Eastwood Theater
Houston, Texas
1936-1960
Remembering the Eastwood. While looking for something else this morning, I ran across this brief post and response thread about the old Eastwood Theater on Leeland Avenue at Telephone Road. It was by Stan Gilmore and six reader contributors who apparently also experienced the post WWII fun of that iconic movie house in the East End. The other large ones for most of us East Enders back in that era included the Wayside on Telephone Road near Wayside Drive (that one later became home to the Jimmy Menutis Club), the Santa Rosa, further south on Telephone near Park Place Boulevard, and the Broadway on Broadway Boulevard near Milby High School. Several other smaller movie theaters also operated in the East End and throughout the city back in that time and all of you survivors from that period will know immediately the ones I write about here. As I’ve written previously, my home base smaller movie theater, the one that held me and many of the kids from Pecan Park and Mason Park spellbound at their Saturday double features, plus action serials and cartoons, was the Avalon, on 75th near Lawndale. Unfortunately, only one of these suburban, mostly art deco sculpted houses of Houston history, the Santa Rosa, survived the wrecking balls beyond the 1960s. The Santa Rosa, which also was located near the home of my old Houston Buff friend Jerry Witte at the time of his death in 2002, was still around then as an “adult” movie theater, but it too may be gone by now. I haven’t been back to the specific area of Jerry’s home since his death to know for sure about the fate of the Santa Rosa.
The oft-repeated punchline to this story is a familiar sad one for so much of Houston’s history until now. Each wonderful place of cultural and architectural history went down without a whimper of protest from Houstonians favoring preservation. Buff Stadium went down the same way. At least, today, we have a fairly well organized voice of protest in Houston against turning landmark places into parking spaces or strip centers. It’s only because we now have an activist movement in favor of sensible preservation today that a problem with “what to do with the Astrodome” even exists. Back in that earlier time, a vacant, unused and unusable building without the funds to resurrect it to a legitimate use would have long ago already added up to “no problem at all.” By this much time of standing idle, an Astrodome structure back then would have become additional parking space for whatever else new that was going on at the same property site.
Here’s a link to the Eastwood reference piece:
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/29034
Best Oxymoron of 2014. I saw it on a bumper sticker yesterday while waiting for the light to change at the east bound I-10 feeder road intersection at Echo Lane. It simply read “VEGAN TEXAN”. ~ How oxymoronic is that one, friends? And was the author of this impossibility simply pulling our chains – or was he or she attempting to defecate us on some rudimentary level? (i.e., “Are you ‘defecating’ me?”)
Congratulations to Channel 11. Hardly anyone these days could argue with the fact that the anchor personnel at all three of the major network connected TV stations in Houston (Channels 2, 11, and 13) have certainly improved the visual landscape at 5:00 AM. They have done it with faces and bodies that are far easier on the eye when simply waking viewers up during the work week. It’s not an easy job. Their challenge is a little bit of a struggle with the still grasping sandman for audience attention.
Darby Douglas
Traffic Reporter
Channel 11, Houston
Until recently in Houston, all of the traffic advisory positions were being staffed by attractive younger females like Jennifer Reyna at Channel 2, who does a good job, by the way. Her job, also apparently, is to make sure that her male viewers, at least, get lost in her charms long enough to get good info on their best choices for reaching work any given day while standing pat as a viewer long enough beyond the traffic reports to watch at least a commercial or two.
In that light, congratulations to Channel 11 for bringing back Darby Douglas, a slightly pudgy middle aged male staffer as their traffic “expert” in spite of the building all-cute-female pattern that has dominated TV traffic reporting figures since the time a few years ago that it swept male reporters like poor witty and bright Darby onto the street from the same Channel 11 (unofficially, of course) for not being a sexy female.
Jennifer Reyna
Traffic Reporter
Channel 2, Houston
OK, guys, we know what you are thinking. Attention to Darby’s Channel 11 traffic reports won’t spike higher in reader attention ratings as Darby turns his body sideways and sticks his chest out to point at the traffic map. It doesn’t matter. His grasp of various Houston traffic problems places him at the head of the TV traffic experts class. You may actually get some information from Darby that could help you find a better way to work in Houston, Texas. (Talk about oxymorons and we have to place anything that alludes to “easy driving” in Houston on our list.)
At any rate, the point is this simple. – Darby Douglas seems to do a good job of offering alternatives around specific congestions that pile up normally and variably from day to day on Houston strrets and freeways.
Now that we’ve presented our short case in favor of Darby Douglas for local TV early morning traffic reports, give us at least two reasons why some of you will continue to watch Jennifer Reyna at Channel 2 – even on days you have no plans to go anywhere.
Have a nice Thursday, everybody – and hold onto your sense of humor wherever you go!
