The Show Goes on at the Rogers Theater

In 1937, an illuminated beacon arrived in Rogers City, Michigan. This wasn’t a newly built lighthouse, although Presque Isle County, a rural community on the northern shore of Lake Huron bounded by timber forests, had many of them. This beacon was a V-shaped neon marquee, announcing the opening of the Rogers Theater. The marquee’s flashing chaser lights and warm neon tubes flooded the businesses and public buildings on Third Street—the city’s main thoroughfare—with electric light. In the mid 1930s, only three percent of the rural population in Michigan had electricity, and the Rural Electrification Administration, a New Deal era program to deliver electricity to rural communities, had only been operating in this part of Northeastern Michigan since 1935.

It made sense for the Presque Isle District Library, which became the owners of the single screen, Art Moderne Rogers Theater by way of a donation in 2016, to tackle the restoration of the marquee as soon as possible. “No matter what corridor you come in from on main street, you see those lights lit up right across from the courthouse, so it just draws you to downtown, to the theater,” shares Amber Alexander, Executive Director of the Presque Isle District Library. Amber and her colleagues Anne Belanger, Director of Programs for the Presque Isle District Library, and Daniel Bielas, Rogers Theater Manager, are the optimistic, multigenerational team behind the restoration, programming, and care of the Rogers Theater, the only movie theater in the county. They have gathered inside the Rogers Theater for an interview. “Those chaser lights never used to work, the lights would go on, but we really wanted to see the chaser lights illuminated,” shares Anne Belanger. Daniel Bielas, who began working at the Rogers Theater at the concession stand, explains how important the sign is to this small town, “On the flip side, I don’t think there is anything sadder in some other towns than seeing a sign like ours not functioning. The Rogers Theater sign is just iconic. There is nothing like it in this town or county or anywhere around.”

Many small towns just like Rogers City have seen their main street movie theaters go dark. While threats to independent theaters have always existed—the aggressive marketing of home television sets after World War II was the first to emerge—each threat facing them in the late twentieth and early twentieth century seemed to become more and more existential—and more expensive—than the last.

After stay-at-home orders were lifted during the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines became available on a mass scale, moviegoers began checking in on their local theaters. What they found was that many had closed; the Cinema Foundation’s 2023 national report indicated that over 2,000 movie theaters had closed between 2019 and 2022.¹ But there is good news for the ones that have survived. According to the National Association of Theater Owners, independent movie theaters have seen their businesses grow, and in the past year, moviegoers reported that they planned on visiting theaters as often or more often than they did the previous year.²

The Rogers Theater showed its first film on November 16, 1937, the musical comedy This Way Please starring an ascendent Betty Grable. In the film, which takes place in a theater that screens movies (congruously to the future of the Rogers Theater later in its life), an usher, played by Grable, meets her favorite matinee idol, who in recognizing her star power encourages her to give performing a try. Grable’s character quickly outshines the singing and dancing of her hero, and a romance blooms between them. The Rogers Theater was constructed by Charlie “C.A” Vogelheim, owner of a local lumber company, and operated by Walter Kelley, who had previously run The Strand theater in Rogers City. In addition to the metal marquee, painted red and yellow, the façade had an ultra-modern ticket booth, flanked by two doors with quarter moon shaped lights, and was surrounded by glossy Vitrolite, a type of pigmented structural glass. A commercial storefront was located on each side of the theater entrance, and above the marquee the building was dressed in blonde brick. Inside, moviegoers were treated to mahogany walls and terrazzo flooring underfoot, and time was noted via a set of electric clocks. The auditorium carpet was a luxurious velvet, and a proscenium arch framed the projection screen.

The Presque Isle County Advance covered the opening: “All features combined give Rogers City a theater which reflects the aggressiveness and spirit of the town. There is little doubt that every business will benefit from the presence of the structure and that it will draw an attendance from the surrounding area and the summer tourists.”³

Presque Isle County is bound to its natural features, resources for sustenance, commerce, and recreation. These features have defined it since Native Americans hunted and fished in the area around the mouth of the Ocqueoc River, and used a twenty-foot-long, six-foot-wide rock deposited on the beach during the Ice Age as both a navigational marker and as a way in which tribes could divide the shoreline between them. Logging of pine and other hardwoods, still plentiful east of the city, began in the area in the mid-eighteenth century. Founded in 1868, Rogers City takes advantage of its proximity to Lake Huron as a method in which resources could be transported. In 1910, a limestone quarry was founded within the eastern limits of Rogers City. Known as the Carmeuse Calcite Quarry today, it is the world’s largest, spanning nearly four miles long and a mile and a half wide. The quarry is vital to the area economically, but so is the influx of visitors each summer, who are drawn to the area’s beaches, much as they were when the theater opened.

