Buffalo, Oklahoma - Building a Theater and Community Center with a Community!

My gps informed me quite positively that the town I was headed for did not exist. In its polite English voice, it suggested several other towns. I knew the town existed and while it changed as little as Brigadoon between my visits, Buffalo, Oklahoma is a real place.

Buffalo, Oklahoma is a tiny town of 700 people located in western Oklahoma. Imagine the rivet holding the handle to the pan. The rivet is Buffalo. Like many small western towns off the interstate routes, Buffalo hangs on stubbornly. Main Street is lined with empty buildings and the nearest Walmart is 30 minutes away.

I like Buffalo and wanted to write about it. Asking around for ideas, lifelong resident Becky George suggested I write about the movie theater. Movie theater? I wondered. Why would a movie theater be something special? Was it old? A 1920s treasure? Becky laughed. The movie theater personifies the people of Buffalo.

According to Becky, Buffalo's greatest asset is the people and their love of this town. The story of the movie theater is why Buffalo survived the dust bowl, Great Depression, interstate bypass and decreased beef prices. The original movie theater, built in the heyday of fancy theaters, burned to the ground in 1965. It was not rebuilt for several years. When it was, the manager took her duties very seriously. Dressed to the nines and carrying a flashlight and rod, she patrolled the aisles to make sure that no one put their feet on the seats or made out in the back rows.

By the 1990s, the elderly theater owners cut back on showings until the theater shut down all together. The building stood empty for about 10 years. The nearest theater was in Woodward, 30 minutes away. The largest gathering place was the high school auditorium and thus not always available to use for public forums. With that in mind, a group of Buffalo residents, including my sister Robin, decided to reopen the theater as a not-for-profit.

All the money to renovate the building came from local donors. This tiny town and its not much larger county raised enough to purchase a digital projection system, something much larger towns are struggling to install.

The menfolk did the heavy work while the ladies set up sewing machines and industrial lights to sew the seat covers. Robin describes it "as a sweatshop, literally. We got the seat bottoms done finally," and then they decided to take out all the seat backs and have someone recover them in an air conditioned shop.

The 200 seat theater now shows new release movies on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays to an often packed house. People come from tiny towns all around the region and when Woodward's movie theater was hit by a tornado in 2012, the Buffalo theater picked up the movie going Woodwardians. In addition, the theater offers a place for the community to gather to hear politicians and other speakers.

Community spirit may be in short supply in some towns, but not in tiny Buffalo, Ok.