Grand Theatre

Joe Vogel on August 15, 2017 at 2:29 pm

This web page has some information about the Grand Theatre in Hallock (I don’t believe any of the accompanying photos depict the Grand, though.) The page says that the Grand opened in November, 1920. It doesn’t give the closing year, but does note that the house operated into the CinemaScope era. A drive-in theater, under the same ownership, opened nearby in 1954.

The article also mentions Frederick “Casey” Jones, a local mechanic and radio repair man who, in the late 1920s, built a sound system for the theater when the owner was unable to afford the commercial systems then coming on the market. Jones later went on to work for Minneapolis-based Ultraphone Sound Systems, where he made many improvements in the company’s theater sound systems. Over the next couple of decades he proved to be an imaginative inventor in many fields, and invented, among other things, the first practicable refrigeration system for long haul trucks. There is an interesting short biography of him on this page from the Minnesota Science & Technology Hall of Fame.