While modern moviegoers are accustomed to watching trailers before a movie, visitors to the Rogers Theater, like other theaters in operation in the late 1930s and 1940s, would have seen newsreels and serials before a film, providing them with a visual, moving source of information that supplemented newspapers and radio.

In 1947, the Vogelheim family took over operations of the theater from Walter Kelly, maintaining ownership of the theater for the next fifty years. In January 1948, a fire originating from a furnace in the basement gutted the theater’s auditorium but left the lobby and façade intact. By July, the theater would reopen to show I Remember Mama, a drama starring Irene Dunne based on a Kathrine Forbes memoir about a family of Norwegian immigrants living in San Francisco.

In the 1950s, the Vogelheim family modernized the theater, installing CinemaScope equipment to show films on a wide, immersive screen, and replacing the Vitrolite storefronts with Permastone. While the businesses within the storefronts at the Rogers Theater would change in the coming decades—housing a Michigan Secretary of State Office, a wallpaper store, an insurance agency, and a Dairy Queen—the theater and building would remain under the Vogelheim family’s care until 2003.

In 2003, Karl Heidemann purchased the Rogers Theater from Richard Vogelheim, Charlie “C.A.” Vogelheim’s son. Heidemann, an attorney who served on city council, was also an actor, and saw the potential for the Rogers Theater to evolve into an entertainment and cultural venue, an amenity that the county didn’t have. The theater would need a proper performance stage, lighting, and utility improvements, amenities that Heidemann added to the theater in 2004. Live productions began alternating with films, and in 2009, Heidemann founded the Rogers City Community Theater. An all-volunteer organization, the Rogers City Community Theater, which includes community cast members from ages six to ninety-four as actors in its productions, made the Rogers Theater its home. This change in programming was a harkening back, in reverse, perhaps, to the plot of the first film ever shown at the Rogers Theater. Instead of a live performance-oriented theater showing films, as was shown in This Way Please, the Rogers Theater became a movie theater that hosted live performances. That same year, Heidemann restored the original look of the glass tile storefront, returning it to its original black and orange color scheme.

In the northern reaches of the Midwestern United States and elsewhere in the country, independently owned theaters were not faring as well. Historic theaters in particular, like the Ely State Theater in Ely, Minnesota, which opened in 1936, would struggle to balance maintenance, preservation, and technology, leaving the local community to ponder its changes and fate over decades. In 1983, the Ely State Theater was sold to a local movie enthusiast, who was unable to reopen the theater, and instead converted it into offices and apartments.⁴ The Ely State Theater was sold in the 1990s and the auditorium became an arcade. In 1998, the theater began showing movies again, but ten years later it went dark, initiating a period of uncertainty. In 2014 the theater was purchased and renovated. With the support of the community, it reopened again in 2020 as a nonprofit theater.

In 2013, film distribution companies ended the manufacture of first run movies on 35mm film, forcing small independently owned theaters like the Rogers Theater to make difficult choices regarding how they would respond to the shift in digital technology. Many independent theaters, already competing with corporate-owned multiplexes with luxury seating, food and beverage options, and arcades could not make the costly jump and went dark. Converting to digital projection equipment would cost the Rogers Theater between $75,000 and $100,000. A Kickstarter campaign was initiated by local resident Rachel Goodstein and exceeded its $100,000 goal by over sixteen thousand dollars, allowing Karl Heidemann to purchase the digital equipment and replace some of the theater seats.

By 2016, Karl Heidemann was ready to retire, and the Presque Isle District Library was offered a unique donation. While the district library was no stranger to being offered everything from paperbacks and DVDs, it also accepted animals, such as a pair of turtles, and a thirty-year-old classroom tarantula, gifted by a retiring public school teacher. But would the library be interested in a single screen Art Moderne style movie theater?

