MUSEUM HOURS

Monday – Friday

1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

1st Saturday

10:00 am – 2:00 pm

CURATOR

Richard “Ted” Waterfall

TRUSTEES

Jim Gillies, Chairman

Charlie Bagg

Louise Carter

Melanie Blankenship

Kim Winn

OFFICERS

Timothy Totten

President

Bob Marks

Vice-President

Cindy Satur

2nd Vice-President

Danyel Moulden

Recording Secretary

Anita Ezelle

Corresponding Secretary

John Blankenship

Treasurer

APPOINTED

Louise Carter - Historian

Regina Heffington - Website

Ethel Ryan - Refreshments

Eustis Reflections

A Monthly Publication of the

Eustis Historical Museum & Preservation Society, Inc.

Volume VII, Number 7 – July 2011 www.eustishistoricalmuseum.com

EVENTS CALENDAR

July 28 History of the Eustis Sailing Club

Thursday at 7:00 pm at The Clifford House

Monthly Membership Meeting to follow

Aug 5 First Friday Street Party

6:00 – 10:00 pm

Downtown Eustis

Friends,

This is a special issue for me, as it highlights several articles we’ve been working on for a few months.

In this issue we’re taking a look at the history of theatre in Eustis. From the State Theatre on Bay Street to the Ace Theater on Bates Avenue, we have compiled memories from area residents to catch a glimpse of the way that live entertainment shaped our city.

Timothy Totten, President

CURATOR’S CORNER by Ted Waterfall

While checking out yard sales last month, my wife and I chanced upon an estate sale in Tavares and picked up an addition to our Civil War exhibit. I managed to convince the owner to donate to our museum a couple of artillery shell fragments (shrapnel). I am most pleased to be able to add something authentic to the display. It came from the estate of Mr. William F. Mursch.

Also recently donated to this exhibit from Eustis residents Ray and Sue Strutz are an original publication of Harper’s Weekly, perhaps the most famous publication during the Civil War (dated April 13, 1861 – the day following the firing on Ft. Sumter), a period bullet mold, and some projectiles, all very exciting additions.

Louise Carter was the guest speaker at the East Lake County Historical Society on June 13. Her topic was our own Clifford House. Since the East Lake County Historical Society does not have a structure, office, or anything else like this at present, they are thinking of buying a house and converting it to a museum. We wish them the best of luck in that endeavor.

I will be trying again to schedule a living history encampment on our grounds after the snow birds have returned. I already have a Spanish Conquistador lined up who does a first person impression. I hope to contact some Seminole, Black Seminole, 2nd Seminole War soldiers, and maybe some Blacksmiths, or other uncommon impressions for a unique show. I’m looking at perhaps the weekend of November 19 as part of our centennial ceremonies that month.

The First Ladies of the Eustis Historical Museum has removed their beautiful and popular teapot display from the museum and are preparing another of vintage handbags. That should be a very interesting exhibit and we all look forward to it with great anticipation. Marcia Arnold is coordinating these displays and they will be creating several others as the months and years progress.

And a very big thanks to Ace Hardware here in Eustis for filling in the barren spots in the garden at the front of the house with several new plants. Described on the tags as Loropetalum, Ruby, this is a very generous offer and the museum thanks them many times over. Now, if I can get permission to plant a certain Dahoon Holly (Ilex cassine) …

As an ongoing project, I am now attempting to identify and catalog with what is called an accession number absolutely everything within this museum. This has been done to some items but not entered into our current software programs. Those items are simply a matter of transferring the info. But there are some items here that were never properly catalogued. Those items can be a challenge. When is my estimated completion date? Can you say controllable nuclear fission? Can you say the successful teleportation of complex matter? Can you say human colonization of the nearest solar system?

Well, that’s it for this month, so until next time…

Keep you powder dry.*

Ted

* Keep your power dry was an expression wishing good luck when black powder was the major propellant in hunting rifles. Wet or moist powder = no food.

