Name: Joe Yuchasz
Age: was 82
Occupation: former businessman and mayor of Elk Rapids, Michigan
Last Seen: The Great Beyond
Awarded For: being a rock in the community I grew up in
It was thirty years ago this past May 18 that my life would change forever.
I was playing Nintendo in my bedroom, waiting for my mother to come home from work to cook dinner. She did, followed by two more cars, driven by two of the biggest assholes I would ever meet in my life.
After a long while, my dad summoned me to the living room. He announced that mom had filed for divorce and that I would be moving in with her and her friend, a 400-pound bitch who was also a former boss of hers at a gas station in Elk Rapids.
There were many good and bad things about moving to a new town. The worst was that I ended up changing bus stops three times. One time was because I was bullied and harassed, maybe because I was now being forced to live with the town whore.
But, the big plus was that I now lived where I could now go anywhere without begging my parents to drive me ten-plus miles. I could grab a slice of pizza from Chef Charles. I could grab the latest issue of Mad Magazine from Riteway Party Store. I could go to Ed and Son's IGA and grab a gallon of milk so my mom wouldn't have to.
And yes, I could watch a recent Hollywood hit at the Elk Rapids Cinema.
Thirty years ago, the theater was in somewhat rough shape. Seats were missing in the auditorium. The floors were worn and worse of all, the sound was horrible since it came from an old PA speaker.
But, its owner was good at shushing his critics, too.
Joseph William Yuchasz was born in Detroit in 1940. Six years later, he and his family moved to the tiny hamlet of Kewadin, a few miles outside Elk Rapids. On the weekends, Joe and his two younger sisters would catch Saturday matinees at the Cinema, then called the State. He graduated from Elk Rapids High School in 1959 and went to Notre Dame. He also enlisted in the Navy and was on its reserve for over 20 years.
In his 20s, Joe came home to Elk Rapids where he became a schoolteacher in Bellaire. In 1967, he started the popular Ye Olde Music Shoppe. He also operated a t-shirt shop as well. He also was looking at starting a radio station in the area, but money and the lack of good frequencies for the Grand Traverse region squashed that idea.
One cold winter day in March, 1973, the owner of the Elk Rapids Cinema, Howard Coddington came to Joe and asked him to buy the theater. Coddington, who made his fortune with a dry cleaning business, bought the Cinema from founder Ed Loomis in 1960.
Loomis built the Elk Rapids Cinema in 1940 as the State Theatre. Previously, he owned the Community Theater where the Town Club Bar now resides. In its first 20 or so years, the State did exceptionally well, especially during a time when television, video or streaming existed. Back in those days, movies were bicycled from one theater to the next, showing for two or three days. Loomis expanded his art deco masterpiece in the mid-50s to accommodate the growing trend of the day: Cinemascope.
However, by the end of 1954, the State had two major problems: WPBN-TV and WWTV. Television had come to northern Michigan and it hurt the State and other cinemas. When Coddington purchased the Stare in 1960, he changed the name to the Cinema Theatre to avoid confusion with Traverse City's State, opened in 1949 by the giant Butterfield chain.
According to Yuchasz, he blamed Coddington for not properly running the theater. If it rained, the roof leaked, which made finding a seat at the Cinema tricky. The ceiling became heavily water damaged and the seats became so unusable that some had to be removed. Needless to say, fixing up the Cinema would become Joe's mission.
The late 60s and early 70s were a tough time for movies, but Joe and the Cinema soldiered on. In 1975, Butterfield built the Plaza Cinema by the Meijer on US-31 South in Traverse City, the area's first multiplex. Three years later, the State was twinned. In 1985, Butterfield also built the Grand Traverse Cinemas in Acme, only about ten miles from the Elk Rapids Cinema. To add more headaches for Joe, Elk Rapids' economy in the 80s was disastrous. Factories were closing (even my own mother - who worked as a secretary in one of them - lost her job) and downtown was a near-ghost town. Even Joe cost his costs by moving his music store into the Cinema lobby.
In 1986, Joe was given a new occupation: mayor. Well, technically, he was Elk Rapids' Village President. Under his aegis, the small village of 1,600 would transform from a dying middle-class town to a vacation paradise, even expanding the village harbor twice. The once-nearly abandoned downtown would transform into a haven for small businesses, even with some transformation in the late 90s into the 2000s with the addition of several new buildings such as the ones housing what is now Gil-Roy's Hardware, Chemical Bank, and the Plaza next to Gil-roy's.
