Lyceum Theatre
411 Main Street,
Clovis,
NM
88101
411 Main Street,
Clovis,
NM
88101
2 people
favorited this theater
The Lyceum opened in 1921, built for Eugene F. Hardwick for vaudeville and movies and was located on Main Street. It was designed by the Boller Brothers firm in Mission style.
The Lyceum showed its first “talking picture” in 1929, “Chinatown Nights”, with Wallace Beery. A year before, John Phillip Sousa and his band peformed at the Lyceum, debuting “The New Mexico March” there. Other celebrities to appear in person over the years at the theater included cowboy star Tom Mix and Shirley Temple.
After closing after a long career in 1974, the Lyceum was acquired by the city of Clovis in 1982, and has been restored and renovated. The Lyceum today functions as a performing arts venue.
Contributed by
Bryan
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Recent comments (view all 17 comments)
The Lyceum was in the early 1950s the “kids' theatre” of Clovis, playing double bills of shoot-em-up westerns, car-chase cop movies, and wacky kid-comedies. An exception to the rule that adult movies played the Mesa was a “roadshow” called “Mom and Dad,” a sort of negative instructional drama about teenage pregnancy, which played at the Lyceum. There were separate showings of this movie for boys only and girls only. The Lyceum was also where I performed in a tap dance recital. It was very good for the purpose, for it had full stage riggings, ropes and belaying-pin racks, and I assumed it must have started life as a vaudeville house, or as a theatre for touring plays. The Lyceum also occasionally played first-run, “A” movies that were not considered quite right for the State or the Sunshine. For instance, I saw the British ballet movie, The Red Shoes" there.
THE SUNSHINE THEATRE, CLOVIS, NEW MEXICO
I’m going to write my few memories of the Sunshine Theatre in Clovis and post them on the pages for the Lyceum, the Mesa, and the State, in hopes that they’ll inspire someone knowledgeable to make a Sunshine page.
The Sunshine was next door to the Thrifty Drug. I worked at Thrifty, and when I was in back unloading deliveries, I clearly heard the movie playing next door.
The Sunshine was narrow-fronted and inconspicuous. I don’t remember it having a projecting marquee or a “title tower,” and none shows in a 1950s postcard of Clovis' Main Street in which Thrifty Drug is conspicuous.
The Sunshine got mostly Paramount, RKO, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists movies, while the State got the M.G.M., Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney pictures.
Therefore, in my mind, the State is always showing a Gene Kelly, Betty Grable, or Doris Day/Gordon MacRae Technicolor musical while the Sunshine is playing a black-and-white Ma and Pa Kettle or Francis the Talking Mule or Martin and Lewis comedy. A great exception to this (very inaccurate) rule-of-memory is when I recall seeing the great color spectacle, “The Greatest Show on Earth” over and over again at the Sunshine.
Once the Sunshine showed a “roadshow” movie, “The Lawton Story,” a “family movie” about the annual religious pageant in Lawton, Oklahoma. I supect some touring company just rented the Sunshine on a “four-walls” basis for this presentation, for the ticket-sellers and ushers and a man who tried to sell the audience a poster and a souvenir booklet were all strangers.
Bob….You can add the Sunshine Theater by clicking on “Add Theaters” at the top of the screen. Two theaters for Clovis that I don’t see listed on this site are the Sunshine and the Plains Theater, which was most likely the smallest of the theaters in Clovis.
Here is an older photo from 2004.
This is a 2008 photo.
I apologize if my comparative description of the atmosphere of the different theatres in Clovis in the 1950s was considered “off-topic, obscene, spam, or personal attacks.” It was certainly not intended to be so. I wonder if anyone saved it and would be willing to e-mail it to me at
Most striking was the rapid gradation of Clovis' sunny Main Street from pristine to prurient in five very visible blocks. Standing at the intersection of Seventh and Main where the high-school, the courthouse, the First Methodist Church, and the squeaky-clean Silver Grill stared each other down, one could see in a line as straight as a bowling lane the marquees of the shiny State (rhymes with"date") where M.G.M. and Fox deposited their inspiring entertainments, the Sunshine where Paramount, RKO, Universal, and Goldwyn’s often more thoughtful ruminations played, the moth-eaten ex-vaudeville house the Lyceum, home of shoot-‘em-ups, edgy or artistic road-shows, and my junior-high tap-dance recital (!), and at last the murky Mesa, catering to salesmen and servicemen from the adjacent train depot or the facing Hotel Clovis (whose gift-shop concealed some “naughty novelties” among its souvenir ashtrays and magic tricks), as well as to wandering workers, poor husbands out for some cheap-seat relief, and urgent adolescents begging to buy illicit liquor from corrupt cops. And all of this in one straight-line five-block stretch! It’s a wonder Clovis never turned out a major social novelist!
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Does anyone remember an early 1950’s restaurant called The Aristocrat? My parents, Stan and Jo Curkee, ran it. Some women’s clubs held luncheons there. I’d really apreciate any photos of it. , rbrtptrck
I was downtown over the weekend shooting photos for a class assignment. As I was outside the theater shooting, a lady came outside and asked if I’d like to see the inside – HECK YEAH!
I went inside with my camera, taking time to change a lens, and wish I’d grabbed my tripod.
I was expecting a run-down old movie theater, and boy was I surprised! I was FLOORED by the place, it’s beautiful! I hope I can get back in, and take more photos; this time with my tripod.
Photos are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/melanys/5387376391/
Thank you, Mel :–) for the wonderful photos of the renovated Lyceum. I am sure that somewhere in Clovis there are such photos from the 1950s. There were photographers in the town who specialized in making photos of the interiors and exteriors of businesses for onwers or managers to hang in their offices.