Tags: general Houston thoughts
The Pecan Park Eagle 
December 4, 2014 at 2:50 pm |
What has happened is the make up of residents have outnumbered natural born Houstonian s and it always goes back to that argument of it raises my yearly taxes if we vote to preserve this or that. The sad part about this is a lot of these people voting to destroy our treasures are not even born here and they are the very ones that will pack up and move back to their home states after retirement or transfer. I don’t mention the developers of course which also drive this destruction and even goes as far as a few bad seed in our city government. It’s sad really we have lost so much because of people that are not true Houstonian s. Matters of historical preservation should be restricted for those that are holding those birth certificates issued in Harris County to have the only vote and say so, but since they use others tax money that won’t ever happen. It is a very serious problem that ranks above a lot of other issues facing Houston. The culture is already turned upside down in a small time frame of 30 years, the structures were next.
December 4, 2014 at 4:47 pm |
Well Buff, I guess you are actually acquainted with an oxymoron! — I became vegan a year and a half ago (after discovering crazy & unexpectedly high blood pressure) to stay off statin drugs, and it has worked. As I was born in San Antone, I guess that makes me a living, breathing…Vegan Texan! 😀 As to the un-excusable disappearance of nearly everything possessing genuine, original character from this burg, don’t get me started. You don’t have to be a Harris-county native to deplore it, believe me.
December 5, 2014 at 4:27 am |
I attended the Eastwood as a kid many times during the war years. I was also at the opening of the Wayside Theater in April, 1942 which was a gala affair with high school drill teams and the Bob Hope film “Louisiana Purchase. Houston’s motto is “If it’s old tear it down” unlike Galveston which has preserved many of it’s old buildings and houses. I believe I grew up in the best of times in a culture which wasn’t like the cesspool we have today.
December 5, 2014 at 4:34 am |
Bill, have attached photos of Wayside theaterâs opening. It was the only theater to have a soda fountain. Unfortunately, that didnât last very long.
December 8, 2014 at 4:57 pm |
Love that photo. Note the aerodynamically styled Studebaker parked amongst the clunkier vehicles in the photo. Ironically, I just bought the movie on the marquee, “The Boy From Oklahoma”, last month. It stars Will Rogers, Jr, who bore an uncanny resemblance in both appearance and vocal sound to his father. Very enjoyable movie, and it became the basis of the television series “Sugarfoot”, starring Will Hutchins, a program I remembered from my childhood. This in turn inspired me to by the DVDs for the “Sugarfoot” television series. The first episode is a virtual duplicate of “The Boy From Oklahoma”. I recently drove to Fort Lauderdale with my wife for a professional conference. We rented a bungalow and walked around the neighborhood, and one day we walked past an old-style movie theater, which had been preserved and restored with all its art deco trimmings. We bought tickets to see “Interstellar”. It was like stepping into 1953 (where we watched a movie about the far future.) I can think of three such theaters still standing in Houston: The Tower, The Alabama, and The River Oaks. I think The Tower now is a Mexican restaurant. The Alabama had been a Bookstop for many years, and now it is Trader Joe’s. Only The River Oaks still is a showing movies. Let’s hope that will always remain the case.
December 8, 2014 at 5:02 pm |
P.S. The Eastwood looks identical to The River Oaks. Probably the same architect.
August 8, 2018 at 5:21 am |
The Eastwood was open until at least 1962 as I saw the Mutiny on the Bounty starring Marlon Brando. I was disappointed because it ran for at least 2 weeks so we hgad to wait for another double bill.
January 19, 2019 at 7:19 pm |
I doubt if anyone but techies and film students will find this anecdote interesting, but in 1953 the Eastwood Theater had the dubious distinction of being the first neighborhood theater in Houston to show polarized 3-D movies. Back at the beginning of the short-lived 3-D boom of the fifties, only the major downtown theaters had the aluminized screens, polaroid filters, and synchronous selsyn motors required to show dual-projector, polarized 3D movies. But, 3-D eventually spread to the surburbs, and the Eastwood theater was the first to convert to 3-D. I saw Man in the Dark and The Charge at Feather River in 3-D at the Eastwood, but I passed on I The Jury (not even the magic of 3-D could motivate me to see that stinker). Next, the Wayside Theater converted to 3-D in time to show Sangaree in 3-D, but quicker than I could duck a flaming arrow, the 3-D boom was suddenly over. After investing in 3-D equipment, the Wayside showed Kiss Me Kate and Dial M for Murder (which were both photographed in 3-D) in the flat 2-D versions. As movie attendance began to dwindle in the fifties due to the the influence of TV, the Santa Rosa and many of our suburban theaters upgraded to CinemaScope and stereophonic sound to pull people in and that worked for a while, but they always needed something bigger and more spectacular to compete with TV. The Tower Theater was the first to install a giant curved screen and 70mm projectors to show Oklahoma in Todd-AO and the Wayside theater presented DeMille’s Ten Commandments as a VistaVision roadshow attraction, complete with reserved seats and Perspecta sound. That was the first and last time I saw Catholic nuns in the Wayside Theater, or in any movie theater anywhere. In the end, TV won, and none of those herculean efforts saved our beautiful single screen suburban theaters. But, Houston was always a leader in film projection technology, we even had one downtown theater that converted to the original three-projector Cinerama process, complete with a massive 146 degree screen and seven channel surround sound. Even by today’s standards, the original Cinerama is still breathtaking. And all this happened in Houston, my hometown, before 1960!