Air shows, movie premiere at city’s biggest lakefront festival (not Summerfest)
Editor’s note: This is an updated and revised version of a story first published in the Green Sheet in 2016.
Seventy-five years ago — and more than 20 years before the first Summerfest — Milwaukee threw its biggest, and longest, summertime party on the city’s lakefront.
It was a party 100 years in the making.
Milwaukee began talking about celebrating the city’s 1946 centennial early. The Milwaukee Journal reported on Aug. 16, 1928, that the subject was broached at a meeting of the Auditorium board, where it was decided “to ask the public for a general expression of opinion as to a suitable observance of this important date.”
It’s not like Milwaukee didn’t know how to throw a party on the lakefront. In 1933, the city threw a festival with fireworks, street dancing and more to celebrate the repeal of Prohibition laws barring beer sales. That event was so successful that it spawned the Milwaukee Midsummer Festival, which was held each year in July up until World War II.
But the idea of a lakefront festival to put Milwaukee on the map was something else.
‘Main dish’ of Milwaukee’s centennial
In Mayor Carl Zeidler’s inaugural address on April 16, 1940, The Journal reported, he urged the city to hold a centennial bash that “will be spotlighted by the entire nation.”
It took awhile, but on Oct. 30, 1945, Ira A. Bickhart, executive director of the centennial program, told Milwaukee’s Civitan Club that the festivities would start with a seven-day celebration beginning at the Auditorium Jan. 27, 1946, The Journal reported.
But the “main dish” of the 100th birthday celebration, Bickhart said, would be a monthlong festival on the lakefront beginning July 12, 1946.
Overhead, there was a daily air show based at Maitland Field, the airstrip on land now occupied by the Summerfest grounds. There also were water shows, navy and agricultural exhibits, a carnival midway, and a parade through downtown Milwaukee that attracted as many as 250,000 people, despite the rain.
The event even included Milwaukee’s first legit Hollywood premiere — fittingly, for “Two Guys From Milwaukee,” a comedy starring Milwaukee native Jack Carson and singer-actor Dennis Morgan, who was from Prentice, in Price County in northern Wisconsin. The pair of Hollywood stars arrived with some fanfare by boat, greeted by a naval salute.
A big stage on a big lake
But the festival’s center-ring attraction was the Centurama Amphitheater, the event’s main entertainment venue.
Flanked by giant numbers reading 1846 and 1946, the amphitheater, seating more than 9,000 people, was built at about what is now Veterans Park for an estimated $75,000. The venue hosted shows every night, including harmonica master Larry Adler, Hollywood
song-and-dance man Donald O’Connor and a 1,000-voice choir led by John Anello, Centurama’s music director.
In addition, a cast of more than 100 performers staged a nightly “Cavalcade of History,” depicting, the ads said, “Milwaukee’s rise to its position of one of the world’s great cities.”
The Journal reported that 40,000 people attended the Friday afternoon opening, which included an aerial bomb display and the Milwaukee Police Band playing “Happy Birthday.” Centurama’s first Saturday attracted another 100,000 people, The Journal reported July 14, 1946.
(The biggest one-day attendance, according to The Journal, was 215,000, attracted Aug. 3, to a demonstration by the U.S. Navy and a stage show featuring singer and comedian Eddie Cantor. “I never played to a larger crowd in two appearances a day as I did in Milwaukee,” Cantor told The Journal in an Aug. 9 story.)
Despite an early surge in attendance, the lakefront festival wore out its welcome as it wound down. Centurama officials had predicted attendance of 3 million to 5 million, but according to The Journal on Aug, 12, 1946, “generous police estimates, tallied daily for the lakefront show and all of its associated activities … brought their totals to 2.85 million.”
Crews began dismantling the amphitheater Aug. 12. The Milwaukee Sentinel reported that Bickhart had recommended that some of the facilities “be retained as the ‘beginning of an outdoor arena or theater,’” but that didn’t happen.
Twenty-two years later, Milwaukee’s first Summerfest was held at scores of sites around the city — but not on the stretch of lakefront that was the home of Centurama. Citing “increased civil disturbances erupting throughout our country,” the U.S. Army had blocked the first Summerfest from using the land, which was near the Army’s Nike rocket launching installation.