Elk Point History-Part 3 by Don Fowler

  As a young boy, I heard of the “opera house.”  I say “heard,” since I don’t recall seeing an opera or even a play in the opera house.  It was the largest building on Main Street and was used from its inception

for many activities, plays, concerts, basketball, and commercial businesses on the ground floor.  Mr. Ven had a distilled water operation with sales county wide and somebody bought and sold chickens in a small store.  Next door, on one side, was Wilmarth’s Barber Shop, which had a fascinating line-up of mirrors advertising the products of other stores on Main Street.  The Shop also had facilities for casual visitors to our town to take baths or showers. As a boy, I would “stroll-in” to watch the barbers shave their customers, some of whom had their own distinctively decorated shaving soap cups permanently on a shelf.  At that time, I believe the cost for a shave was twenty-five cents.   On the other side, was the Union County Bank of which Mr. William Schatzel was President and Mr. George Kimmel was a long time major officer.  As time went by opera houses in small towns went out of style and utility and the space was converted to other uses or allowed to deteriorate, the latter being the case in Elk Point.   The last use I can remember was as a basketball court for the adult town team.

  The annual Chautauqua, in part, took over for the Opera House.  It was organized and directed by people in some way associated with the Chautauqua Association of Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York, a unique institution, founded in the late eighteen-hundreds and continuing with strength and verve to this day.  At an appointed time each summer, a large tent was erected in a vacant space of the town, and the Chautauqua week long ecumenical and entertainment program would begin.  One day of the week the program belonged to each pastor of a local church.  Besides his special church sermon, music, plays, etc. were performed under his general direction.  The High School glee club performed as did political parties and candidates, local lawyers, school teachers, and personnel imported and sponsored by the Chautauqua Association.  The Chautauqua week provided a cultural setting for the community and put the prevailing ideas of the world before the local populace.  One year, one play, captured my attention and participation.  It was called, the Pied Piper of Hamlin and I was two characters in one, child and mouse, in the play. Obviously, the part did not require a special ability.

Elk Point Main Street--South Side

  The Public School also took over, in part, for the Opera House.  Although the High School became the locale for basketball, its gym had a low ceiling and confining space that severely limited the sport and the attendance.  Miss D. May Miller, the voice of all music in my school and the fount of all culture for the town, led her glee clubs, instrumental players, and all other musical performers in most programs of the small town.  She was the popular center of our musical stage and she lived to one hundred and four to prove her endurance.  The auditorium of the High School, with its limited facilities, became the necessary center for almost all dramatic programs in the town.  When I was in the fifth grade, as a frightened child, I spoke my first oration, entitled “Fourteen Ninety Two,” from the stage of the Auditorium.  Plays, operettas, orchestral and band programs, debates, political oratory and the School Superintendent’s directives and instructions to all students were held or delivered from the auditorium platform before a relatively small audience (capacity probably less than one hundred).  These were the substitute accommodations until many years later when a Town Auditorium was built on the Main Street. 

  In the 1920’s two weekly newspapers thrived in Elk Point and two Sioux City daily newspapers were read by most of the local population.  When I traveled the rural mail route with my Dad, I noticed that about an equal number of each of the local papers, the Leader Courier and the Union County Herald, were subscribed to by the patrons, and similarly the Sioux City Tribune and the Sioux City Journal. I believe the Tribune was a morning paper and the Journal an evening paper. Each of the papers, local and big city, had a political bias, the Courier and the Tribune being on the Democratic side and the Herald and the Journal on the Republican side. I watched Mr. Knutson in the office of the Courier set the print type by individual letter and by hand for the paper.  The Herald office was more convenient for me, so normally on my way to the post office or the Bauer butcher shop, I stopped in to witness the composition of the type for the next edition of the Herald. I have a very clear recollection of the thrill of seeing the installation of the first linotype in the Herald Office, an automatic machine taking the place of the time consuming hand assembly of print. It had to be in the mid twenties.  Being the County Seat town, the local papers were provided the authority to print all of the authorized public announcements, which filled several pages of each paper.   Although the daily papers had an Iowa publication, they dominated in Elk Point: very few local people subscribed to the daily Sioux Falls Argus Leader.  The difference in distance between twenty and forty-five miles seems then to have been the discriminating factor.  I doubt that such a small difference is important to the subscribers of today.