Grand Theatre

Joe Vogel on April 12, 2023 at 4:16 am

There was a notice of the closing of the Grand Theatre at Odin in the January 14, 1937 issue of Film Daily.

The only movie house listed at Odin in the 1914-1915 American Motion Picture Directory was called the Prize Theatre, and it was located at the corner of Laurel [sic] and North Main Street. Laurel was apparently a typo for Laury Street, and North Main was the former name of Kirkwood Street. It seems possible that the Prize was an aka for the Grand.

A history of Odin’s Masonic Lodge has this to say:

“In 1962 the Lodge bought the Sugg Building that once housed Wooters Insurance Office, Odin Drug Store and Odin Kroger Store downstairs and the Grand Theatre and a bowling alley upstairs. It was rebuilt into what now is the Lodge upstairs, accessed by a chair lift, and downstairs a dining room and two rental spaces.”

This Flickr page has a photo of the Masonic Lodge. Neither Google nor Bing Maps offers a street view of the location, but judging from the satellite view and the shape of the buildings in the photo, the lodge is located at 202 E. Kirkwood Street, which is a very short distance east of Laury Street. As the Grand was an upstairs house in a very small town, it’s likely that its space was multi-purpose, and thus probably had a flat floor and movable seats, so it might have switched back and forth between being a movie house and a skating rink multiple times. It might have operated as a movie venue intermittently all the way until the Gem Theatre opened.