Page 27 - Senior Link Magazine Summer 2026 - Online Magazine

Echoes of the

Silver Screen

The POWER of the

Small-Town Theater

by Alycyn Keeling, Executive Director, Wallace Theater

ong before the faces of Cary
Grant, Katharine Hepburn,
LMarlon Brando, and Rita
Hayworth lit up the silver screen
in West Texas, the Blankenship
family arrived on the South Plains
with little more than determination,
vision, and a willingness to build a
new life from the ground up.

In the early 1900s, A.W. and Mary
Blankenship made their journey Wallace studied engineering at
west by covered wagon, settling Texas A&M beginning in 1921.
into a dugout home carved into When he returned home, he
the land. Life was not easy, but worked alongside his family on
A.W. and Mary raised a close-knit the farm. But in the margins of
family grounded in hard work and that life, he began to experiment.
an appreciation for the arts. Those Using his engineering instincts
values would ripple far beyond their and entrepreneurial drive, he built
small homestead. his own sound and projection
equipment and decided to take the
Their daughter, Doyle, was a jazz show on the road.
musician, performing in the Texas
Technological College saxophone Traveling from town to town,
band in the 1920s. Their son, Wallace Wallace screened movies off the side
Blankenship would go on to build of a truck, bringing entertainment
a film legacy that would leave an to rural communities that had little
enduring mark across West Texas. access to it. In those early days, he Wallace & Rose Blankenship
wasn’t just showing films, he was

Lubbock Senior Link 27