There’s a little old white building located on Main Street across from Maynardville Elementary School which is the remnant of a time gone by. It was once a theater in the 1940s and early 1950s. The theater on Main Street was built and run by Clifford Stiner.

Mr. Stiner also operated theaters in Luttrell on Delmar Dyer’s property, in New Loyston (Big Ridge Area) on Cana Stooksbury’s property, and a theater in Caryville. His brother E.J. Stiner owned a theater in Sneedville. The Stiner brothers jointly owned the drive-in theater in New Tazewell.

It was at the end of the Great Depression (1929-1939): Norris Lake had been created by TVA in 1936; World War II began in 1939 and ended in 1945. The mid-to-late 1940s was a time of transition from war to peacetime.

The theater in Maynardville opened in 1945 and closed in the early 1950s. The other theaters in Union County and in Caryville were operating in about the same time period. The theater in Luttrell on Delmar Dyer’s property was down by the railroad tracks near the water company on Luttrell’s Main Street.

Jimmy Stiner and Terry Miller were both instrumental in providing information about how Clifford’s and E. J.’s movie business operated. Jimmy is E. J. Stiner’s son and both Jimmy and Terry are Clifford Stiner’s nephews.

Clifford and E. J. rented their films from a salesman who represented studios located in California—studios like MGM. They rented the movies for around $15 - $25 a movie for a rental period of about two days. Office space in Clifford Stiner’s building across the street from the courthouse was used to warehouse the movie films and was used as a movie drop off/pickup location for order fulfillment. The movies were shown at the Main Street theater in Maynardville on Tuesday and Friday nights, in Luttrell on Saturday nights, Caryville on Sundays and New Loyston on Thursdays.

All of Clifford’s small theaters had a similar setup. The box office was out front and as you entered the theater there were a few steps that led up to the projection room. Inside the main theater the floor sloped down toward the movie screen and each row had a wooden bench for a seat.

It had a seating capacity of about 40 people. The price of a movie ticket was .25 for adults and nine cents for children 10 and under. The theaters didn’t have a concession stand but people could bring their own snacks. The movies were in black and white.

Serial clips would play for about 5 minutes or so. A serial film is a series of short film clips played at the beginning of movies that were used to entice people to come back to the theater to see the sequel film clip on the next movie. I suppose it was like a cliffhanger commonly used in episodic TV programs today.

A cartoon would then be shown and then the featured movie. The featured movie was usually a Western, Western Musical or World War II movie. Movies like “Cavalier of the West,” “Hopalong Cassidy,” “The Angel and the Bad Man” starring John Wayne, as well as some Gene Autry movies. Of course, there was no air conditioning, so it would get quite warm.

Terry and Jimmy both recall helping their uncle run the projector when they were kids. Terry was about 10 years old and Jimmy a few years younger. The projector room was upstairs in the attic because it had to be higher than the audience. They used a 16mm projector to show the reel to reel films.

Terry chuckled as he recalled climbing into the dark attic to set up the film to show the movie. He had to crawl around in the dark to make sure the film projector was lined up with the four little holes that the light from projector went through to project the film onto the screen.

He said, “It was kind of scary up there! There were mice and rats running around everywhere up there.” Jimmy described the process of showing the movie in detail. The film reels were about 12 inches in diameter. The movie would usually come on three or four reels but the projector only held two reels at a time.

They would set up the first two reels to play in succession and when the film started running out on the second reel they would load the next reel in the movie on the other projector. Then they would look for a little asterisk in the bottom right corner of the screen and that’s how they would know to start playing the next reel. If you were viewing the movie, you might see a little flash or flicker as they switched between reels but wouldn’t notice much.

Clifford would facilitate elementary school groups to watch a movie at the Maynardville theater just across the street. My aunt Bonnie Peters remembers being in a group that watched a movie there during her elementary school days. My aunt June Russell said she remembered going to the theater with her older sister.

During the summer months Clifford would show movies outdoors on the side of an old hotel building that was located where the County Clerk’s Office sits now. People would sit across the street in the parking lot of the courthouse and watch the movie.

He also received clearance from the Federal Government to show movies to workers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. During the war everything going on at Oak Ridge was top secret. I’ve been told that even workers had a limited knowledge of what they were working on. Workers were restricted from leaving the area, so the government arranged for entertainment to be brought to them.

Marvin Elkins sent me a couple of nice photos of the New Loyston theater that was located on Cana Stooksbury’s property next to his general store, which was on Hwy 61 close to Hickory Valley Road. Neither the theater nor the general store in the photograph are still standing. A side note, this is the Stooksbury and Hutchison families who owned property and had a general store in the original town of Loyston who relocated to New Loyston when Norris Lake was formed.

