Circle A Theatre

Joe Vogel on June 8, 2012 at 2:00 pm

Stevie Joe Payne remembers the Circle A Theatre in the early 1950s. As he describes it, this was Pawhuska’s western movie theater. Just about every town big enough to have multiple theaters had a cowboy house in those days, where the kids would go for Saturday matinees of movies with stars like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.

These theaters often had names suggestive of the old west, like the chain of several houses called the Hitching Post Theatre in the Los Angeles area. Circle A sounds like the name of a ranch. Western theaters went into decline in the 1950s, when all the old movies and a lot of new half-hour cowboy shows began running on television. Most of L.A.’s Hitching Post Theatres were re-branded as art houses, showing foreign movies, but most of the western theaters in small towns or suburbia just shut down. The Circle A probably didn’t survive the 1950s.