Chevy Stylemaster Town Sedan

1948 Chevrolet Stylemaster Town Sedan

Raffle for Granada Oct. 15

By Russ Morgan

Thursday, September 24, 2009

At 7 p.m. Oct. 15, a classic car will be raffled off at the Granada Theatre, echoing a similar drawing that took place 61 years ago, all the way down to the model of the car.

The raffle tickets have been on sale for a year, and the event is being held to mark the one-year anniversary of the opening of the restored Granada.

“We’ve sold over 200 tickets already,” said Jessica Buchholz, the Granada’s executive director. “We can fit 800 people here, so if we sell 800 raffle tickets that’s OK with me.”

The car, a 1948 Chevrolet Stylemaster Town Sedan, has been on display at various events throughout the year. It currently is being kept at John North Ford.

A similar drawing was held at the Fox Granada Theater on July 7, 1948. A picture from the event shows the theater packed with people anticipating the drawing.

The idea to find and restore the same model car originated with John Mallon of the Emporia Granada Alliance. Mallon bought the car and started the restoration, and the body work was done by John North Ford.

The drawing will be held following a reception for ticket-holders that will begin at 5 p.m. Immediately following the drawing will be a showing of the classic movie musical, “Grease.”

Tickets cost $20 each or three for $50. For tickets or more information, stop by the Granada or call 342-3342. Pictures of the car and more information can be found at www.emporiagranada.com.

Proceeds from the raffle will go to help with improvements and operations for the Granada Theatre.

http://www.emporiagazette.com/news/2009/sep/24/raffle_granada_oct_15/

Chevy Stylemaster II

1948 Chevrolet Stylemaster Town Sedan II

Celebrating a year of success

By Russ Morgan

Friday, October 16, 2009

The Granada Theatre enjoyed a packed house Thursday night as people gathered to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the theater’s grand re-opening. They were also there in hopes of winning the 1948 Chevy Stylemaster being raffled in celebration of the event.

The car is the same make and model as one given away by the theater 61 years ago. The idea to find and restore the same model of car originated with John Mallon of the Emporia Granada Theatre Alliance. Mallon bought the car and started the restoration, and body work and storage was done by John North Ford. For the past year as raffle tickets were being sold, the car appeared at many Emporia events.

Before the drawing, Frank Sinatra played on the sound system as a screen showed slides of the Granada’s history and pictures of the progress of the restoration.

“We are celebrating a year of very successful operations since the theater reopened last October,” said Jessica Buchholz, executive director for the Granada. “The first year was quite a success, from classic movies to many events with the Emporia Arts Council and a number of other organizations and private events, with weddings and receptions.”

The drawing for the car was held just before a screening of the movie “Grease.” The event drew a near-capacity crowd.

“I cannot express our gratitude to all the individuals and businesses and groups in the community and outside of the community who have supported the Granada in the past year,” Buchholz said. “It’s been amazing. ... We are so looking forward to the next year, so here’s to another successful year at the Granada.”

More than 600 tickets were sold for the drawing, and as Justin Mallon and Tim North took the stage to draw the winning ticket, a hush fell over the crowd.

Norman Fields and his wife, Rosaetta, were the winners of the car. Both were speechless as they were presented with Granada memorabilia.

“I’ve got the title, so come and see me after the movie,” Buchholz told the couple.

“We were just talking about getting another vehicle, but I didn’t expect something like this,” Norman Fields said as he and his wife stepped outside to look the car over. He said he has a place for it in his garage.

The event raised more than $9,000 that will go to help with improvements and operations for the Granada Theatre.

http://www.emporiagazette.com/news/2009/oct/16/celebrating_year_success/

The Granada Theater

Unlike many of the faded old movie palaces in Detroit and across the country, The Granada Theater in that quiet little college town of Emporia, Kansas was saved.

Not only saved but restored to its exquisite Movie Palace interior décor splendor—back in the days when movie theaters rivaled the worship and adoration equal to, for example, the grand edifice of the gothic limestone Presbyterian Church looming across Commercial Street in all its grim stoic Midwestern Gothic seriousness.

The Granada was serious business too—but Hollywood business. So serious was the movie business that all the schools of Emporia were closed—and all of us students were herded down to the Granada to take in the new Cinemascope sandal & tit classic movie, The Robe (1953).

