On with the show
Middleton’s former Capitol Theatre building the stuff of memories for pub patrons
Ask the lunch crowd at Capitol Pub about movies and the stories don’t stop. Food gets cold.
Rob Gillis leans back in his chair and looks up to where the gallery of the old Capitol Theatre once was – just above where the bar is now.
He remembers his first date was there. He was in Grade 5 and they sat in the balcony.
Rob’s father, Bruce, can go back further than that. He remembers Looney Toons on Saturday mornings. And he was no stranger to that gallery where more than a little mischief might have taken place.
Rob looks wide-eyed as his father recounts how the kids would crumple up their empty popcorn containers and throw them off the balcony. The trick was to throw them so they’d sail through the projector beam and the shadow would glide in a graceful arc across the screen.
And Bruce remembers seeing some of the classics when they first came out, like "Psycho," "The Magnificent Seven," and ‘"Lady and the Tramp."
“That’s what everybody did, everybody went to the movies on Friday night,” said the elder Gillis. And it didn’t matter if you had a girlfriend or boyfriend at the time. “Everybody went. It was always packed.”
He recalls when admission was 35 cents, popcorn 10 cents; no extra charge for butter.
Pub owner John Bartlett listens, fascinated, as his diners reminisce. He bought the place in 2008, about a decade after the theatre closed, but people of a certain age know how important movie theatres were in small towns.
“It was your community hub.
It’s where your kids went to see the movies, or where you went out on your date. It’s where you met people,” said Bartlett. “To me, that’s what a theatre would have been at that time. This was a single theatre house for a long time.”
Somewhere along the way – Bartlett thinks in the 1990s, not long before it closed – it was divided down the middle to become two theatres.
SMALL TOWN
“But still it was a theatre in a small town,” he said. “It was the place where you went for your entertainment, for your dates, where you sent your kids to a matinee on a Saturday afternoon to get them out of your hair a little bit. For them to spend their allowance and get some popcorn and treats.”
Bartlett said it harkens back to a different time.
“No cellphones. Nobody was taking selfies. Nobody was Facebooking,” he said. “Nobody was doing any of that stuff. They were actually out doing something. You couldn’t download those movies.”
When Bartlett bought it, the place was called the Capitol Lounge and Grill.
“I changed it into the Capitol Pub because I think it better reflects who we are and what we do,” he said. “A pub traditionally is something that is community. If you look at the history of England and pubs, it's community – your ‘local.’ We wanted to be more like that.”
In doing that he thinks a bit of that old movie house vibe remains. There’s old movie posters and one of the first things he did when he bought the place was commission local artist Tatiana Baxter to paint a movie-themed mural with all those old movie icons – John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, James Dean, and yes, Marilyn Monroe standing over that subway grate. And Elvis.
In 1922 Fred Armour erected a 375-seat theatre with a bowling alley in the basement, apartments on the second floor, and a receiving station for Lahave Creameries. That theatre burned to the ground about 1930. During that blaze a wall fell on firefighter Harold Ray who died about a year later.
“Middleton's next theatre was built in 1936 on the same site by the Town to be leased to the F.G. Spencer organization of Saint John while the town offices occupied the southwest corner of the building,” the book "Middleton 1909 – 1984" recounts.
The Capitol Theatre was opened Nov. 5, 1936 by thenMayor Albro Coldwell and the first film shown was "In Person," starring Ginger Rogers, with
800 people in the seats.
Bruce Gillis tries to remember the name of the woman who sold the tickets.
“That was Winnie Marshall who is long gone but ran the ticket booth for years,” said longtime resident Albert Johnson. “Richard Sanford on Commercial Street did the cleaning. Al Whittle was supposedly the manager for the owners in Saint John but usually he was at the Wolfville theatre.”
He remembers Marg Mason and Heather Rushton ran the canteen. Nita Simpson also worked in the canteen until it closed.
“Our good friend Marcus Lewis was the projectionist along with Don McCoy, Brian Schofield, Brian Wagner, and Steve Morse now the tow truck owner,” Johnson said. “Our friend Marcus was there from 1993 until it closed in 1999.”
Bartlett always wondered exactly where the gallery was. He thought it might have been above the bar but was never sure. He said someday he might take out that wall and see what’s there.