Marvin’s mother, Myrtle Stooksbury who is 93, thinks her father and Clifford Stiner built the theater building together on the Stooksbury property. People would buy their snacks at the Stooksbury general store next door and bring with them to the movie.

Wanda Byerley remembers the New Loyston theater, although she never attended, she recalls the theater being there and knowing people who did go to the fights held in front of or near the theater. Neither Jimmy or Terry remembered anything about the fights and doubts Clifford had anything to do with them. I do remember my own grandfather speak of going to fights in New Loyston but don’t recall him giving any details.

Clifford Stiner had other entertainment venues unrelated to the theaters but still noteworthy. Aunt June remembers the airstrip that Clifford owned near Hwy. 61 and Old Hwy. 33 intersection near Airport Road. It was a small airstrip and with a difficult landing. He would host air shows with small aircraft that turned flips and performed stunts while she sold refreshments at the concession stand. She mentioned he even gave plane rides for people who wanted to fly.

E. J. Stiner opened the theater in Sneedville in Hancock County in the early 1950s around the same time Clifford’s theaters in Union County closed. E. J. was the sole owner of this theater and drove 50 miles from his home in Maynardville to Hancock County every day to show movies.

They showed movies up there every weeknight, three times on Saturday and twice on Sundays. Jimmy commented, “The theater was popular because people up there didn’t have anything else to do.”

Jimmy helped in the Sneedville and Maynardville theaters the most. They used a 35mm film projector to show movies in this theater. Jimmy speculated the new technology and need to upgrade equipment could be one of the reasons Clifford closed his theaters in Union County. The 35mm projector created a brighter picture for the viewer.

Jimmy explained the difference in technology in detail. He said instead of using bulbs to project the light through the two holes onto the movie screen, it had two rods pointed at each other that generated a light, something like you would see when someone is welding. There were mirrors positioned behind the rods that would reflect the light off the mirror and project the image through the two holes onto the screen. The 35mm film came on about the same number of reels as the 16mm film, so it still required someone to setup/load the reels in the correct order. By the early 1950s the movies were in color instead of black and white.

The Stiner brothers’ drive-in theater in New Tazewell was located at 125 Old Kentucky Road close to the Frosty Freeze in New Tazewell. It opened in 1951 and E. J. and Clifford sold the theater in 1974. The new owners kept the drive in open for a few more years but it closed sometime in the late 70s.

The price of admission to the drive-in was 50 cents for adults, 25 cents for children 12 and under to age 4. Children 3 and under were free.

The drive-in had a concession stand. Some concession items and prices Jimmy remembered were popcorn for 10 cents a box; hot dogs were 20 cents, candy was 5 cents a bar; and ice cream was a nickel a scoop.

The movie lot was laid out where the row in the back of the lot would park more cars and the rows became narrower as you got closer to the screen. Each parking space had a post with a speaker on each side. The speaker had a long cord that you would pick up and stretch to pull inside the car. You could roll your window up if it was cold and the speaker had a volume control that could be adjusted by the viewer.

Jimmy and Terry Miller both commented that “Thunder Road” was the most profitable and best movie ever shown at the drive-in. E. J. and Clifford Stiner were able to negotiate to rent the movie for seven days instead of the usual two-day rental.

They showed the movie for seven consecutive nights. It was sold out for all seven nights; they packed as many cars in the lot as possible at each showing.

Judson Palmer contributed that Clifford Stiner had a banner made to advertise the movie “Thunder Road.” He drove around town in Tazewell and neighboring counties to advertise the movie. The banner now resides in the Union County Historical Society.

The theater on Main Street in Maynardville is the only one of the theaters still standing. There’s still a lot of rich history that resides in the building today. Mainly the printing press in the basement of the theater along with the letters to set type. The printing press was used to print things like election cards, election brochures, business cards, etc. It was a tedious process to set the type. Each letter was placed into a square peg using a stick like tool to tighten the letters together so they would not fall out.

The cards or print stock were manually fed into the press one at a time. The machine had rollers and would roll the card/stock paper through and press the print onto the paper. Then another blank could be fed into the press and so on.

An order of 200 cards would require the same process 200 times. The printing press was also used to print a newspaper Clifford Stiner published named the “Echo.” The Echo was about 6 or 8 inches tall and 4 or 5 inches wide and consisted of 2 to 4 pages, according to Jimmy Stiner. Hopefully, this piece of history will be preserved for future generations to observe and appreciate.

Many thanks to Terry Miller, Jimmy Stiner, Judson Palmer, Wanda Byerly, Marilyn Toppins, Marvin Elkins, Myrtle Stooksbury, June Russell, and Bonnie Peters for their contributions that made it possible to chronicle this piece of history.