The Girl Who Lived Above The Orpheum Theater
by Karen Hechler
Dauna Woodward Prinkey with her Aunt Louise Klitz
You have to be of a certain age to understand what going to the movies was like in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Think of a time when you didn’t have a VHS or DVD player or movies available on your computer or smart phone. Today, you can see a movie on your electronic equipment whenever you want to or have the time. Ages ago, unless you had a film projector and access to films, going to the movies was a big deal. My little movie theater in Rockwood, PA had three different movies a week. When we moved to Connellsville, there were three movie houses: the Orpheum, the Soisson, and the Paramount. I only visited the first two as I was never inside the Paramount. The Orpheum was a classy, elegant movie house with a large stage area and a beautiful stairway leading to the balcony, and the Soisson was the theater where kids could spend all day Saturday at the movies. When you see reruns on television of series like The Andy Griffith Show, you realize what a treat it was to go to the movies back then. What if your father was the manager of the theater, you could go to the movies whenever your parents allowed you to go, and you lived in the apartment building where the Orpheum occupied the entire first floor? What a dream! Well, Dauna Woodward Prinkey was that lucky girl in Connellsville. She was “The Girl Who Lived Above the Orpheum Theater.” Dauna is the wife of Pastor Ralph Prinkey who serves at the Connellsville Presbyterian Church as a guest pastor from time to time. After worship, we meet in the Fellowship Hall for coffee and refreshments. I knew something of Dauna’s background at the Orpheum and thought that her story would make a good article for Crossroads Magazine. Kids who once lived in a village like Gibsonville had fathers who worked at the Etna iron smelting furnace,
cut timber for heating the furnace, or hauled the wood, ore and limestone. Kids who lived in a coal patch town had fathers who worked in the mines. Kids who lived in the church manse had a father who was the pastor of the church. Our kid, Dauna, lived over the Orpheum Theater and her father ran it. The building that housed the Orpheum was built as the Royal Hotel in 1916. I can imagine Connellsville in 1916, a bustling railroad center for the active coal mines and coke ovens turning out coke for the hungry steel mills of Pittsburgh. People who were in and out of Connellsville on business needed a place to stay overnight or if you were employed by one of the industries having its home base in Connellsville an apartment to live in. The Royal Hotel offered both single rooms and apartments. People can’t work all of the time and need some entertainment, so the lobby area of the Royal Hotel was turned into a theater which staged vaudeville shows and silent movies. The first movie to seen at the new Orpheum on December 14, 1916 was titled Less Than the Dust and starred Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart.” Silent films gave way to talkies in May of 1929, when the Vitaphone system allowed films to enter the “Sound Age.” The theater was owned at different times by Pete and Gus Mikalarias, Greek brothers. Pete had created the theater within the Royal Hotel in 1916, and it was he who installed Vitaphone in 1929 to equip the theater for sound. My friend, Fotenie Melassanos Mongell, told me stories about the local Greek families and their involvement in restaurants and theaters, not uncommon occupations for Greeks who had immigrated. Her father was born in Greece, and he eventually moved to Connellsville where he owned and operated the Star Restaurant. 10
