The Theaters of Goetz: Ironwood, Michigan's "Rex"
Both the joy and bane of researching Goetz history are the trade journals which document the brothers’ business. Sometimes the information is muddled with misspellings and confused geography (perhaps relayed over early phone lines). At other times, they provide a gloriously detailed chronicle of Leon and Chester’s activities. When I first read that the Goetz Brothers were involved in a Michigan theater, I thought there must have been a mistake. A lot of digging later proved that this time, there was no mistake.
At some point prior to 1926, the Goetz Brothers invested in the Rex Theater of Ironwood, Michigan alongside its long-standing manager A. L. Picker (sometimes spelled “Picket” and “Picken”). In itself, Goetz interest in Ironwood, MI is weird because the brothers’ area of operation is roughly 300 miles south, in Southern Wisconsin.
Ironwood lies on the border between Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (U.P.), which is a land mass that actually extends out from the top of Wisconsin and has no physical connection to Michigan beyond a man-made bridge connecting the two. The U.P. is an artifact of the Toledo War, a cold war between the state of Ohio and the territory of Michigan— all of which happened before Wisconsin was a state. The U.P. is a vast, beautiful, sparsely populated (and policed) area. What’s important to the Goetz story is that Ironwood, which used to be much larger than it is today, is the closest Wisconsin-area town to Thunder Bay, Ontario that is also on the edge of a wilderness area.
Thunder Bay is the modern name of Port Arthur, where in 1909 the presidential “king-maker” Mark Hanna and Theodore Roosevelt began developing submarines for the British. By the time the Goetzes were involved, Ironwood would have been the nearest Wisconsin-focused market town for bootleg liquor coming out of Canada via the U.P.. Thunder Bay/Port Arthur, the submarine port, was the leading exit point for bootleg liquor being smuggled through the U.P.
Rum-running was an [alleged] early source of income for the Kennedy political family, who became heavily invested in the motion picture industry. The Kennedy bootlegging firm, Consolidated Exporters Corporation, was the focus of US Treasury investigations lead by NSA-founder (and some-time Imperial German agent) Elizabeth Smith Friedman. Consolidated did business right down the US-Canada border, according to historian Daniel Francis:
Most of the large liquor dealers from Canada established warehouses in Saint-Pierre. Consolidated Exporters, for example, represented United Distillers, a prominent Vancouver distillery. Consolidated Traders did business for the Montreal liquor giant Canadian Industrial Alcohol Ltd., owner of Corby’s.
The Kennedy family business history has a strange resonance with both Leon Goetz’s US Navy/‘health film’ history and his submarine business history, from Wikipedia:
Kennedy [Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.] was born to a political family in East Boston, Massachusetts. He made a large fortune as a stock market and commodity investor and later rolled over his profits by investing in real estate and a wide range of business industries across the United States. During World War I, he was an assistant general manager of a Boston area Bethlehem Steel shipyard; through this position, he became acquainted with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. In the 1920s, Kennedy made huge profits by reorganizing and refinancing several Hollywood studios; several acquisitions were ultimately merged into Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) studios.[2] Kennedy increased his fortune with distribution rights for Scotch whisky. He owned the largest privately owned building in the country, Chicago's Merchandise Mart.
Kennedy was a leading member of the Democratic Party and of the Irish Catholic community. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Kennedy to be the first chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which he led from 1934 to 1935. Kennedy later directed the Maritime Commission. Kennedy served as the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 until late 1940. With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Kennedy was pessimistic about Britain's ability to survive Nazi Germany's attacks. During the Battle of Britain in November 1940, Kennedy publicly suggested that "Democracy is finished in England. It may be here [in the United States]".[3] Following this controversy, Kennedy resigned his position.
Regular readers will remember what an important part Bethlehem Steel played in the initial politicking to build submarines in the USA for the British— read all about that and its bizarre Mormon connection in Submarines in the Great Lakes. NSA-mother Elizabeth Smith Friedman was struck that WWII-era German spies in North America used the same type of encryption used by Prohibition-era bootleggers— read all about that in Imperial German Active Measures and the Founding of the NSA.
So while Leon and Chester’s interest in Ironwood, MI theaters makes no sense from a business-management point of view, it makes perfect sense given Leon’s mysterious 1910 Submarine connections.
Records pertaining to the Goetz-era of the Rex are sparse, but the early history of the Rex is much better documented. The Rex theater (located on 115 W. Aurora Street) was built in the summer of 1915 by Con Geary and was originally operated by Chester Kitzman. It had a seating of 700. (See Moving Picture World, November 18th 1916, p. 1048.) The Rex was owned by a firm named Fulton & Peck at this time, which also ran another Ironwood theater named “Rialto” from 1917.
Moving Picture World, April 28th 1917
By June 15th, 1918 manager A. L. Picker and a partner Frank J. Petrusha had taken out a lease on the Rialto while maintaining an interest in the Rex. Leon and Chester became involved around 1926 when A. L. Picker began building a new theater in Ironwood... and here the lacuna of information begins.
What we can say is that Chester appears to have been the one actually doing the work managing the new theater:
From the “Milwaukee” subheading of the “Purely Personal” column of Exhibitors’ Herald, November 6th 1926. Chester seems to have been traveling through Milwaukee a lot prior to the brothers’ decision to invest there.
The Goetz brothers divested out of Ironwood in 1927, when they poured money into their disastrous Milwaukee venture…
Motion Picture News, January 21st 1927. The Radio, Empire, Regent and Parkway were all Milwaukee theaters. The divestment is the first mention of the Goetzes having anything to do with the Rialto in Ironwood.
The 1927 Ironwood divestment was accompanied by legal troubles between Picker and the Goetz Brothers:
Motion Picture News, February 4th 1927
Picker’s new independence seems to have been a cash-rich one:
Motion Picture News, February 18th, 1927
I was unable to find any photographs focusing on the Rex theater, but Greg Bellamy on WaterWinterWonderland.com says that he remembers the Rex being opposite the Ironwood Theater, which would make it one of the large, white/cream-facade buildings opposite the Ironwood sign in this old postcard from the same website:
The Rex Theater would have been right above the start of this sentence. The Ironwood theater is the long, white stone building in front of the red brick building flying the American Flag, which was the Sears Roebuck department store.
The 1928 Ironwood Theater is famous for its Barton Pipe organ, and the Rex was said to have had one as well, which would have looked something like this:
Barton Theater Organ image from theaterorgans.com
According to Cinema Treasures, The Rex was demolished in April 1961.
