Louisiana Through My Lens - The Pringle Theater in Glenmora


Yesterday I was taking my time driving down from my home in Lecompte to Lake Charles so I decided to take a detour into Glenmora to take a look around and I was surprised to find an old movie theater downtown. I've been through several small Louisiana towns and I'm always shocked that there is rarely an old movie house to be found.



The Pringle (you have to love that name) reportedly opened 1942 and the price of a ticket was a whopping five cents. The theater entertained the residents of Glenmora for sixty years until it closed it's doors for good in 2009.

I initially questioned that date of  2009 due to the fact that surprisingly a poster for the 1999 Julia Roberts and Richard Gere comedy Runaway Bride is still in one of the glass cases in front of the theater.

There have been several attempts to reopen the Pringle including a 2019 campaign by local high school students that set up a GoFundMe (No longer active) and a Facebook page (Go Here) to try and raise $50,000 to update the theater's projector to a modern digital format. Unfortunately that seems to have failed.

As for me I can't help but think that if I ever won the lottery I would buy the Pringle and restore it. Being a fan of classic movies I would use it to showcase films from the golden age of Hollywood and put on a movie festival or two. I wouldn't do it for the money (because I won the lottery) but for the love of movies.

As for now (or until those numbers on the back of the fortune cookie pay off) the Pringle sits abandoned but not forgotten.

*Update*

Here is a post that a former resident named Brian Granger shared with the Facebook group Abandoned Louisiana after I shared this article. 


"I was friends with Mr W.C. Pringle who owned the theater. I worked for his son for years so I saw him daily. I'd help him ship new films to and from New Orleans when the theater was running. The last movie he ran at the theater was Aliens in the Attic. He ran the projectors in this picture since he was 14 and passed away in his 90's. He shut down the Pringle after the industry moved to digital as the old projectors would cost a fortune to upgrade. After his wife passed, the theater was donated to local high school. I took this picture of Mr Pringle around the last time he ran the projectors ( he kept reels of movie trailers to keep the projectors running).

The theater was always owned by Mr WC's dad as far as I know, but the name was different before it burned. Mr WC went off to war and it burned while he was gone. To spare him the stress, his father did not tell him about it. Mr WC was surprised to see a new theater when he returned from WW2 (he was a navy radio man on the USS Hornet)."

Brian also sent me this picture of the original theater before it burned down in the 1940s.


Here is where to find the Pringle theater:



 Here are my photos:





Check Out:





An Abandoned Louisiana Special: Saying Adios To 2021 In Central Louisiana









Louisiana Through My Lens - John James Audubon Bridge Over The Mississippi River Between New Roads and St Francisville





Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 7, 2023 at 1:11 PM

    I remember seeing white chicks there 😄. That came out around 2004-2005 I believe

    ReplyDelete

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