Poncan Theatre

The Poncan was the oil town's daydream — the $280,000 atmospheric theater the Boller Brothers opened in Ponca City on September 20, 1927, when the town of 16,000 already had four other theaters and the oil money bought a fifth that outdid them all. The auditorium simulated a Mediterranean courtyard under a twinkling night sky; a five-foot I-beam spanned the width so the balcony needed no pillars; an on-stage elevator moved furniture for the magic acts. The $22,500 Wurlitzer accompanied the silents.

The first nights were pure vaudeville-palace: Vera Byerhoff soloed on the Wurlitzer, John Philip Sousa's band played the stage, Will Rogers drew the biggest crowd in the theater's history in 1931, Ethel Barrymore toured through in The Constant Wife. The Pathé newsreels arrived by airmail twice weekly — manager Fred Pickrel, a former Pathé Exchange man, cut them himself so Ponca City saw the news before the rest of Oklahoma. The talkies were wired in by 1929; the right-hand door was the designated entrance for Black patrons, a detail the National Register nomination preserves without flinching.

The lobby holds what's reportedly the world's largest collection of hand-painted 1930s lobby art — the posters of the picture-palace era kept in the palace itself. Restored in 1994, the Poncan still runs — the atmospheric ceiling still twinkling over the oil town it was built to elevate.

The Poncan is the archive's atmospheric file — the Boller Brothers theater where the ceiling is a Mediterranean night sky, Will Rogers played to the record crowd, and the newsreels came by airmail to the oil town that built a palace.