Desperately Seeking Projectionists, Part 2
Now Appearing: Baumer, Ristow, Young, and Corrin
Light flowing from the Centre Theatre’s third-floor projection booth. A detail from a larger photo, 1947, Archives of Ontario (AO), 56-11-0-202-3.
“Do Pay Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain” — Film School Rejects, De Filmkrant
“Life isn’t like in the movies. Life is much harder.” — Alfredo, a projectionist (Philippe Noiret) in Cinema Paradiso (France/Italy, 1988)
Introducing Emile Baumer, Harry Ristow, Ernest Young, and Don Corrin
Emile Baumer (Peterborough Projectionist from 1914 to 1941)
Emile Baumer projected films at local theatres — from the Empire and the Strand to the Regent and Capitol — for almost three decades. By all accounts, he was a multi-faceted, intelligent man who made an indelible mark on the city.
Examiner, Dec. 19, 1892, np. The Schneider jewelery store, already a fixture in downtown Peterborough.
Baumer was a nephew of the Schneider brothers, long-time Peterborough jewelers and, as of the late 1910s, motion picture proprietors, and came to the city because of them.
Born on Feb. 2, 1874, in the village of Bischwiller in Alsace in northeastern France (22 kilometers northeast of Strasbourg), he was the son of Henri Baumer and Dorothee Schneider in a family of carpenters and cabinet makers — people of an artistic bent.
He first travelled across the sea to join his uncles in Peterborough in 1893. Not long after arriving he had received his notice for obligatory army duty in France and quickly boarded a ship heading back home. According to stories passed down in the family, when the ship was delayed on its passage, perhaps by a storm, Emile was late reporting for duty and got briefly thrown “into the clink.”
Emile Baumer (on the left) and his brothers in Bischwiller. Courtesy of Paul Board, Montreal.
Emile returned to Canada for good in 1913, now married and accompanied by his wife Eugenie Marie and daughters Marguerite and Marthe. He rejoined his uncles in Peterborough.
By that time he had already built up years of experience in the “picture business.” Back in his village in Alsace he had set up a photography studio, and sometimes on Sunday afternoons he would rent a hall and exhibit motion pictures. It appears that he did some moving around because, as he later stated, from as early as 1900 he had been working with “Messter, Edison, Gaumont, Pathe, and Simplex machines in Germany, France, England,” as well as in Canada.
The house the Baumers once lived in, 567 George St., as of summer 2019. At one time a few theatre seats graced the porch — and plenty of music was played inside: Emile’s daughter Marthe was an accomplished pianist who played for silent pictures. The house was later subdivided into apartments, and in the 1950s was owned by the Rishor family.
In Peterborough he got a job as film operator at the Empire Theatre as early as 1914, living briefly at 559 George and then within a year or so at 567 George Street, on the west side just north of London St. It was the house where George Schneider had lived for a long stretch of time, from 1870–71 until around 1905, and it had an interesting history: it had been planned in 1846 by the famous Sandford Fleming, the Scottish Canadian inventor and engineer (best known for invention of universal standard time) who lived in the city for a short time beginning around 1845. According to Martha Kidd, the house on George Street was Fleming’s “first in Canada and the only one in Peterborough” – and remains in place, to this day, subject to a few alterations. The area was called “the Schneider estate.”
Emile Baumer, wife Eugenie, and daughters Marguerite, born in 1902, and Marthe, born in November 1906. They came to Canada, and Peterborough, in 1913. Courtesy of Paul Board.
In Peterborough, coming as they did from the contested area of Alsace-Lorraine, the Baumers and Schneiders were sometimes regarded as being German, although they were French and clearly saw themselves as such. Emile’s daughter Marthe eventually married a Peterborough boy, Maxwell Board, and their son Paul Board remembers his mother telling him how, back in Alsace (and under German rule) she would, on July 14th, Bastille Day, go up to their attic and get out their French flag. He remembers his grandmother, Eugenie Baumer, talking about how tough things were in Peterborough for their family during the First World War – the Germans were the enemy, after all. She would hear people saying things such as “There’s the German family,” and find it hard to stomach.
During those early years in town Emile went into the army for a short time (1915–16), returning to work at the Empire by 1917. By 1920 he had moved over to join the Schneiders, who were operating the Strand Theatre; he followed them to the Regent when it opened in 1920.
At one point Baumer contemplated going off in another direction. In 1923, with the help of a wartime colleague, he applied to the federal government in Ottawa for a position in the civil service. Col. Ernest J. Chambers, then the “Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod,” wrote a letter of support (on Senate letterhead), indicating that during the war Emile had worked under him “in a confidential capacity” on the staff of the Canadian Press Censorship Service. Chambers wrote that Baumer had “showed himself . . . to be a thoroughly reliable and willing and a very good translator.”