MEMORIAL PLACQUES ORDER FORM

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important or show your support for the museum.

Placques will be affixed to the back of the sign

and will be visible to visitors.

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The theatre, which could seat about 100 patrons, also featured folding seats and a sloped floor.

Following integration, the Ace Theatre closed its doors. The building was briefly used as a market and a church, before being abandoned. In recent years, Mitchell and other concerned residents have petitioned the city to overhaul the building and preserve it. Unfortunately, the building collapsed before any restoration project could be undertaken.

The city has plans to erect a marker on the property that will highlight the location of this historic building that gave Eustis’ black residents a night at the movies.

During segregation, Eustis was home to two movie theaters: the State Theatre in downtown Eustis and an un-named theatre on Bates Avenue. The downtown theater, which catered to the area’s white residents, had a balcony, concession stand and a neon marquee. The Bates Avenue theatre, in one of the African-American sections of town, was little more than a sheet nailed to posts, a movie projector and orange crates for seating.

“These guys would go to the sawmill and buy the bark that they would chip off the wood,” says longtime Eustis resident, Carla Mitchell. “They used the bark as walls.”

Later, after the State Theatre experimented with limited seating for black patrons (see “What I Know About the Eustis Theater” in this issue), a gentleman from Sanford built the Ace Theatre at 1609 East Bates Avenue in 1949. The white building with a stair-step façade showed movies on Saturday nights, with admission costing 26 cents.

“A gentleman by the name of Limuel Odom ran the projector,” says Mitchell. “And Christine Green Clark sold the popcorn, which cost ten cents. Later, Ken Ellis’ family took over the theatre and ran it for a while.”

OTHER PLACES OF INTEREST

Visit our friends at these other museums

for more history of Lake County.

Please call the specific location

for hours of operation and directions.

Groveland Historical Society Museum 243 S. Lake Avenue Groveland, FL 34736 (352) 429-0771 www.grovelandhistory.org

Historical Society of Tavares 121 Alfred Street Tavares, FL 32778 (352) 343-7252

Lady Lake Historical Society Museum 107 S. Old Dixie Highway Lady Lake, FL 32159 (352) 259-4359 www.ladylake.org

Lake County Historical Museum 317 W. Main Street Tavares, FL 32778 (352) 343-9890 www.lakecountyfl.gov

Leesburg Historical Museum 111 S. Sixth Street Leesburg, FL 34749 (352) 315-1800 www.leesburgflorida.gov Mote-Morris House 1195 W. Magnolia Street Leesburg, FL 34788 (352) 728-9898 www.leesburgflorida.gov

Mount Dora History Museum 450 Royellou Lane Mount Dora, FL 37257 (352) 383-0006 http://www.mountdorahistoricalsociety.com

South Lake County Historical Society Village 480 West Avenue Clermont, FL 34711 (352) 394-6611 www.southlakehistoricalsociety.com

Ah yes, who could forget the great times we had on Saturday evenings at the State Theatre on Bay Street? When the folks finally relented and allowed us to go to the “show,” we were still limited as to the movies we could see. So mainly it was the Westerns, now caller “oaters,” that found us in the Saturday night crowd.

It was much fun to watch Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger and those guys bring justice to the old West! But watching those shows was only part of the fun. How about watching an older couple (probably mid-40s in age) react to the happenings on the screen! Oh yes! There they sat every Saturday night on the front row of the balcony.

Now, Folks, even at our young ages, we knew that the “good guys with the white hats” were going to eventually win the fights. This couple seemingly did not know that! They would shout happily when the right one finally prevailed. They would stand up and wave their fists at the “evil-doers” and make derisive remarks toward them. They would groan and cover their eyes when things looked bad for the heroes. We had never seen such goings on from adults in movies, nor have I seen such to this day!

