In the dawn of our first world war, with Christmas right around the corner, the people of Portland in December of 1914 seemed to enjoy the basic shopping and merriment that comes around the holiday season.

In 1921 there was only one movie more successful than Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid.

Precautions and Prestige

Unfortunately the movie business was not always the safest or the most secure by any means in the early days of exhibition. Portland was by no means an exception to this trend and as time went on, it didn't take long for entrepreneurs to take preventative measures.

The Lyric theater was a small theater located in Prineville, Oregon. Prineville is about an hour-long drive northeast of Bend, Oregon. While researching the Lyric theater, I learned that it originally opened at a now-unknown location, then moved three more times before finally settling at its final, and most well-known location at 216 N. Main St, Pineville Oregon. The operator of the theater, Ken Piercy, opened another theater across the street and named it the Pine theater. The Pine theater is still open today, standing from 1938 to now, and serves as Prineville’s main theater.

The Alta theater was located in Pendleton, Oregon. The theater was opened on September 6, 1913, and was made to accommodate the needs of viewers in response to those lacking said needs. It came equipped with extra space in the back so that late-comers would not be crowded together and a large number of people could sit comfortably and maneuver the theater with ease. The owner of the venue, C.E.

Dan L. Sharits was an enterprising and ambitious manager of the Star theater (1911-1918) in Medford, Oregon, who leveraged his movie theater experience into a career making pictures in Hollywood.

Dorothy Jaquish was a movie theater prodigy, as this article in the exhibitors’ trade journal Motion Picture World explains. When she was still a teenager, she took over running the Dreamland Theatre in remote Ontario, Oregon, after her father died in 1918.