Alpine Theatre

MichaelKilgore on December 31, 2022 at 8:49 pm

There’s a fairly lengthy story about the Alpine in “East Rainelle” that ran in the April 18, 1960 issue of Boxoffice, found on Yumpu. To summarize:

Frank L. Weitzel bought the Alpine on March 1, 1960. Soon after, the town was snowed in for a week. In early April, warm weather brought a flood that “inundated the 512-seat house” so that only about 100 chairs were dry enough to be used. Weitzel reopened anyway on the weekend of April 10, running the boiler night and day to try to dry out the place. He soon bought dry seats from closed theaters in Gowen (?) and Gassaway (also called the Alpine), because the damp seats were creating an unpleasant “smell-o-vision” experience.