Rig Theatre

Pyote, Texas was a tiny, quiet village in West Texas with as few as under 100 residents in the mid-1920’s. Rail activity associated with a 1926 oil discovery changed that overnight. A “black gold triangle” formed with Pyote in the southwest, another boom town called, Wink, 16 miles to the North, and the town of Monahans 16 miles to the East. All three towns would have movie houses. The 1926 oil strike led Pyote from just a few businesses to over 100 businesses created rather quickly with Pyote growing from 100 to 3,500 residents in 18 months. Two theatre exhibitors came in with Oskar Korn building a 632-seat theater - the Palace Theater - and another company building a quicker, but markedly smaller 250-seat theater - the Lyric Theater. Korn placed a Reproduco pipe organ in the Palace Theatre to take the presentational quality up a notch.

Practically the entire world changed between the opening of the Lyric Theater on April 23, 1927 with Zane Grey’s “Born to the West” and four years later in 1931. In that span, the Palace Theater had opened, sound had come to motion pictures, the Great Depression had hit, an intense drought beginning in 1930 led to disastrous, dust bowl conditions, and the K&P railroad built a spur to Monahans ostensibly eliminating Pyote from the rail business. And a steep decrease in the production of oil from the nearby fields helped the population move from 3,500 in Pyote to just about 1,000 people in an overbuilt town with only 36 of the over 100 business buildings occupied. The movie trade press said that given the conditions, the movie auditorium situation in the oil boom triangle area could be summarized in a single word, “overbuilt".

Oskar Korn converted the Palace Theatre to a Mallaphone sound system in 1929. The K&H Circuit purchased the Lyric changing its name to the Pyote Theatre also equipping it for sound. As was common in that period of small town theater operation, Korn then bought the competing Pyote Theatre only to close it (in 1931) and it became a church almost overnight. Unfortunately, the town’s continued loss of population forced him to additionally close the Palace Theatre three times once in 1933, again in 1937 and once again in 1940, leaving the town theatre-less as World War II began.

But in 1942, the Pyote Air Base was created giving the town a second, lesser dramatic boom period. The Pyote Air Base created the third movie theater in Pyote’s history within the base, itself. The population increase stimulated Griffith Amusements to take over the dormant Palace Theatre as Griffith purchased all of the West Texas O.K. Theatres Circuit locations then headed by Oskar Korn. Griffith relit the Palace Theatre reducing seating count in a redesign as the 500-seat Rig Theatre in 1944, named for the oil rigs in the area.

The “Rig” name was shared by the Wink, Texas, Rig Theatre also operated for a period by Griffith. It was the theater’s second location after a fire. Pyote’s 1944 Rig Theatre reopening was likely with Edward G. Robinson in “Mr. Winkle Goes to War” as a snapshot exists from that showing - likely to have been shared with the trade press. After the War, the Air Force Station’s needs changed from active training to post-War scrap and refurbishing requiring fewer personnel. The base activities fell dramatically after the Korean War’s end in 1953. The Rig Theatre closed as did the Air Base Theatre. The Air Base reopened theatre-less in 1958 for a five-year period with a streamlined number of folks until its permanent closure in 1963.

The last bit of activity for Pyote occurred on the former base when the West Texas State School was created there for juvenile delinquents in 1966. That was eventually closed permanently under a severe abuse controversy. The town’s population sunk to under 100 ending all hopes for any further cinema exhibition in the area.

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