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1928–1929 · BOUNDARY: MISHAWAKA'S NORTHSIDE AND SOUTH BEND'S COLFAX, EACH AT ITS FRAME
Flagged as the sound pioneer, at the frame its own record claims: with no house seated on this ground, there is no Osceola room to flag — so the item is answered at boundary size, from the rooms this town's picture-goers actually used, and the two firsts in the record are printed whole, each at the frame its source claims, never merged into one. For Mishawaka, the Tivoli's National Register nomination states it plainly: "Sound equipment first came to Mishawaka at the newer but smaller Northside Theater" — the Northside is Mishawaka's sound pioneer, the checklist's test answered for the town's eastern picture-going — after which the Tivoli itself reopened for talkie pictures in 1929 under the Columbia Picture Corporation of Chicago, "generally credited at the time with the best sound," to a capacity crowd for Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl. For the county frame, the Colfax Theater in South Bend opened 4 August 1928 hailed by local newspapers as the first theater in the United States — "and thereby in the world" — to offer a program of sound pictures, Vitaphone and Movietone, from start to finish, and the Colfax nomination record calls it the first theater in St. Joseph County to show sound pictures. The two claims stand side by side as their records give them — a county first of 1928 in South Bend, a city first at Mishawaka's Northside — and Osceola's line is printed between them: the town's first heard talkies were heard in those rooms, west and east, because the town kept no room of its own in which sound could have arrived first, or at all.
From the Tivoli Theater National Register nomination, Mishawaka (historic-structures.com: sound first at the Northside Theater; the Tivoli's 1929 talkie reopening with The Godless Girl); Cinema Treasures and the Colfax Theater nomination record, South Bend (the Colfax opened 4 August 1928; the all-sound program claim; first in St. Joseph County to show sound pictures). The home-ground premise: Arts's picture-show test as banked.