History
The origins of Goodrich Quality Theaters can be traced to 1930, when William Goodrich left his family's rubber manufacturing business in order to purchase the Savoy Theatre in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. Previously, the Savoy Theatre had been a vaudeville theater; Goodrich renovated it as a single-screen movie theater and opened it in 1931 with "All Quiet on the Western Front". Business at the theater prospered, largely due to Goodrich's cheap double features. For just 15 cents, patrons could watch the high-budget main feature, followed by a less-glamorous B-movie. By comparison, the average price for a movie ticket nationwide hovered between 23 and 25 cents during the 1930s.
The Savoy was later converted into a two-screen theater and finally shut down in 1979. William Goodrich also operated the Majestic Theatre in Grand Rapids, which was later sold and currently exists as the Meijer Majestic Theatre, owned by the Grand Rapids Civic Theatre.
Control of the company was handed down to William's son, Bob Goodrich, who still heads Goodrich Quality Theaters. Bob Goodrich extensively expanded the company, founding new multiplexes and drive-ins around Michigan. Although Goodrich no longer owns any drive-in theaters, some of the "original" multiplex theaters are still in operation. Of course, many have since been expanded, and all have undergone technological renovations (such as the addition of digital sound).
Bob Goodrich eventually began expanding his business outside Michigan, establishing theaters in nearby states. Perhaps due to a high amount of competition in Michigan, in the past few years, Goodrich Quality Theaters has focused on renovating and building theaters outside of its home state.
Read more about this topic: Goodrich Quality Theaters
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)