Regent Theatre

themel on March 30, 2010 at 3:58 am

Took some photos on a recent visit. Looks like it was a great place back in its heyday.

LouisRugani on August 24, 2010 at 2:42 pm

Gus Sun mural looms large â€" just like the vaudeville legend

Sun’s secretary recalls him as a shrewd businessman

(Photo caption:) Ginny Snyder laughs as she stands in front of the giant Gus Sun mural being painted on the back of the Regent Theatre. She was Sun’s secretary in the 1940s.

By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer

Thursday, May 14, 2009 SPRINGFIELD â€"

If there needs to be further justification for the painting of a 6,000-square-foot mural on the back of a downtown building of some guy juggling, try this â€" in 1947, it was reported that Warner Bros. was thinking about making a movie based on the life of that guy.

Gustave Ferdinand Klotz.

Better known as Gus Sun.

Sun later said that he wanted Bob Hope to play him in the movie, which would’ve been appropriate â€" as the ruler of a vast vaudeville empire centered in Springfield, Sun gave Hope his first break.

Only the movie never happened, presumably because it would’ve been a casting nightmare.

Sun also helped the Marx Brothers, the Ritz Brothers, W.C. Fields, Al Jolson, Will Rogers, George Burns, Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz”) and Edgar Bergen (and his puppet, Charlie McCarthy) on their way to fame.

But the biggest, most logical, question remains â€" who would’ve played his secretary?

After all, it only seems fair to include the woman who took his dictation, got him tickets every year to the Kentucky Derby, hired bandleader Glen Gray to play his 50th wedding anniversary and addressed all 500 of his Christmas cards.

“I’d love to see that address list now,” said Ginny Snyder, who worked as Sun’s secretary for close to a decade. “If I looked at the list, it’d all come back to me.”

At age 84, Snyder is one of the last links (quite possibly the last) to the Gus Sun Booking Agency, the now-defunct theatrical institution that chose Springfield as its home in 1906.

“I don’t feel like it,” she said.

Increasingly, the mural-in-progress on the back of the vacant Regent Theatre â€" home to Sun’s agency from 1920 onward â€" is just another piece of public art dedicated to someone nobody actually knew.

“He loved to talk about the old days,” recalled Snyder, who went to work for Sun in 1942. “I’d give the world to have the stuff he dictated to me.”

At the time, it was the twilight of Sun’s dynasty.

“When I went up there, the vaudeville days were over,” Snyder said. “It was the end of an era.”

Once believed to have been the nation’s largest individual user of telegraph and telephone services, the agency was down to three offices (in Springfield, Detroit and Des Moines, Iowa) from a high of 10.

During the heyday of vaudeville, the Sun booking agency had provided a circuit of 275 theaters with entertainers â€" many of whom became world famous.

According to legend, Sun once visited a Hollywood set and realized that 12 of the 17 people there once worked for him.

But by the early 1940s, the agency had switched to booking acts into county and state fairs.

“We had high-wire acts,” Snyder said. “We had the Sensational Kays.”

They were a husband and wife high-wire act.

“She wore pantaloons,” Snyder said, “so nobody could tell she was pregnant.”

There were flying acts, dog acts, juggling acts and more.

“One of the most elaborate acts was Will Hill’s Elephants,” Snyder said.

The name probably speaks for itself.

“Then there were the Zacchinis,” she said. “They were the people who got shot out of a cannon.”

The agency might’ve just been a shell of its former self, but Sun was still at the helm, although most of the daily work had been overseen since 1930 by general manager Bob Shaw, a former vaudevillian himself.

“When I went up there, at 19, (Sun) was getting ready to celebrate his 75th birthday,” Snyder said. “He was wonderful to me. All of them were wonderful to me.

“In those days, people didn’t think that show people were all that great. I liked them because they were themselves. Show people are just different. They accept you for your face value.”

And as a hunter and avid cook, Sun could whip up some mean hasenpfeffer (pickled rabbit).

When someone floated the idea of writing a book about Sun’s life â€" like the movie, it never happened â€" he called on his secretary to dictate the details of his life.

“He never dictated a little,” Snyder said. “He’d get started … ”

A Toledo native, he told of opening Springfield’s first movie theater in 1904, and how, in order to convey to people that it was a family-friendly endeavor, he parked a baby buggy outside.

“He was shrewd,” said Snyder, who still uses shorthand to this day. “He wasn’t educated, but he was shrewd.”

He talked often of Bob Hope â€" one of his vaudeville success stories.

“He loved to talk about Bob Hope,” Snyder said. “I used to write to Bob Hope at least once a year. He liked to have that feeling, that he gave him his start.”

Hope wasn’t the only one â€" Snyder remembers plenty of autographed photos on Sun’s office wall, from the likes of singer Sophie Tucker, bandleader Ted Lewis and Fanny Brice, the comedian whose life later inspired the musical “Funny Girl.”

For Snyder, who eventually left the agency in 1951 to start a family (Sun died in 1959 at age 90), it was as close to a dream job as she would get.

“I was always just fascinated with carnivals,” she said. “I said I always wanted to work for the circus, and I would have in a minute.”

True to the mural, by Yellow Springs artist Jason Morgan, Sun might have become a millionaire impresario, but once a circus juggler always a circus juggler â€" even behind closed office doors.

“Every once in a while,” Snyder said, “you’d hear those balls go thump, thump.”

(Tuesday, August 24, 2009, Springfield News-Sun, Springfield, Ohio

Joe Vogel on March 4, 2012 at 12:09 pm

Heh. It turns out that one of the sources that attributes the design of the Regent Theatre to C. Howard Crane is a blog at some site called Cinema Treasures. As it appears to be a fairly reliable site, we should probably add that information to this page.

SethG on May 8, 2021 at 10:55 pm

This was a direct replacement of the old Grand Opera House, which occupied nearly the same space since sometime before 1886. There was originally a small stream called Mill Run along the south wall, but this was paved over, probably during construction of the new theater.

rivest266 on April 17, 2022 at 12:51 am

Two screens on June 22nd, 1979. Another ad posted.