Princess Theatre

Ken, I goofed on this one, I must have hit Ka. instead of Ia. The theatre is actually in Mapleton, Ia. Sorry.

kdinkcmo: The 1948 year of opening currently given in the intro is wrong. The Maple opened in 1950. Boxoffice Magazine ran a brief item datelined Mapleton in its June 25, 1949, issue which said: “Construction of a 50x100-foot brick building to house the new Mapleton Theatre has begun here. The business is owned by F. W. Kugel of Holstein and will be managed by F. D. ‘Doc’ Naulteus.”

Then the January 7, 1950, issue of Boxoffice had an item saying that the opening of the new Maple Theatre was scheduled for January 10. The first movie was to be “Challenge to Lassie.” Boxoffice said the house had 400 seats, but Boxoffice was frequently a bit off on seating capacity. Their items also had frequent spelling errors (“Doc” Naulteus might have been Nalteus or Nulteus or even Multeus, depending on which issue of Boxoffice you look at.)

I think Chuck probably got the 1948 date from the Boller Brothers Architectural Records (PDF here) which lists the Maple Theatre as a 1948 project. I think the Boller records give the year in which the firm began working on a given project, though, which is often not the year the buildings were completed.

Unless it was replaced at some time between 1928 and 1942, when F.W. Kugel bought it, the original Maple Theatre, closed when the new Maple Theatre opened in 1950, was called the Princess when it was sold to Mrs. Charles Weeks of Ord, Nebraska, by Harry Day in 1928. The information about that sale was reprinted in the “From the Boxoffice Files, Twenty Years Ago” feature in Boxoffice of August 28, 1948. Unless the name Princess was given to the 1950 Maple Theatre at some later date, this page should be renamed Maple Theatre and the aka Princess should go to a new page for the original Maple Theatre, which must have been at a different location.

The Orpheum in Mapleton is mentioned in Boxoffice in December, 1937, and in August and October, 1938. The first item names the operator as Ray Richards, and the last says it is Roy Reichard. I haven’t found either the Maple or the Princess mentioned in any issues from the 1930s.

Orpheum probably is an aka for the Princess/first Maple, though I wouldn’t yet rule out the possibility that the Princess closed and the Orpheum was a different theater that later became the Maple. I doubt that Mapleton was ever large enough to support two theaters at once, though.