By Tom Wilbur
So here’s something kind of cool about Salina downtown history. We all grew up loving the Fox Theater— the Stiefel Theatre these days, and the great shows they now bring to Salina. I saw “A Hard Days Night”, the Beatles first movie there, with a couple of guy friends and a thousand screaming Salina girls. An interesting moment for a ten year old boy. My first date with my wife was seeing “Paper Moon” at the Vogue. My Aunt Jody actually had a part in the movie.
At one time, there were a number of movie theaters operating in downtown Salina at the same time. Know how many?
Most of us remember The Fox, the Strand and the Vogue. But at the peak, there were actually five downtown movie theaters in Salina operating at the same time.
In the early 1930s and again by the late 1930s–1940s, all of these running downtown along Santa Fe:
- Fox–Watson Theatre (now the Stiefel Theatre) – opened in 1931 as a first-run movie house, closed as a cinema in 1987.
- Strand Theater – opened May 10, 1916; remodeled in 1938; closed July 4, 1966.
- Jayhawk Theater (originally Delharco) – became the Jayhawk in 1930, with film listings into the late 1940s/early 1950s before being dismantled in the mid-1950s.
- Grand Theater – Convention Hall converted to the Grand Theatre in 1921, still operating as a movie house until about 1934.
- Royal Theatre – opened in 1913 on N. Santa Fe; closed in early 1959. It was also known as the “Bloody Bucket”.
By 1931–1934, all of these except the Vogue were open, giving you five simultaneous downtown picture houses; later, after the Grand closed, the Vogue Theatre (opened October 1938, cinema use until the 1980s/early ’90s) joined the Strand, Jayhawk, Royal and Fox–Watson, again making five operating at once.
Party on, Salina.
