The Tivoli: opening night, 21 May 1925

TWO SHOWINGS · A CROWD OF 2,500 TO 3,000 · A BANQUET AT THE HOTEL MISHAWAKA

The opening was a civic holiday conducted as a premiere. The name itself had been chosen less than a month before — workers were still rushed on plaster and on the projecting marquee as the date came — and a full-page advertisement on the day invited everybody in Mishawaka to spell the Tivoli backward: I-LOV-IT, the letters reversed, with the assurance that the show was as good as the theater. On the night of Thursday, 21 May 1925, the house opened to a crowd of 2,500 to 3,000 people across two separate showings — in a house of 1,400 or 1,500 seats, two full rooms — and the South Bend News-Times' opening-night judgment, quoted in the nomination, was that “the Tivoli, while not the largest theater in this section, is unsurpassed by any theater anywhere for intrinsic beauty, and it is wholeheartedly asserted that Mishawaka indeed has a theater of which it may be most justly proud.”

The bill was a palace bill of the last vaudeville decade: three vaudeville acts and a photoplay feature, with the city's officers woven into the program — a brief statement by Mayor Campbell, a backer of the corporation, and an opening address by Ralph W. Gaylor, postmaster and president of the chamber of commerce, who expounded the name: the letters of TIVOLI in reverse spelled “I love it,” and as to the missing “e,” “where there is real love a little thing like the absence of an 'e' doesn't amount to much… and the people of Mishawaka should love this theater.” Manager Oscar J. Lambiotte declared the sentence the night is remembered by: “Mishawaka has attained entertainment independence.” The management's declared policy was “furnishing the last word in theater entertainment,” and the construction was touted as as near fire-proof as engineering skill could devise — a selling point with a century of theater fires behind it, printed as the claim it was. After the second showing, a banquet for one hundred guests — officers, directors and stockholders of the corporation, city officials, clergy and civic leaders — closed the night at the Hotel Mishawaka.

The house's service ideal was formalized within three years. In 1928 the Tivoli established a policy it called “Courtesy is Law,” under which twelve young women ushers worked to a strict dress code in uniform. The management, meanwhile, turned over at a promoter's pace: in 1928 alone the house changed management three times, and by December Elmer Vosburgh was the new manager, overseeing a redecoration and introducing the management plan of the Publix and Balaban & Katz houses — grand architecture, air conditioning, splendid service, live entertainment, key locations — with a programming pledge the News-Times carried: the cheaper pictures were taboo; only the best shows would play the Tivoli. It is the palace economy stated by its own manager, in the last full year of the silent era: the room, the service and the bill were one product, and the small houses up and down Main Street could not sell it.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Tivoli Theater (1997) — the opening crowd of 2,500 to 3,000 at two showings; the News-Times' opening-night judgment, quoted; the bill of three vaudeville acts and a photoplay; Campbell's statement and Gaylor's address with the I-LOV-IT exposition, quoted from the South Bend News-Times of 1925; the full-page advertisement; the Hotel Mishawaka banquet of one hundred; Lambiotte's “entertainment independence”; the management's “last word” policy and the fire-proof claim; the name chosen less than a month before opening; the 1928 “Courtesy is Law” usher policy; the three management changes of 1928 and Vosburgh's December appointment, redecoration and Balaban & Katz plan.