Carbon Junction, Ohio — Mahoning County
Daily Box Office Ledger · Anno 1933
Walter F. Drennan, House Manager · 412 Foundry Street
Property of HouseBound this third January of the year nineteen hundred and thirty-three. Each day's record entered in pencil before the booth lights are extinguished, so it may be corrected without shame. Receipts banked Saturdays at the First Mahoning. Children admitted under twelve at half rate before five o'clock. House closed Mondays for cleaning and re-threading.
Friends —
I have been at the Empress every evening this November and I want to set down what I have seen, because it is not a small thing.
The mill cut another shift in October. Men I have known since boyhood are walking the streets in the daytime with nowhere to be. And still, on a Friday at seven, two hundred and forty of them find a dime and a nickel — sometimes pooled from three pockets — and they come up the steps and hand it through the window to my wife.
They do not come because the picture is grand. They come because for an hour and three quarters they sit shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors in a room that is warm, and a light moves on a wall, and a story unfolds that has nothing to do with the rent. They laugh together. That laughter is medicine no doctor in this county can write a script for.
People say the picture business is frivolous. I say the Empress is the last public room in Carbon Junction where a man without work and a man still drawing a paycheck sit in the same dark and feel the same thing. I do not know what that is worth in dollars. I know what it is worth in our town.
So long as fifteen cents will buy a seat under our roof, we will keep the doors open. That is a promise.
— W. F. Drennan, House Manager
Carbon Junction, November 1933