Duluth’s Sunbeam Theatre

PDD's Fairy Research Spy found this ad in the June 22, 1920, Duluth News Tribune, which indicates the theater opened on June 22, 1907.

Sunbeam owner J.B. Clinton went on to transform the Lyceum -- "the most beautiful theater in the northwest" -- with Charles Meyers. They changed it from an opera house into a "combination home for photoplays and legitimate road productions." This article from 1921 provides background on both.

Here are ads for other theaters from the same issue of the paper as the 13th anniversary Sunbeam ad above. (Note: this is not the original newspaper layout, but a manipulation of the images for the purposes of cramming them all into this space.)

J. B. Clinton may have owned and reopened the Lyceum in 1921, converting its auditorium so that it could run movies, but he sure didn't build it. The theatre had already been standing for 30 years by then. It was built by A. M. Miller, a lumber tycoon who also gave Duluth the money that eventually built the Miller Hospital, which became Miller-Dwan, which merged with St. Mary's to become SMDC, which we all know today as the Duluth campus of Essentia Health.

In 1922 the Sunbeam moved to 103 West Superior Street and the New Astor Theatre took over its previous location. The Sunbeam was gone by 1930, and the New Astor ten years later, replaced with Snyder’s Drug. 

You can find a history of the Lyceum here and discover more about Duluth's smaller historic theaters here.

I love the 1920 ad; "There has never, knowingly, in all that time been a picture shown of which the owner's mother would not approve" is funny on so many levels:

1) Awkward passive, multiclause construction.
 
2) It strongly implies there was at least one incident in which they unknowingly showed something really indecent; I can imagine the scene now. 

3) Since when is your mother the standard moral arbiter? A more cynical age would suggest that her financial interest in the success of the theater may have compromised her exercise of rectitude.