What Cheer Opera House

Under What Cheer, Iowa in the 1897-98 edition of the Julius Cahn Official Theatrical Guide is the “New Masonic Opera House”. Peter Flaherty was Mgr; there were 850 seats. The proscenium opening was 24 feet square, and the stage was 24 feet deep. The theater was on the ground floor. There were 3 weekly newspapers, and the hotels for show folk were the Smith and the Lydell. The 1897 population of What Cheer was 5,000.

What Cheer’s theatrical history appears to be richer and more complex than even local people remember. An article datelined What Cheer and headed “What Cheer is Rebuilt and Renamed Tic-Toc” appeared in Boxoffice March 20, 1948. The article said that the theater had been destroyed by a fire on November 6, 1947, but the building had been renovated and the theater and would soon open with 300 new seats, new carpeting, and new sound equipment, plus a nursery for children.

It was to be called the Tic-Toc Theatre and would be operated by the son and daughter-in-law of Mrs. Dorothy Fritz, who had operated the What Cheer for the previous eleven years. The FDY continued to list the What Cheer Theatre, with 225 seats, in its 1949 and 1950 editions, but the name Tic-Toc appears in a few items in trade journals over the years, the last being an item about the closing of the house which was published in the May 22, 1978 issue of Boxoffice. That means the Tic-Toc had a run of thirty years, on top of whatever time it spent as the What Cheer Theatre. One particularly interesting item, in The Exhibitor of November 7, 1951, said “Richard Fritz, owner, Tic-Toc, What Cheer, Ia., purchased the Masonic, What Cheer.” Mr. and Mrs. Fritz still owned the Tic Toc when it closed in 1978.

The history on the Opera House web site doesn’t mention a 1947 fire, or any alternate names for that theater, saying only that it operated as a movie house from sometime in the silent era until 1953. It seems strange that a town as small as What Cheer would have had two movie theaters in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but that’s what the evidence so far seems to be pointing to to: the Masonic Opera House and the What Cheer/Tic Toc were two different theaters.