library’s California Index contains quite a few cards mentioning early theaters in Bakersfield, though the name Bakersfield Theatre is not mentioned.īakersfield had a population of over 12,000 in 1910, and over 18,000 by 1920, so it supported several theaters during the 1910s. You can contact the theater using the email address on the Memories on H information page.Several legal journals of later 1910s make reference to a case involving a dispute over rent owed by a Bakersfield Theater Company to the Bakersfield Improvement Company during 1914. The photos can be viewed on Fox Theater’s Memories on H website.Īdditionally, anyone who has historical photos or other memorabilia associated with Fox Theater in Bakersfield, Memories on H wants to hear from you. The Bakersfield Museum has digitized all of the photographs and memorabilia the theater has collected of the Grogans and others up to that point. “I think it would be something he would expect from me.” “I think he’d be glad we found this,” Grogan said. “This place had a lot of families, people working to keep it going, and I have photos of my kids here, that was fun.”Īs for Debbie herself, she can only speculate what her father would think of her recreating this photograph all these years later, let alone what he would think of handing over his treasure trove of Fox Theater memorabilia to so that future generations can enjoy it. “As soon as I saw, ‘Oh my god, that’s her in my office!'” Spindler said. ![]() Spindler saw the resemblance in the photo immediately and marveled at how things change but just as often stay the same. “I didn’t even know that was there, and I was probably about three.” ![]() “Well, it’s funny to say, but he had a picture of me when I was little and I was sitting in his chair in the office and it was still there,” Debbie said. Of all the memorabilia the Grogans have donated to Fox Theater, everyone agrees that the one piece that stands out above all the others is a photograph of a little Debbie Winslow, now Debbie Grogan, taken by her proud father became. “They had so much information and photos that we had never seen before and started helping us to go further down the rabbit holes to dig more of our story. “I mean, that’s exactly what we hoped for when we started Memories on H,” Spindler said. It came as a shock to Debbie, but to Matthew Spindler, the theater’s manager, it was a gold mine. “He started going through it and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t even know he had that!’ I had never seen any of this, so it came as a shock to me.” “He comes home with this box and he’s like, ‘Look what I found in the garage! It’s some old photos of your dad at the Fox.” And I’m like, ‘Oh, cool!’” Debbie said. “There were a lot of house records and it was sort of stuffed in between.” “It was just tucked away in a corner of the garage and it was in a filing cabinet,” said Mark Grogan. Mark stumbled across the treasure trove of memorabilia while cleaning up Debbie’s mother Joan’s home after her death in 2014. The Grogans passed on many of Debbie’s memories in the form of hundreds of pictures and other theater memorabilia collected by Debbie’s late father during his nine years as theater manager from 1957-1968. The project is a campaign to catalog community images and memories of the theater for a future book. That summer, Grogan heard about the theater’s Memories at H Project. I just came here with my dad when my mom had errands to run and he brought me over and let me roam free,” Grogan said. Winslow, was a theater manager and she was in charge of the house as a child. In the 1960s, the theater was something like Grogan’s sandbox. “I remember the screening room because my dad was also a projectionist whenever they needed him to do it,” Grogan said. When she recently visited the building with her husband Mark, she couldn’t help but be transported back to when she was a little girl here. A story involving a teenager who is now fully grown.ĭebbie Grogan has her own theater history. Last year, the non-profit foundation that runs the theater today launched a campaign to document the theatre’s long history. The theater first opened its doors on H Street in 1930, It has been an H Street landmark for over 90 years. (KERO) – It’s hard to visit downtown Bakersfield without seeing the Historic Bakersfield Fox Theater catch the eye.
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