Baumer was clearly multi-talented and capable, but a job in Ottawa did not turn up, and he continued to work as a projectionist in Peterborough for the rest of his working life.
In the late 1920s a writer advised: “The capable projectionist is not a mechanical worker whose duties are limited to loading the projector. He is constantly improving his knowledge, interested in principles of electricity, optics, lenses, light-and-shadow effects, photography, and light mediums.” The profession, often debased (though unionized by the 1910s), faced a “daily grind of sweltering” projection booths. It was said to be “boring, unhealthy, and dangerous,” and a projectionist had to be especially careful in handling the inflammable nitrocellulose film. It was a dangerous life. Insurance statistics indicated that film projectionists from 1913 to 1926 were dying at a rate of 135 per cent of the average — meaning that at any given age a projectionist was 35 per cent more likely “to boot the bucket” (as a Variety article put it) than a “normal human being.” More stringent laws and safer booth equipment later made the work less hazardous.
Sergeant Baumer at war. “Soldiers from Peterborough and District in World War I,” file, Peterborough Museum and Archives (PMA).
Baumer was one of those workers who had great pride in his vocation, taking the intricate facets of his trade seriously. In March 1926 he was among a group of 260 projectionists listed in Exhibitors Herald — and one of only three in Canada — who were using “Stop Charts,” which were aimed at identifying and correcting faults in projection as a systematic means of improving performance quality and reducing “screen breakdown.” In just over a year the number of theatres and projectionists using Stop Charts snowballed to 567.
The life of a projection operator could be complicated, and Baumer invested enough in the trade to make his points of view known within the industry. In a letter to a U.S. trade magazine in 1929 he complained about “film butchers” – operators who, he said, were not worthy of the name “projectionist.” He was finding that the ends of the film reels delivered from Toronto — whether or not it was “a new or an old film, a two-reeler or a twelve-reeler” — were routinely messed up for “signal purposes.” The previous projectionists had placed large and varied cue marks on the films — pin scratches, paper stickers, holes, “and other products of the imagination.” He declared, “Any projectionist who can’t run film through a projector without all these signs ought to have his license cancelled and be returned to following the horses.” As a worker in the hinterland, Baumer was not of a mind, it seems, to suffer the outrageous failings of those fools out there in the big city, the centre of the universe.
A framed portrait of Emile Baumer, age nineteen. Courtesy of Paul Board.
He was also troubled by the tendency of projectionists of the 1920s to vary the speed of projection. When an operator decides to operate the machine at a faster than normal speed, he asked, “Is it any wonder that the picture theatre patrons, particularly in the big cities, come out of the theatres with their eyes popping out of their heads from the strain.” The faster projection makes it more difficult to read the titles — “and one simply must suppose that this greatly advanced speed is but another concession to the big shots confronted with the problem of filling and emptying theatres as quickly as possible.”
With his sense of dedication and long years as a projectionist, Baumer appears to have been fully committed to the lure of the motion picture experience. In early 1928 he wrote to the “Studio Section” of the New-York-based Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World requesting a signed photo of actor Richard Dix (known especially for Cecil B. DeMille’s top-grossing 1923 film The Ten Commandments), “for placement in my ‘Lobby Album’ of stars whose pictures are especially popular with my patrons.” Who knows? He might have wanted it as much for himself as for the theatre.
A couple of decades later he graced the front porch of his house on George Street with three old rescued theatre seats, attached to each other. His grandson Paul Board, now living in Montreal, recalls sitting on one of the old seats “and watching cars going up and down George Street.” Another grandson, Gerry Armstrong, worked for years at the Examiner and Memorial Centre and had a stint as usher at the Capitol in his teens. Born in 1932, Gerry recalls that when he was a young boy his granddad would take him up into the projection booth and let him watch the movie “through the hole.” Emile was “a real gentleman,” Gerry said – “always dressed up.”
Baumer was a member of the Canadian Legion and, as an Examiner report put, it, “Exceedingly well educated in languages and history.” He “wrote and spoke fluently English, French, German, Italian, some of the Scandinavian languages and also Central European dialects.” During the Great War the army had used him when necessary as an interpreter, and as time went by the local County Court, and occasionally the Examiner, continued to call on him for help in that regard.
This photo was taken around the time of Marguerite’s marriage to Edward Armstrong, which took place in Peterborough in March 1921; she was 19, he was 22. Back row, from the left, Marguerite, Edward, and Eugenie; front, Marthe and Emile. (Marthe married Charles Maxwell Board in 1934.) PMA, Bio, 19648-2.