I recall going to a movie there one time with Phil, a very tall teenager. (A real Mutt and Jeff combination we were). Though he was only one year older than me, and we both should have paid for adult tickets, I looked so much more like a child beside him that I was given a child’s ticket. I paid for it, knowing that I should have corrected the mistake. Occasionally when that crosses my mind, I have a twinge of guilt pass hastily through my mind. So I probably still owe the State Theatre 30 cents or so.

EUSTIS HISTORICAL MUSEUM & PRESERVATION SOCIETY 536 N. Bay Street, Eustis, FL 32726 (352) 483-0046

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The Eustis Historical Museum & Preservation Society is a non-profit 501c3 organization. All donations are tax-deductible.

The 2011-2012 Eustis Historical Museum & Preservation Society Membership year started June 1st.

If you haven’t renewed, please complete the membership renewal form on this page and

mail the form back with your membership dues. Change in address

or new phone number? Please be sure to include these updates on your renewal.

Members of the Eustis Flower and Garden Club have joined forces with the Eustis Historical Museum to plant a Victory Garden on the grounds of the Clifford House.

Classes are given each Tuesday and Saturday at 9am. The week’s topic will be taught at each class, so students can choose the day that fits their schedule.

Future class topics include “Growing from Your Fridge,” “What the Garden Zones Tell Us” and “Whats in Your Dirt?”

To sign up, please email your request to us at eustismuseum@gmail.com or call Ted at the museum at 352-483-0046.

When the Roth family – Nick, Lenore and we kids, Donald, Earl, Virginia (and later, Nick, Jr. and Janet) – came to Eustis, the theater was known to us as the “pitcher show” and we didn’t get to go much. Mamma and Daddy would go on Saturday nights to the 9 o’clock show after they had bought the week’s groceries at the A&P and Piggly-Wiggly. They usually took the current baby in arms and left us over-three-year-olds at home alone (could you do that now?). Once in a while they would splurge and spend 50 cents apiece to see the special “first run” on Sunday or Monday night.

As we kids got older we could go to a Saturday afternoon cowboys and Indians show, at the end of which they would always show an “Our Gang” comedy or an episode of a Tarzan movie with Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan and some pretty girl as Jane. The theater showed these as serials so we’d all b e sure to come back the next week; we couldn’t wait! As I got a little older I would sometimes be able to go to a special show after school and hope to be able to sit by a certain girl, who had paid her own way in.

During the 1920’s and 30’s the manager of the theater was a Mister Wales. His office was off the lobby to the left, under the stairs to the doctors’ offices above, and in the back of the beauty parlor on the North side of the lobby. There was a soda fountain on the south side, operated by the same Taylor family that ran the Palm Pharmacy so long. The walls of the theater office were covered with autographed photos of stars of the day, some addressed to Mr. Wales personally.

Mr. Wales was always properly fully dressed in a suit and tie and wore “spats” over his shoes. He smoked a fine cigar and drove a Chrysler convertible with the top down most of the time. He belonged to the Lake County Country Club and he played a lot on its Bobby Jones-designed golf course, out between West Crooked Lake and Lake Joanna.

When I was of dating age the thing to do on a Friday night was to take your girl to the movies (if the Eustis High Panthers didn’t have a home game, that is). The Friday night shows were usually double-headers with a game of “Screeno” during intermission. This was like Bingo with a card of 25 spaces and a free one already crossed out in the center.

You won when you got five in a row in any direction. The numbers were selected by a special slide in the projector and when you got a winner you called out “Screeno!” and went down - we were always in the balcony - to claim the prize of a free pass or a trinket of some kind.

I got to know two of the theater operators. One was Bill Perry, who entertained his lady friend in the projection booth between changes of the reels. After all, each reel ran for twenty minutes without attention until the vacant spaces in the emptying spool tripped a warning bell that it was about time to switch on the other projector and shut down the spent one. The second reel had been prepared while the first was showing. Then he had to set up the third reel on the first projector to finish the hour.

