The History of the Highland.

The Highland Theater's first manager, Harry Brown Jr., planned a splendid gala event for the opening night of the Highland. It opened March 31, 1938 amid much bally-hoo and excitement. Four thousand watt Hollywood-style floodlights swept the sky. Beauty queens and white uniformed ushers welcomed the guests to this wonderful, new theater! Akron Mayor Lee D. Schroy told the crowd "We must admire and respect the confidence displayed by its owners in building and opening the new Highland in a period of trying times. It is this same spirit that has carried Akron through difficult days in the past and will do so again in the future."

The movie that opening night was "Swing Your Lady." "A musical farce of wrestling and hillbilly song and romance." It starred Humphrey Bogart before he became Sam Spade or Rick Blaine, and featured Ronald Reagan before he became President. The tickets that night were 25 cents for adults, 10 cents for children.

This new and thoroughly modern theater was built by the Wallace Construction Co. of Akron for Cleveland's Monogram Realty Co. There were originally supposed to be two theaters. The Highland, and The Akron, which would have been built east of South Highland. But The Akron never came to fruition. Work on the Highland began in March 1937, and except for a seven week work stoppage due to a strike at the Newton Falls steel supplier, work continued for a year.

The Highland was meant to be an elegant theater, creating a dignified, dark and romantic air. It gave "every luxury, comfort and convenience." It was advertised as an "exquisitely intimate, amazingly modern, homelike, comfortable, luxurious" theater, "specially constructed for the perfect presentation of talking pictures."

The residents of Highland Square would walk to the theater that they came to know so well. On Saturdays, the films ran continuous; a newsreel, cartoon, serial installment, and then the feature. If you walked in late, you just stayed to where you came in on the next run. Some groups of kids even had their own special area in the theater saved just for them, like the Highland Boys, who would help out around the theater. They sat up front and to the left. Over the seventy year history of this wonderful theater, many of the residents built their own memories. Many people were there when it was announced that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. How many couples shared their first kiss there? Blaine Wallace, who's grandfather founded Wallace Construction, remembers helping on the job site as an eight-year old boy. One day, as the theater neared completion, he and his father climbed a ladder to just above the marquee. The workers were just completing the coping stone. "He (Blaine's father) wrote on a piece of paper my name and address and the date, and he put down some mortar, and put this note right on top of the mortar, and he laid the coping stone right on top of that." And as long as the theater stands, young Blaine Wallace#s name will be up there.