Milton Kendrick
interviewed by Historical Commission member Frankie Kendrick Marcoux on January 29, 1992
MILTON KENDRICK, DISCUSSING THE MACOMB THEATER, WHICH HIS FATHER HELPED TO ESTABLISH:
On Walnut was a --I don't remember if it was a vacant lot or if it had old buildings on it-- but, a few other people, my dad included, decided to build a theater building, a theater there, and go into the theater business. At the time, there was a theater called the Bijou, on Gratiot, and there was only one theater in town and no television. And they opened Selfridge Field up, and of course although they had entertainment theoretically on the base, why, the guys would come down and go to the theater, so there would be long lines of people waiting to get into the movie houses. Well, a local group decided maybe the town needed another theater.
Well, my dad was president of the theater company, Macomb Theater Company, and they tried to use a local architect to design --they wanted to design a ... have them design a theater that would seat around a thousand, I think the Bijou seated about eight hundred or seven-fifty or something-- they wanted one just slightly bigger, because that would double the capacity here a little better and they figured there was room for both of them. But the architect kept dragging his feet, and so forth, and they got impatient, so they --as it turned out, it was a mistake-- they hired an architect out of Detroit who designed those big theaters in downtown Detroit --at the time, the Fox, and the ... maybe not the Fox, but the Michigan and the State and some of those ... and he persuaded them to go to an entirely different concept. A theater with a balcony, and to put on vaudeville acts. It wouldn't be just a plain movie theater, it would also have vaudeville, which was a big thing in those days. But it more than doubled the cost of the theater, so they got themselves a little overextended.
And then they'd had acts come in, the same acts that played in Detroit, they'd come out, and what they'd do was run two, three vaudeville acts and they'd throw the movie in --it's the same thing they did at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor when I came to school. That's the way they did all movies --you had acts-- jugglers, and dancers and singers and everything first, and then you did run the movie, and then they would come back the second time, and the same way with the Majestic Theater in Ann Arbor. But anyway, as I ... going from a one-floor theater to one with a balcony and all the extra equipment needed for the vaudeville acts, ran the cost up, so it became a financial .... uh, financially it didn't work out so well ... and so they finally, in the late thirties, or early thirties, rather, they leased it out to a man named Sol Krim, who was ... turned out later to ... Krims went out to, got into big business, went out to Hollywood and became interested in the theater out in Hollywood. But, at the time they were running that they had their struggles and finally after .... it finally went bankrupt.
But it was kind of fun when I was growing up because I got to see movies for no charge and I was a popular date. It was fun growing up in a town with two theaters, and finally, when Mr. Krim was running it, he had a unique way of building up business, he would give you .. you kept half of your ticket, and the other half he'd put in a box and every Saturday he would have a drawing, and he'd reach in the box and pick out a number, and if you were the lucky number you got a Ford car. That ran in the early part of the Depression. Yeah, the Depression was still on in the early thirties -- 1930, 31, around there. Finally, the Bijou gave up --it was the giveaway program. In the meantime, Mr. Krim and ... had signed up to buy a car a week for 52 weeks, and the Bijou gave up in the middle of the act, so he was ... had to take those cars and get rid of them.