The Robe was a great success story—grossing more than any film ever had done at the box office. Richard Burton as the tribune in the time of Christ in charge of the group that crucified Jesus, Jean Simmons as his lover, Victor Mature as Demetrius the slave/gladiator and the campy Jay Robinson as the totally mad hairdresser Caligula, the mad emperor of Rome, well, that’s what me and my classmates at demure little Walnut Elementary got dragged off to see one afternoon in 1953.

We were all dutifully stunned and somewhat thrilled, I suppose, but the extravagant cinematic wonder of it all—the Cinemascope Technicolor production meant to make all of us born-again Christians perhaps.

But for me, all that The Robe ever did—was to prepare me for the future air-conditioned wonders of all of the magnificent movies that Hollywood could conjure up—to make me a born-again worshipper of all the Divas and Queen Bees that the Silver Screen could deliver.

Lana Turner in Imitation of Life, Elvis the Pelvis Presley in Love Me Tender, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Zsa Zsa Gabor in Queen of Outer Space, Rita Hayworth in Blood and Sand, etc. etc.

The Granada like so many old film palaces fell into disrepair and was closed, the roof leaked, the pigeons and bums moved in. It was on the verge of being torn down—when some historically minded residents took pity on the ruins & restored it to its original glorious beauty.

The photos above show some of the restored original interior decorating—which is a story in itself out of the past and full of love for the cinematic heritage of that little Athens of the Midwest, Emporia, Kansas.

The other photo from David Naylor’s Great American Movie Theaters (1987) is an interior shot of the Granada Theater taken in 1948 of an audience back then at a special promotion giving away a Chevrolet town sedan. Circled in red is yours truly, my grandparents and my Mommy Dearest—all of us anxiously waiting for the drawing to begin.

Thanks to Kenton Rhoades for the interior photos.

Midwest Gothic Haiku

 

Midwest Gothic Haiku

The decay of just—

About everything around

The gothic downfall

Decaying Small Towns

They never were much—

Thriving metropolises

But they were alive

Dead Doorways

They’re dead doorways now—

But they still open to the

Midwest gothic past

For Sale or Lease

Closed old gothic bars—

What tales could they really tell

Old highs long since gone

Grand Motel

All along the once—

Well-traveled Highway 50

Grand but cheap motels

Gone Detroit

Swank slinky Packards—

Big Showboats tooling their way

Down gothic highways

For Sale

We were rich back then—

Nice big cars that came & went

Like Toilet Paper

Dodge

Farmers could afford—

Heavy-duty Dodge pickups

Not just Chevy, Fords

Gone Gothic Americana

Gradually though—

The times changed & RFD

Went retro bye-bye

Antiques

Midwest gothic then—

Went beyond merely being

Grant Wood nostalgic

Gothic Nostalgia

They’re all pretty much—

Dead today, the Depression

And WWII crowd

What's Wrong With Kansas?

What’s Wrong With Kansas?

—for William Allen White

One day I may—

Touch what’s wrong

The small skulls—

The lonely Flint Hills

The stark fenceposts—

The Godawful hush…

Z Bar Ranch

There’s no life higher—

Than the tall prairie grasses

The wind bending—

Everything in one direction

The cattle know where—

They are better than we do

Driving out past Strong City—

Past the Z Bar ruins

Like being mailed into space—

This thin, silly message

The Artist

—for John Evans

The obscure moon—

Lighting an obscure world

Where we ourselves—

Wereneverquite ourselves

And didn’t want to be—

Nor did we have to

Then getting outta town—

Desiring some freedom

The motive for coming out—

Shrinking from the creeps

The weight of prairie gloom—

The ABC’s of being real

Face Lift

And then there are—

All the other faces

The ones that needed—

A facelift worse than me

The faceless faces—

Of unimportant people

So jealous of anything—

That’s not flat

They are jealous faces—

Fly Over State faces

Stoic, gothic Americana—

Fenceposts in the pastures

Touring Emporia

1

Tragedy isn’t Kansas—

It’s the people stuck there

Scrupulously stale—

Boring with quiet desperation

The tragedy is cultural—

Mysteriously hiding individuals

People dragging their—

Shadows down Commercial Street

Some go south down to—

Soden’s Grove and play baseball

Others keep going to Bird Bridge—

To murder their wives down there

2

Others travel to Olpe—

Along desolate Highway 99

The smart ones go north—

To ponder the Sunken Gardens

One hundred fifty years of—

So-called Higher Education

Others stick to Sixth—

Going east to Toad’s Hollow

Or west past EHS—

The new Santa Fe Motel

Convention Center Hotel—

But who wants to come?