I often frequented the Cinema as a young boy and had many good conversations with Joe. Long after I graduated high school, moved to Grand Rapids, and got myself a steady job, I would go back to Elk Rapids and one of the first things I would do is catch up with 'ol Joe at the Cinema. One of my fondest memories was when I came up one weekend during a sidewalk sale. Joe was outside on his laptop ordering CDs for customers at his Music Shoppe. I noticed that Joe had a problem regarding newfangled technology: everything he left on his vendor's website, he had the begrudging trouble of reentering his password over and over again. So, I taught him how to use tabs on his browser. Problem solved.
It was no secret that Joe was a talker. If I was the sole person in the building with him, he'd yap up a storm. We talked about the movie business or other theaters. I told him that I now lived in "Loeks Country" and he talked at length about Jack Loeks, the founder of what is now Celebration Cinema. He talked about how Loeks transformed "a small plot of land" into what was once the biggest cinema in the world, the now-demolished Studio 28.
In those 30 years past, 1/2 of Ed and Son's is now the Chinese restaurant Chang Express while the other 1/2 is now a smattering of smaller businesses. Riteway Party Store is now River Street Market and has freshened up. Chef Charles is still there. However, after the death of longtime owner Charles Egler, new owners stepped in and renamed it Chef Chuck's. The owners also vowed to not change any of Charles' recipes, which left locals happy.
Up until recently, it seemed that the only downtown mainstay to not change drastically in those 30 years was the Cinema. Joe was there most of the time, running it as a one-man operation at times. Of course, he would have high school kids help assist at the concession stand and even his sister Catherine would take tickets as well.
Yes, Joe had his critics. Most of the movies he showed were a month old or two. And yes, some would even make the trek over to Traverse City to see movies there. Well, that was a Hollywood problem and not a Joe problem. The studios have long favored bigger multiplexes versus small-town cinemas like the ERC. The bigger theaters can play a film longer because most have smaller auditoriums for older, less-profitable movies. If a movie plays at a theater on its first weekend of release, the studios will force them to play that film for two to six weeks, depending on its popularity. With just one screen, Joe didn't want to gamble on a film that would bomb.
And yes, the big elephant in the room was none other than the Cinema itself. Many wondered why he owned the theater for so long and didn't do hardly anything to repair it. Obviously, the answer was money. Joe refused to be a charity case and refused any money from people wanting to put new seats in the theater. The obvious answer was the roof itself, which needed to be replaced. Nearly 20 years ago, that long-awaited dream became reality. Soon after, Joe repainted the mural, added new floors, repainted the walls, and gave the Cinema much-needed new seats. Obviously, the Cinema's restoration got two thumbs up from the community.
Joe paid for the remodeling thanks to a bank loan. However, as soon as the loan was paid off, he got stuck with another bill: the mandatory switch to digital.
By the mid-2010s, most bigger multiplexes had made the switch to showing movies off of a hard drive as opposed to a mess of 35mm film. Granted, digital projectors weren't cheap, but it saved money on a projectionist having to thread a ton of film.
The AMCs, the Regals, and the Cinemarks can afford to go digital. But for smaller, independent cinemas, it became a challenge. In northern Michigan alone, many theaters ran crowdfunding campaigns to buy new equipment. Grayling's Rialto Theatre, for example, used Grayling native and Detroit Pistons TV voice George Blaha for their Kickstarter campaign. Frankfort's Garden Theatre became a non-profit.
Other cinemas haven't been as lucky. In 2013, Elaine Dawson, whose family owns theaters in Bellaire, Petoskey, Gaylord, Cheboygan, and Mackinaw City was sent to prison for a year for not properly reporting her taxes. Charlevoix Cinema III has struggled to maintain an owner, especially after its longtime owner defaulted on the theater's mortgage during the 2008 economic downturn. Plus, The Bay in Suttons Bay became a non-profit after its longtime owner announced that he could no longer pay that cinema's bills.
Obviously, all this made Joe Yuchasz and the Elk Rapids Cinema truly one-of-a-kind. Everyone who knew Joe knew he did it for the love of movies and his hometown. He understood that not all the films he showed were liked by everyone. Unless it was an artsy-fartsy film, he avoided R-rated films. Being a devout Catholic, he did show some religious films, including several anti-abortion flicks like 2019's "Unplanned", produced by failing snake oil salesman Mike Lindell. He even showed 2014's "America: Imagine the World Without Her", which was made by convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza.
According to records, the Elk Rapids Cinema made roughly $100,000 per year under Yuchasz's management. That's before bills such as HVAC, taxes, paying employees and distributors of both movies, and concessions, to name a few. He managed to make those multiple upgrades despite tightened margins, according to the Cinema's website.
