You can’t recount the history of The Music Hall without a nod to Walter Brooks. And, in my view, that nod should be a long down-on-one-knee bow to the man who kept the leaky creaky Civic Theater open for almost four decades. A big man with big glasses and freshly trimmed white hair, Walter was in the manager’s office, at the ticket booth, behind the concession stand, and in the projection booth at both the Civic and its Market Square sister, The Cinema.
Our Mr. Brooks gets his due in my book on the history of The Music Hall. But that project has just gone into the design phase and, despite a lot of calling around, we don’t have a good photograph of Walter Brooks. Do you?
A lot of us reporters interviewed Walter back in the ’80s. I chatted with him at length but neglected to snap a portrait. The heavily Photoshopped image above came from an interview in the former Seacoast Business Digest. There were articles in the Dover newspapers when Walter managed the Strand, and in Business NH when he managed the Hampton Cinemas after leaving Portsmouth behind.
“Years ago,” Brooks told Business NH reporter Jeffrey Mandell in 1984, “you used to starve to death in the summer. The big films didn’t open until after Labor Day when the kids were back in school.”
The killer, he explained, was the “blind bid” system in which the Civic and Cinema had to guarantee a lengthy run in advance without ever seeing the movie. He lost thousands of dollars on “Exorcist II” that was a box office bomb. In his time, Hollywood distributors upped their cut from 50 percent to as much as 80 percent of the income on a film. Then came drive-ins, the mall multiplex, cable TV, and video recorders.
When E. M. Loew sold off the Civic and the Cinema in the early 1980s, Walter moved on. He was 60 years old when he spoke to the Business NH reporter in 1984. His photo appeared in the newspaper, but it is too murky to be reproduced in a book. Darn!
A year later, while still working in Hampton, Walter was part of an oral history project for a group trying to save The Music Hall building from demolition. He told great stories and held the memories of “old-timers” who knew Portsmouth’s downtown theaters in bygone days. We have a transcript of that interview and even a wobbly audio recording. But again, no good portrait of the man who ran two downtown cinemas.
So call it “crowd-sourcing.” Let’s see if anyone reading this knows anyone with a glossy photo of Walter Brooks. And while you’re at it, we could use your candid photos of The Music Hall from any era, particularly from World War II through the “Don’t Let the Hall Fall” era of the 1980s. So don’t delay – and thanks in advance.
Tightening City Laws in 1860