Beverly Theater  1937-1992

The roots of Kerasotes ShowPlace Theaters date to the earliest years of cinema exhibition in the United States. Company founder Gus Kerasotes was a 17-year-old immigrant from Sparta, Greece, who originally moved to Chicago in 1890 to work making candies and ice cream. After he was stabbed by a disgruntled customer he decided to leave the big city and head south to Springfield, Illinois, where he opened a candy store with a partner.

The turn of the century saw the first motion pictures exhibited at places like vaudevillehouses and nickelodeons, primitive storefront theaters where short movies were shown throughout the day, often with live piano accompaniment, since the films were silent. Inspired by the success of a friend in St. Louis, in 1909 Kerasotes decided to convert his shop into a nickelodeon that he named the Royal. It proved so popular that he added a second--the Savoy--three years later.

Movie exhibition was maturing in the 1910s as longer-duration feature films appeared, and soon lavish movie theaters began to replace nickelodeons. In 1921 Kerasotes bought the First National Bank building next to the Savoy and converted it into a 900-seat theater called the Strand, which would feature westerns by the likes of Tom Mix and Buck Jones, as well as live vaudeville acts. Five years later he constructed a three-story building in downtown Springfield to house the firm's headquarters, and in 1929 Kerasotes bought Springfield's Gaity theater, which he renamed the Senate.

Sound movies began to displace the silents beginning with Warner Brothers' 1927 smash The Jazz Singer, and despite Gus Kerasotes' belief that they were merely a fad, his oldest son George convinced him to invest in equipment to exhibit "talkies." In 1933 University of Illinois business graduate George Kerasotesbecame the firm's general manager.

Under his leadership Kerasotes Theaters soon began to expand outside of Springfield into small Illinois towns like Havana, Onarga, and Highland. In 1937 the company partnered with Peoria developer J. Fletcher Lankton to build the 900-seat Beverly Theater in that city, and they later added the Varsity Theater near the campus of Bradley University.

By the mid-1940s the Kerasotes company was operating a total of 11 theaters in mid- and southern Illinois, and Gus's sons George, John, Nicholas, and Louis were all working for the firm (a fifth son, Dr. Anthony Kerasotes, died in World War II). The company continued to expand during the decade, and added theaters in Illinois towns like Chillicothe, LaSalle, Rockford, Decatur, and Champaign-Urbana.

Read more: http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/45/Kerasotes-ShowPlace-Theaters-LLC.html#ixzz5BDXnJc00

Permission granted for placement by Mgr.

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