This past January 18, Joe Yuchasz passed away at age 82, just two months shy of the 50th Anniversary of his taking over the Cinema. There was some irony in Joe's death; the first film he booked, "Fiddler On The Roof" was over three hours long. The same with the last film he showed, "Avatar: The Way of Water." Just two months after Joe's death, Chaim Topol, 'Fiddler''s star, died at 87.
Joe never married, nor had children. However, he was very close to his sister, Catherine, whose three children were willed in the Cinema. For the next several months, Joe's family banded together to learn how to run the Cinema. In a statement to the Elk Rapids News, the family said that even with it closed, the Cinema's bills still came in monthly. So after nearly six months of dormancy, the family decided that Memorial Day weekend would be perfect to reopen the Cinema. The family re-lit the theater with "Guardians of the Galaxy 3".
All things considered, business at the Cinema was brisk this past summer. And like many theaters, they benefitted from the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Many felt that the Cinema was in good hands with Joe's family.
However, just after the town's yearly Harbor Days celebration, many in the community were shocked when the Cinema was listed on a real estate website for $500,000. The site even told people not to talk to any of the staffers because they wanted anonymity during that time.
With a price tag some called steep, some in the community criticized Joe's family for putting money in front of tradition. Some even feared that the 83-year-old Cinema would be transformed into condos.
In a statement to the Elk Rapids News, the family was told by their Uncle Joe that he really didn't care if after he was gone, it wasn't a cinema anymore. The family even pointed out that they were at least 20 years older than Joe when he bought the Cinema in 1973, plus the fact that they all have their own families and personal lives. For example, his nephew, Brian Bowe, Ph.D. is the current chair of the Department of Journalism at Western Washington University. Joe's niece, Mary Vasquez is a nurse at Munson Medical Center. They all unfortunately knew that they couldn't run the Cinema quite like Joe did.
But a few weeks ago, the family announced that the Cinema was going to stay a cinema after all.
The new owners are the Chalfonte Foundation, a Detroit-based non-profit that owns summer camps in Elk Rapids and nearby Torch Lake (pronounced "shall-font"; it means "cool fountain" in French). According to the organization's website, its goal is to eliminate poverty of all forms - educational, cultural, spiritual, and physical - among children. They were founded by the late Rev. Jim Meyer, a Detroit Roman Catholic priest and former chaplain of the Children's Hospital in Detroit. He was angry that the hospital was charging parents whose children were patients for meals, parking and even just to watch TV. Often, he raised money to help the families.
Meyer's parents lived in Elk Rapids and when they died in the 1980s he converted their home into Chalfonte House. Meyer was a fierce supporter of the arts and championed social justice activities such as Civil Rights. Meyer died at age 86 in 2021, but his work continues.
According to Joe's family, Chalfonte purchased the Cinema for a reasonable price. Mary Vasquez will now serve on the board of directors for the Chalfonte Cinema and Cultural Center, which will oversee operations for the Cinema.
The Cinema will continue to show regular first-run films ("Five Nights at Freddy's" was their debut film; they showed the recent Hunger Games movie its debut weekend and they're now showing 2004's "The Polar Express" by request) but will also have shows from PuppetART, an organization that works with Chalfonte.
The biggest surprise of all is that Chalfonte does have ambitious plans for the Cinema that only Joe could ever think of. Before his death and Chalfonte's acquisition of the Cinema, he devised plans to expand the theater. The expansion would add a second screen in the basement, a soda fountain, a gaming room, and even a cafe. Now that the Cinema is a non-profit, chances are that members of the community will open their hearts - and wallets - to make this positive change happen.
Even more, Chalfonte is planning to make a dream come true that Joe could not achieve: starting a radio station. The Foundation was donated thousands of old records from Joe's personal collection and plans to build a low-power FM radio station from the Cinema's basement. They also plan to host several talk shows discussing the work they do and some of the people who they support.
In a way, it's heartbreaking when an older theater closes because it can't compete with the multiplex several miles away. Many of those movie palaces of old have all long closed or are now run by a non-profit that knows that they're not doing it for the money, but to bring entertainment and enlightenment to a group of people. It's just like Michael Moore and the Traverse City Film Festival. He admitted years ago that if he ran the State Theatre as a for-profit, it would only be open on weekends. Granted, Moore has his critics who all cry "oH, hE's RicH! He'S a TheIF!"
Let's remember who owns Moore's competition in Traverse: AMC, a multi-billion-dollar corporation that closed the only theaters in Alpena and Big Rapids. If anything, what Moore did was encourage others to turn that old cinema into a place where communities can gather to enjoy good movies.
In the long run, I expect the Elk Rapids Cinema to last well into the future under Chalfonte's aegis. Obviously, it will be a community effort and since the community loved Joe, it will be a testament to how well he was loved.
Joe will be missed, but as long as the community says so, his legacy will live forever.
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