By 1930 Baumer had left the Regent to work in the Capitol’s projection booth, remaining there until his death in May 1941. By that time he was said to be one of oldest members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States and Canada (No. 432 local union). Attendance at his funeral, held at St. Peter’s Cathedral, included a who’s who of union projectionists: not just those living in Peterborough but also William Taylor and Jack Grady of Cobourg; Mike Freeman of Port Hope; and Gordon Pretty, Frank Grimshaw, and Ernest Young of Trenton.
His wife, Eugenie Marie, lived on, at the same Sandford-Fleming-inspired George Street address, until the early 1950s. She died on Dec. 21, 1959.
The Baumers had yet another family connection to motion pictures. Their daughter Marthe was an accomplished pianist — completing the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Grade 8 level — and part-time music teacher (although she also worked as a “saleslady” in downtown stores). In the 1920s, in her twenties, she was sometimes called upon in a pinch to play when a musician in the theatre was sick or missing. Much later, in the 1950s, she could sit down at the piano in her house and dazzle visiting youngsters with a demonstration of the music that had once accompanied certain standard silent-film scenes — a heroine on the railway tracks; a sheriff chasing the bad guys with a posse; a maiden in the hands of a would-be vile seducer — speeding up her playing or slowing down to suit the mood. Years later a nephew remembered that when she was playing in the movie theatre she “would have to play the piano quickly when there were cowboy movies on, as there was a lot of action in those movies.” As a young boy and school chum of Paul Board’s, Peter McConkey witnessed Marthe’s display at home and remarked on how it was “so evocative” of what it must have been like to have been at the pictures: it made the scenes instantly come to mind for a visitor.
Marthe Board died in Peterborough in 1999; her husband, C.V. Maxwell Board, who was a sales clerk for years at Black’s clothing store, died in 1975. They are both buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery.
Harry Ristow (Peterborough Projectionist from c1913 to 1941)
When the Capitol Theatre opened in 1921, one of its first employees was Henry (“Harry”) W. Ristow. Born of German immigrant parents in the Junction area of Toronto, June 30, 1889, Ristow had come to town to stay in 1918–19 and worked as a “machinist” for a couple of years until he got a job as projectionist at the Grand Opera House. He may also have put in a short stint earlier, in 1913, as an operator at the Red Mill Theatre. His younger brother Phillip, born in 1893, was an electrician who also worked as an operator; he had joined that trade in Toronto some years before Harry took it up.
Harry Ristow, outside the Capitol Theatre, 1930. A detail from a larger photo of the Capitol staff lined up outside the theatre. Courtesy of John Trennum.
When he moved over to the Capitol, Ristow found himself in a projection booth that was “just as decorative-looking as the rest of the equipment.” Said to be one of the largest projection booths in Ontario, it had “a battery of two Simplex machines and a spotlight for singing and vaudeville use.” The projectors cast their light out at a “new gold fibre Gardiner screen, which is the newest and best in this line [and] will make the public wonder at the remarkably clear and sharply defined pictures that are always the wonder of the public in every city where Paramount operate theatres.”
In 1921 Ristow had a salary of $1,200 for the job. When talkies were introduced in 1929 he would have had to adjust to the new technology and a different kind of projection. “Until talkies,” as historian Douglas Gomery points out, “it was not necessary to run a film at one constant speed.” The talking films screened using the “New Northern Electric Sound System” could no longer be hand-cranked. “The sound picture projector of today,” said a small piece in the Examiner’s coverage of the event, “is a marvel of intricate apparatus but works as simple as [a] sewing machine.”
After sound was introduced in 1929, Ristow, for perhaps the first time, had a companion alongside him (most likely Emile Baumer), because now “two experienced men” were “required for attendance in the projection booth, which has been enlarged to take care of the extra equipment.” Ristow continued in the job, as head operator, until he died “suddenly at his summer home at Chemong” on Aug. 27, 1941.
James Barron, “How a Movie Projectionist Keeps the Dying Art of Celluloid Alive,” New York Times, April 14, 2019. As a result of the varied and highly skilled tasks involved, Barron says, the role of projectionist became a “niche trade.”
Ernest Young (Peterborough Projectionist from 1941–42 to 1957)
International Projectionist (New York), March 1957, p.25.
Ernest Young was another of the myriad of downtown cultural industry employees who faithfully worked behind the scenes. By the time an article was published about him in New York’s International Projectionist trade magazine, he had been working in the theatre business for 50 years, the last 16 of them in Peterborough.