The lamps for the machines were carbon-arcs, like the giant spotlights use, which generated a great amount of heat, in spite of the fans and the flues to the roof. The little room tended to get very hot and the operator could be glimpsed shirtless through the illegally open door. Since this was in the days before “safety film,” there was always a danger that the film would burn if it did not keep moving past the hot light. The door was supposed to remain closed and if there were to be a fire, automatic shutters would close all the openings and sound the alarm. They hadn’t sufficiently developed air conditioning yet.

The other projectionist I knew was the fellow who became my uncle by marrying my mother’s sister, Alice Hoffman. He was Fred E. Bassett, Jr., who passed on a few years ago at nearly ninety-nine years of age. Fred did many things in his life, much of it to do with movie theaters. (continued)

(CONTINUED)

Fred’s dad, F.E. Bassett, Sr. ran the first movie house in Eustis and Fred’s mom was the censor of the shows. This was before the Boat Works; Fred was just a boy. By the time Fred worked at the Eustis Theater, the pictures had learned to talk and the sound part of the operation called for electronic know-how, for which Fred went, with his wife, to New York to get. He became a district service manager for RCA Sound and soon was the head man at the Southeast district of the company, working from an Atlanta, Georgia office. I mention this because Fred was part of “our” theater for a time.

In its glory days, the theater’s entrance lobby and streetside always displayed large posters and photos of coming attractions. It was the talk of the town when the new marquee, proclaiming it to be the STATE THEATRE in neon lights, was fitted by Merry Signs.

One of the gimmicks that the theatre employed to get people to attend during the Depression was “Bank Night.” About 9 o’clock, between the early and late shows on Wednesday nights, they would hold a drawing to select one of the patrons who had registered to receive a cash purse, which would increase by $10 each time the called name was not present to claim it. You didn’t have to be inside; they announced it on the street. Folks would hurry down after prayer meeting to see if they had won.

An interesting side note: there was an attempt to allow colored people to see a movie during the times of racial segregation. They could buy a ticket at the box-office out front and then go around to the fire escape stairs in the alley and go up to the fire exit to be let into the balcony seats way on the side away from the whites, who wouldn’t have sat there anyway because the far side angle to the screen made the picture all fuzzy and narrow. The arrangement didn’t last long, as someone began showing films in the black community.

Although the “pitcher show” was a minor factor in my own young life, it filled a need in the lives of the people during those hard times of the Depression in a community where there wasn’t too much going on. It was “something for the young people,” they said.

I had already moved away from Eustis when they finally stopped showing motion pictures at the theater. I’m sure that first drive-ins and television, followed by videotapes, DVDs, giant screens and multiplexes had a lot to do with the theater’s closing. But even with all these entertainment options, I still think the “pitcher show” was one of the good things for Eustis, in its time.

HISTORICAL PLAYS & MUSICALS IN EUSTIS

During their 36 seasons, the Bay Street Players has tackled historical musicals and dramas such as The Elephant Man, Titanic and A Man for All Seasons, which detailed the struggle between King Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More.

Last season, the theatre staged Ragtime the Musical, which chronicles the lives of whiltes, blacks and immigrants in turn-of-the-century America. In the photo above, the character named Father takes his son to a 1906 baseball game, only to despair at the influence of “foreign rabble” on what he once saw as a gentleman’s pastime.

The latest show for the Bay Street Players in Thoroughly Modern Millie, a comedy musical set during the roaring twenties that follows a newly-minted “modern” woman named Millie Dilmount. From era-specific music to spot-on costuming, the Players once again bring life to an earlier age of American life. The play runs until July 31st.

Next year, the players will produce at least five more shows, including a staging of Camelot, the story of King Arthur, Guinevere and Sir Lancelot.

Bay Street Players THEN (above)

and Bay Street Players TODAY (below)

Conversations with old time Eustis residents such as Doogle Igou and Wm Church lead us to believe that the building was started as early as 1916. However, the first newspaper article we’ve found of this, is a re-print found in a 1967 Bicentennial issue of the Eustis News. In this is a line drawing announcing the 1922 opening of the State Theater.

