Esquire Theatre

This opened on October 28th, 1947 ad at View link

I worked at the Esquire in high school from 1968-1971 as an usher and Assistant Manager. We ran a lot of the major films during that time period. The Esquire, Paramount and State theatres were all part of the ABC Interstate Theatres chain. The manager at that time was James Arnold, and most of the employees attended Amarillo High or Tascosa. Joe V.

The only Esquire I knew in Amarillo was at 19th and Washington (by I-40). As a child in the 60s, my mother took me to see To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sound of Music there. In college in the 70s, it was the theater that had the Rocky Horror Picture Show every weekend so I continued to go there. Then in the 80s I lived close by and remember seeing that Ringo Starr caveman movie there, among others. The theater was just second run movies, but still a beauty with murals of cowboys herding cows in the Palo Duro Canyon on the walls. When it closed in the mid-80s, their last show was, once again, The Sound of Music and my mother and I went to see it to preserve those good memories of a beautiful theater. It is the only Amarillo theater that I remember before the multiplexes moved in.

Here is a photo of Amarillo’s Esquire Theatre, from the Amarillo Public Library web site. There is information about the theatre on that page, too, but some of it it doesn’t match the information on this CT page. The address is given as 1808 South Washington, and the seating capacity is listed as 763. The date of the grand opening is given as October 24, 1947.