((The Moneta theater's reopening its doors this Saturday and I just wrote a small press release on its history. I think I'm stuck on an alliteration kick. Here's what I wrote today, culled from microfiched newspapers. Will someone please edit it? Thanx.)))
"A nearly century-old Sweetwater institution is reopening its doors. (Insert lead paragraph)
In 1915, the census bureau announced that the U.S. population had reached 102 million. Columnist J.C. Jessen of the nationally-syndicated "Motion Picture News" boasted that everyday one in ten of those people attended movie theaters to witness a burgeoning new industry being born on the California coastline. D.W Griffith released the first cinema masterpiece, "Birth of a Nation," which President Woodrow Wilson described as "writing history with lightning." Hardly any town was without a nickelodeon palace located in its center. Sweetwater would be no exception.
In the February of that year Frank Johnston opened the Moneta Theater. Ads promising "photoplays that please" ran in the Sweetwater Telephone alongside ads for castor oil and grippe relief medicine. The theater was an almost immediate success--attendance doubled in the course of its first five months as young and old alike went see the very first romances, horrors, and westerns. "The variety of Comedies and Dramas, will pleasantly relieve tired nerves and better prepare children's minds for study," one ad promised. A 7 year-old debutante, "Little Miss Margaret Bradley," treated her entire Sweetwater primary school class to a "Matinee party" at the the Moneta with movies followed by ice cream at Childress's fountain parlor. The baseball league hosted benefit screenings of "The Rosary."
In the year when Americans and British rallied around the cry, "Remember the Lusitania," the Telephone would implore its readers in a single column blurb each edition to "Remember the Moneta."
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