Born in Swansea, South Wales, Young went to work at age 15 as an apprentice electrician. At the age of 18 he took a job with “Poole’s Myriorama” — one of several travelling moving panorama shows (sometimes called “moving dioramas”) that were immensely popular in the nineteenth century and continued into the early age of motion pictures. When Young took up the tour around 1907, the show was in its waning years, and the attractions his team presented included not just the panoramas — which he described as large still pictures depicting topical events (accompanied by comments from a lecturer) — but also vaudeville acts and “slapstick” motion pictures. Young’s job was to run off the movies during the three-minute breaks between acts.
Examiner, May 2, 1957, p.17. Lloyd C. Newton worked at the Centre Theatre from its 1939 opening until 1947, and after that at the Odeon until 1960.
After a short time on that circuit he secured a job as a projectionist in Bolton, England. During the First World War he served in the British Army, where he continued the same line of work — showing mobile movies to troops at army camps. After the war he returned to his job in Bolton before immigrating to Georgetown, Ont., in 1924, again getting work as a projectionist. In 1941–42 he moved from Georgetown to Peterborough and a position at the Capitol Theatre, carefully placing an ad in the Examiner for a four- or five-room apartment, with bath, “for a couple, no children, permanent.” He went a few doors down to the Odeon when it opened in 1947. In the 1950s he was secretary-treasurer of Local 432, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States and Canada. He lived with his wife Gladys in an apartment at 710 George St. N.
Young told International Projectionist in 1957 that he was still a big movie fan and enjoyed his work as much as he did when he projected his first picture “as a lad of 18.”
Following a short illness, Ernest Young died in Peterborough in April 1958 at the age of 69.
Don Corrin (projectionist in Peterborough from 1952 to late 1980s)
Donald Maxwell Corrin worked at the Paramount Theatre in the early 1950s, and after that had a long, varied career, mostly but not entirely in film exhibition. He is a perfect example of how, for many, being a projectionist was a sideline to other activities and jobs.
Corrin grew up in Peterborough, graduating from PCVS. His father, Harry Algernon Corrin (1894–1974), was born in Port Perry but by around 1903 was living with his family in Peterborough and soon after that working in local industry. He served in the First World War towards its very end, and in 1920 married Mary Eveline Rogers (1894–1980). His son Donald was born on Sept. 29, 1922.
PCVS Echoes, 1938. Don Corrin is in the front row, fourth from the left.
As a young man, Don Corrin worked a bit at the CGE in the 1940s and by 1950 had a grocery store at 2 Park St. North. In 1952 he was at the Paramount Theatre, as both projectionist and assistant manager. In May 1955 the U.S. trade magazine Boxoffice noted his contribution in a community publicity campaign carried out by the Paramount’s manager, Arthur E. Cauley — an “outstanding promotion” for the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Corrin and Cauley had engineered a plan that brought together 25 business establishments in a co-op effort to celebrate upcoming marriages featuring a number of lucky couples — “seven brides and their bridegrooms.” Shortly before the film’s opening the daily Examiner presented a six-page section featuring the couples along with ads from the participating merchants — who also contributed gifts of merchandise for presentation to a newlywed couple in a stage ceremony at the theatre. In the end gross attendance for the eight-day run of the film totalled 12,000, about 50 per cent of the possible theatre-going population of Peterborough.
Film Weekly 1962-63 Year Book Canadian Motion Picture Industry, p.132. Donald M. Corrin is the president of Famous Players Programs, based in Peterborough.
Corrin got to know a neighbouring manager, Len Gouin of the Capitol, and around 1957 the two of them went into business together selling theatre program advertising — travelling around the province from “Ottawa up to Timmins and lots of other places.” They later opened a variety store, Len and Don’s, at 753 Park St. South. Along with running the store they continued the advertising business for a while, but Don eventually dropped out in favour of working with movies. For a short while he had his own company, called Theatre Programs, associated with Famous Players.
Another one of Don’s many interests. From Elwood Jones, “A Finger on Shooters’ Pulse,” Examiner, Dec. 27, 2008, pressreader.com.
By 1964 Don was the manager of the Peterborough Drive-In. In 1970 he established a rare (but short-lived) repertory theatre, the Peterborough Mini Cinema, on George Street near Perry, across from what is now Crary Park in a spot that is now a paint store. It appears that Don exhibited what were among his first loves: old movies — at a time long before they were more readily available as videos for home viewing. I suspect he did most of the projecting.
Don was the manager of Pizza Heaven (41 Park St. S.) for a while in the 1970s, but by 1980 was back managing (and doubtless working as projectionist at) the Peterborough Drive-In. His daughter, Gail Marie (Corrin) Flood, was not far off: she became known as a popcorn maker at the drive-in. Later on, around the middle of the decade, Don was projectionist at the Cineplex in Lansdowne Place – working with his son, Robert, who was the manager.
Don died in Peterborough in 1999.