on its labor force
having at least a modicum of learning, an ability to read, cipher, maybe even
read a blue print or two. Being the
area’s largest employer this was indeed serious business.
Ionia
had once been a thriving boomtown. Back
in the second quarter of the 19th century it was said to be the
second largest city in the Michigan of Lewis Cass. Home to the land office, it was the place to
be if you were going to stake a claim, making the City a hub of activity,
lawyers, courtrooms, bars, brothels….yes brothels… almost 75 of them by one
count in a city of roughly 8,000 souls. (1)
Later the town would be home to the Hudson automobile production
facilities as well as the largest wicker furniture factory in the world. By now, however, industry had long since been
in decline with much of Main Street feeling the impact. It had been over 30 years since the good
citizens of the city had passed a bond issue and the schools were in a
dilapidated condition, underperforming as many such schools do. Now the city fathers gathered to try to do something
to stem the tide.
In
the middle of the discussion about what to do with the failing schools, Monroe
Macpherson, owner and operator of WION a 5,000 watt A.M local radio station,
rose to speak. The local theatre, he
pointed out, had been put up for sale and listed by a local real estate firm by
the now defunct W.S. Butterfield Theatre Company. Waxing long and convincingly about the
architectural splendor of the old house, its centrality to the now declining
business district and the need for a venue to bring in cultural events, the
group assembled agreed to form a rump committee charged with the task of
arranging financing and saving the theatre.
Having commandeered the proceedings, Macpherson set about organizing his
group while the parent assembly got back to the business at hand. The upshot is that the Theatre Group formed
around remnants of the Downtown Development Authority, (DDA a quasi-public
spin-off of the Chamber of Commerce), bank officials, and personages interested
in the cultural enrichment of the community, set about gathering contributions
from excited citizens and arranging mortgage financing with both the local
banks secured by the government of the City of Ionia.
And
so it was that the City of Ionia went about, with the help of Democratic
Governor James Blanchard and his Department of Education, local merchants and
banks, and concerned citizens, financing and building a new High School and
upgrading several primary and secondary facilities finally moving students out
of converted mobile homes then serving as classrooms into solid
facilities. And so it was too that the
City of Ionia allowed itself to be dragged into the awkward posture of taking
over operations of the downtown movie house.
It was a secondary responsibility to be sure, operating behind several
layers of emerging bureaucracy with first the Ionia Theatre board of control,
itself operating under the aegis of the Downtown Development Authority, in the
end sanctioned by the City which had secured the financing loans and held final
fiduciary responsibility as well as liability.
For a group of small business, small-town conservatives, this was a very
strange position to justify. The irony
was never lost on me. These very souls
who could see no government role in meeting the needs of the needy, who
steadfastly derided food stamps, housing subsidies, or any relief for the poor,
somehow came to see as critical to the mission of local governance the need to
operate a downtown movie house.
And
what a splendid little movie house it was.
Built by the W.S. Butterfield Corporation in 1932 on the site of an old
Hotel and located in the heart of the city a block or so due west of the County
Courthouse the Theatre was originally built as a duel functioning facility
designed to produce live stage productions as well as exhibit motion
pictures. The theatre was constructed at
precisely the time that the then emerging “talkies” (introduced 5 years
earlier) were making films all the rage and were to put a swift end to old
Vaudeville. The result was that there
weren’t many stage productions in the ensuing years, although the Theatre would
feature dressing rooms, an orchestra pit, and all the stage rigging to put on a
right professional production.
It
was these facilities that Monroe skillfully fashioned into a fine tapestry as
he argued for saving the grand old house from the wrecking ball. “Mac”, as he was affectionately called, was a
dreamer. As a boy, I was told by several
of his relatives, he dreamed of being on the radio—then the dominant medium in
the America of the 30’s and 40’s. While
other boys honed their skills on the playing field, Mac, it was said, would sit
on the sidelines and call the game like it was a live broadcast going out over
the “airwaves”. It was a dream that
would never leave him. Later he would
serve in the military working as a reporter for an armed services publication
and when he returned home, just prior to the Korean conflict, his father who
was a wealthy—for these parts—poultry farmer, built his young son his own radio
station. Actually two of them, one in
Ionia the aforementioned A.M. facility and an F.M. station located15 miles or
so to the West in Lowell Michigan. And
so it was the Mac gained entry to the business community of his home town, the
local chamber of commerce, and when the time came, membership on the board of
the Ionia Free Fair “The World’s Largest Free Fair”. These positions, if they did not bring riches
to his radio station, brought him standing in the community. Mac was always good for a promotional idea,
always trying to attract the “big” names.
On the Free Fair board he pressed to drop the standard venues and bring
in national and international performing acts.
The result is that the fair began to feature performers like Willie
Nelson, Jefferson Starship, Blood Sweat and Tears, George Burns, Alabama, the
Oak Ridge Boys, to name a few. So big
did it become that it was said that for two shows on a night of the Fair,
Willie Nelson commanded $120,000. in cash.
It was arranged for a Brinks truck to pick up the money at the local
banks and deliver it to the fairgrounds.
Old “Mac” had a reputation for promoting, usually through his radio
station, mostly through his work with the Fair. When he spoke people
listened. And on this day he spoke about
coming to the rescue of the grand old lady.
And
what a grand old lady she was; for she was grand no more. The years of neglect had indeed taken its
toll, with the result that the splendid facility that once dominated Main
Street had become, like so much of the old Butterfield chain, the flotsam and
jetsam floating like so much corporate wreckage on the landscape of the
countryside. Like the dilapidated Vogue
Theatre in Manistee, and the deteriorating hulks long since closed in other
downtowns, the Ionia Theatre stood, by then, like a ghost hovering over the
landscape. The Marquee was rotted, with
only half the lights working. The
furnace had long since ceased to function and, since boilers are not cheap,
Butterfield had made the business decision to operate the Theatre only during
the period of the year when the ambient temperature within the house was such that
it would not be uncomfortable, limiting operations to only the summer and a few
months in the spring and fall. The
projection equipment was old, in fact there were parts of the projectors, long
since disconnected, upon which one put long playing records. This was technology used with the
introduction of sound back in the late ‘20’s’ and no doubt original to the
construction. In 1980, when the
Butterfield home offices moved from the old First National Bank Building in
downtown Detroit to their new offices in Troy, the phone company took the
equipment, old patch-cord switch boards, telephones with hand switches to
change lines, etc., and put the system in a museum. So it was in Ionia, what the city fathers
were inheriting was a rusting, rotting, museum piece. Undeterred these local
businessmen, hardened realists and bedrock conservatives though they be, went
about the business of resurrecting the grand old lady. It would cost a small fortune to salvage the
lotus dream of the local booster.
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(1) This
was the estimate of Monroe MacPherson, local historian who produced a much
More
sanitized version shown at the theatre in the form of a slide-show during the
annual Ionia Free Fair week.
Later the
production was transferred to Video entitled “Ionia the First 150 Years” and
given to the Historical Society as a permanent fund-raising source.
The references to the brothels were dropped
in this version, but I got the scoop straight from the horse, so to speak.
Our ancestors are almost never what their
much burnished legacy would have us believe.
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