The Bay Street Players first became involved in the State Theater in the spring of 1975 when they rented the building with the intention of beginning an actor-oriented theater group. The kindness of the heirs of Dr. Stanley Tyre enabled the fledgling group to hold their first meetings in March and April of 1975.

The building, originally intended as both a vaudeville house and motion picture auditorium, has a 40’ fly loft built for this aspect. It is built entirely of brick with brick fire walls on each side for protection. (This was gratefully evident when the Bay Pharmacy burnt right next door.

Our first entrance into what had been exclusively a movie house for Eustis since at least 1950 found that it was filthy dirty. It had a permanent movie screen, ancient projectors in the balcony, small mazes of rooms backstage, a city bench swinging from the fly loft and rooms over the lobby so full of trash one couldn’t open their doors.

Stories spoke of the grandeur of the building when it originally opened. Before Atlanta or Miami, Al Jolsen’s THE JAZZ SINGER played here at the State Theater for guests of the exclusive Fountain Inn. According to Lestina Vaughn, daughter of Stanley Tyre, chorales and evenings of orchestra music were performed in the building thru the 20’s until the Depression.

In Easter week of 1975, the Bay Street Players held their first public meeting. Two weeks later they held open auditions for the musical production of HELLO DOLLY, and in July of 1975, they opened. HELLO DOLLY was an eye-opener for the original founding fathers and mothers of Bay Street Players. The 1940 air conditioner, housed under the stage, blew up on opening night, and as a result, the entire production “in July” was played with open doors and huge fans.

Miracle of miracles, they were a local hit. After their first show, the players had borrowed and repaid $4,000 and were only $49 in the red. They decided to continue.

The players co-signed a mortgage for $10,000 to buy a new air/conditioning system and opened with ANY WEDNESDAY on Labor Day weekend of 1975. In the next year, they staged eight productions including SOUND OF MUSIC and CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. They held their 1st annual Dolly awards in June of 1976 and presented the musical 1776 that July in co-ordination with the country’s bi-centennial.

In the years since, there has been a continual effort on the part of this organization to broaden the cultural aspects of Eustis and its surrounding audiences. We have brought in ballet, pianists, and traveling artists. We have had a Young People’s Theater for students 4 – 18 since January of 1977.

XTRA: BAY STREET PLAYERS TODAY

During the intervening years, the Players have renovated the interior of the building and undertaken a façade project to add awnings and beautiful ironwork on the front of the building. Future plans include expanding the lobby and upgrading the electrical service inside the building.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written more than 25 years ago. To date, the Players have logged 36 seasons in the building.

Photo Courtesy of Iron Block Studios

BUSINESS MEMBERS Please consider supporting those businesses which support the work of your Preservation Society.

Bay Pharmacy (352) 357-4341

Forever Ballroom (352)742-9461

Merry Jewelers (352) 589-4321

Bronson Ace Hardware

(352) 357-2366

Harden – Pauli Funeral Home (352) 357-4126

Rick Howe’s Auto Repair (352)357-9991

Coldwell Banker

Tyre & Taylor Realty, Inc. (352) 357-4100

Premier Pet Solutions by Dana Ellerby (352) 460-7409

Paulhamus Produce, Inc. (And catering service)

(352)357-6284

Inspired Designs by Sue Hooper (352) 589-0867

Classic Tents & Events (352) 357-7920

Steve’s Heating & A/C (352) 636-2064

www.stevetheacguy.com

Wall Street in the Dirt (352)357-5433

Jack & Andy’s Electric (352) 357-4459

Tom’s Color Bar (352)483-4247

Bills Prestige Printing

(352) 589-5833 Party Source of Eustis

(352) 357-5700 United Southern Bank

(352) 589-2121

Eustis Historical Museum

& Preservation Society

536 North Bay Street

Eustis, Florida 32726

Phone: 352-483-0046

eustismuseum@gmail.com