“My understanding is that Karl and his wife Mary Ann were very driven to keep the theater alive as far as a center for culture and they just weren’t able to do it anymore,” Daniel Bielas says. “I think they had incredible forethought as far as who could keep the theater going. Who in the community could keep this running for the future?” The library had a long-standing relationship with Karl Heidemann and would occasionally rent spaces for events. When the theater was donated, that relationship continued. Daniel continues, “Karl continued participating in the theater program, as did a lot of his family members, and so he still had a working relationship where he was in the building often. I also just saw him here last Sunday after the matinee!” Heidemann, as well as Richard Vogelheim, who is ninety-five, remain resources in the restoration of the Rogers Theater. “To have Mr. Vogelheim’s knowledge as the person who owned the theater before us is just so phenomenal in terms of how this place used to look, how it used to work, and also, importantly, how it used to feel,” Daniel shares.

This connection became critical as the Presque Isle County Library, just the third owner of the Rogers Theater, began to determine best practices to carry out the stewardship of the Rogers Theater into the future. The library’s public status meant that the theater, recognized as a community asset for decades, could take on that status officially. It is likely this status that helped protect it from permanent closure during the most isolating periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, when movies were not shown at the theater, and the Rogers City Community Theater went nearly a year without a performance. Amber points to a twenty-year millage in Presque Isle County, a form of property tax that is specifically committed to public libraries, with funds specifically to support the Rogers Theater, as proof that the work has value to the community. The library began to explore funding public sources that would not have been available to the theater under private ownership. This exploration led them to grants administered by the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office for the rehabilitation of historic structures that required listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The process to research and write the national register nomination, authored by Christopher Riley of RESCOM, began to peel back the layers of history on the ninety-year-old building. “We were scouring everything trying to find photos of the interior,” shares Anne Belanger. “We didn’t find photos, but we did have the oral histories of two really significant people who played the biggest role in the theater’s continuation. That’s truly preservation, in a way.”

Throughout the theater’s lifetime, changes have been made to modernize the theater and to make it more comfortable, but the essence of the theater’s nature has remained the same since it reopened after the fire in 1948. When Karl Heidemann replaced the seats in 2013, he took care to retain rows of the original seats. The bathrooms, while updated, retain the 1948 signage above the doors. Wall sconces and even wallpaper, aspects of an interior that are ephemeral in nature, are original to 1948. The ticket booth remains a tight squeeze, as it did in 1937. In 2025, the Rogers Theater’s façade remains almost identical to the way it looked when it opened in 1937, a vital link to the authenticity of the past in this small town that experienced both the demolition of many historical buildings downtown and an aggressive “Nautical City”-themed rebranding in the 1970s.

In addition to restoring the marquee and repairing an exterior wall, which will be activated this spring by a mural celebrating Rogers City history, the library updated the concession space, a buildout that included an exterior service window that will provide an opportunity for the library to provide refreshments during outdoor events, like the aptly named Rogers City Nautical City Festival, which happens every summer.

Acknowledging that the theater’s present and future is a result of thoughtful stewardship is an idea that guides the choices that the library makes. “Mr. Vogelheim was just chit-chatting a month ago about the new concession space, so just to have that positive energy behind us and to know that the previous owners are behind what we are doing is keeping us going,” shares Daniel.

The programming at the Rogers Theater is conscious of both education and entertainment, but as a part of a county library, it must deliver content that serves its community. Under the stewardship of the library, the Rogers Theater has expanded its programming beyond live theater and films, and into scheduling international musicians, speakers, and the first TEDx event ever to be held in Northern Michigan. This summer the theater will host a traveling Shakespeare company. Yet, according to Anne, Amber, and Daniel, it is the partnerships, particularly those with local schools, that have the most impact and value. For students who don’t get to travel outside of Michigan, or even Presque Isle County, the theater provides a venue for learning and culture outside of the classroom.

“We just keep growing, and word is out that we are doing creative things, so we are getting a lot of inquiries from performing groups that want to come here, and from libraries that are looking to figure out how to do something similar with an old theater in their town,” shares Amber. Guided by the theater’s nationally recognized historic status, as well as the intangible resources that both Karl Heidemann and Richard Vogelheim provide, the library continues to tackle preservation projects in phases. In 2026, the inner lobby will be restored, and in 2027, it will be the auditorium’s turn.

What are the coming attractions at the Rogers Theater in the meantime? A series of classic novels made into films, a production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by the Rogers City Community Theater, and a concert by a Celtic Folk duo. A selection of the eclectic programming that keeps the community coming and the marquee’s chaser lights flashing.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Anne Belanger, Daniel Bielas, and Amber Alexander of the Presque Isle District Library for their interviews, time, and insights.