What’s in Emporia—

For convening conventions?

3

Some go west—

Past Iowa Beef and Tyson’s

The smell of Auschwitz—

Pervading the Streets of Elms

Out past the Roller Rink ruins—

Past the VFW and Truck Stop

Bug-eyed with amazement—

Those glory-holes in the walls!!!

Out past Stauffer’s statues—

Giant old limestone Fenceposts

A gaunt way of saying goodbye—

Driving fast to get outta town

The Santa Fe Hotel

We had a leisurely drive to our Hostess Twinkie Convention—and checked into the lovely Santa Fe Hotel there on Sixth Avenue.

I tipped the maîtres d'hôtel—so that we could ensconce ourselves in the exquisite “Wood Bloxom” bridal suite up on the third floor.

After all, that corner suite had many fond memories for me—just thinking about it makes me weep with fake nostalgic joy and ersatz melancholy tears.

So many fond bitter-sweet memoires even now pervade that ever so gracious former classroom—with its precious view from way up there of quaint abandoned Sixth Avenue far down below.

If my sweet bride only knew—the profane history of that former tacky loathsome classroom. Remodeled and transformed now—into a coy pretty little Bridal Suite.

It’s almost as if it were just yesterday—the ancient gnarled gargoyle face of the Lord and Master Wood Bloxom scowling down at the huddled flock of shy little innocent lambs that were unlucky enough to be stuck in his stultifyingly boring Algebra and Plane Geometry class back in the primitive 1960’s.

No teacher like bitchy snarling Wood Bloxom would ever be tolerated in the American school system today—but back then his almost half-a-century tenure had fixed him in stone for the Eternal Ages. If not Maplewood Cemetery—where he’d eventually end up like the rest of them.

Even my mother had walked those very same hallways and sat in the same classrooms as I did twenty years earlier. She graduated in the Class of 1942—during those dark War Years looming over the ruins of the Great Depression Midwest. Her various Yearbooks are film noir flashbacks—to a time that's hard for me to imagine.

She knew only too well—what Wood Bloxom was really like because he was teaching even back then. The same with Anita B. Rice, Ed Price, Marion Howard, Lois Jaquith—teachers that I was so lucky or not so lucky to have as teachers myself.

Each one a living breathing caricature of themselves—indelibly set in their ways like the cracks in the jagged limestone sidewalks I walked on going down Constitution Street on my way to that strange rather beloved EHS everyday.

And now here I was back in this lovely Neo-Classical former high school Convention Center—the classy, swanky Santa Fe Hotel. How lucky I was to cozy up to my sweetheart tonight—here in Wood Bloxom’s petite little comfy Bridal Suite.

Of course, it raised some eyebrows at the reception desk—when I flaunted my Gay Marriage Certificate from the radical State of Massachusetts. We were the first gay couple—to check into the grand Hotel.

But as bitchy Linda Darnell said in that classic Hollywood film noir trashy Fallen Angel (1945)—“So what?”

Hood Mansion

Marion Howard

(1900 1992)

There's an embossed, bas relief quality to her earlier photo. It's almost as if she were a Greek goddess come to life or perhaps Roman, Etruscan, Cretan queen-bee? Maybe it's just the way her profile stands out on the page her tightly-knit coiffure, her cool eyes, her light smile, her poise for the camera?  On the other hand, it could be her Columbia education, her East Coast poise, her NYC way of looking at things? Or is it her gift of language, her fluent Spanish, her trips to Madrid? Which side of the Civil War was she on did she favor Franco? I really can't say I guess I was more enamored with Mabel King. I plodded my way through Latin translating Caesar's commentaries and the Gallic Wars as best I could. I had flashbacks at night of Roman soldiers dreams about the Baths of Carcalla. I dreamed I was St. Sebastian sacrificed in the Coliseum jaded pagans famished for my long drawn-out demise. Oh those ruthless gladiators and hungry lions!!!! Back then I had a crush on dead languages English was my favorite. So many dead languages so little time. I did kind of like Spanish though like during wrestling practice. When Arnold Lopez whispered sweet nothings in my ear.