Then and Now: Orpheum Theater and Ryan Block in Gardner
Two entrepreneurial brothers and a iconic local movie house left their mark on downtown
Mike Richard
Special for The Gardner News
The three-sided marquee was easily one of downtown Gardner’s most familiar landmarks, promoting the double-feature films at the beloved Orpheum Theater.
How many Saturdays around noontime did you get into the line that would snake down Parker Street, around the bend at Liggett’s Drug Store, to the corner of Pleasant Street and beyond for the afternoon matinee?
Originally known as the Murray Block, the Orpheum Theater first opened in the building at 32-40 Parker St. on May 29, 1913, by the Trimount Theatre Co. and was called “the last word on model construction of a motion picture house.”
The novel coronavirus did more than kill a third of a million Americans and freeze major swaths of the business and education worlds. By turning large gatherings into potentially virulent spreaders of disease, it also turned 2020 into the year the fun died â in the Napa Valley as across the nation and globe.
The Napa Valley Expo stood empty in late May, when tens of thousands of music fans had been expected to pack the fairground for the BottleRock festival. Not a note was played of a concert series planned for the Oxbow Commons, the summertime Porchfest music crawl was replaced by internet video feeds from bedrooms, and all that survived of the Town & Country Fair in August was an online livestock auction with cattle and goats dropped off by truck a few days later.
10 more favorite films
I’m following up on “10 favorite films” with numbers 11-20. I make no claim for them other than that they are movies I love. My emphasis is on lesser known and offbeat movies rather than classics like
Citizen Kane or
The Godfather or
The French Connection. With the long holiday weekend coming up next week, I thought some readers might find the list of interest or perhaps of use one way or another.
11.
The Big Red One: If you love movies, you are probably familiar with the work of Sam Fuller. This was his labor of love and dream project. Fuller wrote and directed this autobiographical film depicting an unnamed “Sergeant” (the absolutely brilliant Lee Marvin) leading an Army platoon in World War II from North Africa in 1942 to the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia at war’s end in 1945. Saturated in Fuller’s cynicism and black humor, the movie “is an enduring monument to Samuel Fuller, the writer, soldier, raconteu
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