End of an era: Palace Theater changes hands after over 50 years with Suick family

ANTIGO — Fifty-two years — or, as Tim and Barb Suick wryly think of it — 18,980 days.

That is how long the Suicks owned the Palace Theater — from 1973, when Tim first took over for his father, until earlier this month, when they officially sold to Mickey Zima, an employee at the Palace for the previous eight years.

Zima, who is just 25, said she bought the theater for several reasons.

“I think that it’s important to have a small local theater,” Zima said. “It’s a piece of history at this point. It’s a good way to get out of your house and enjoy some theatrical art and to see movies the way they’re meant to be seen.”

Because of his own family’s role in it, Tim is just as familiar with the Palace’s history. He knows that technically, 1916 was just the year it moved from the north side of 5th Ave., where it took up half of what is now the Harper’s Mercantile building, to its current location. He knows the name of the woman who played the organ during the days of silent film (Selma Neufeld), the base material of the gilded wainscotting that swirls around the screening room (horse and cow hair), its largest events (the remodel that flipped the Palace from its former 1,180 seat single screen design into a twin comes to mind), its biggest hits (“Gone with the Wind” drew the highest attendance, but “Titanic,” in an era when tickets were no longer 25 cents, was highest-grossing).

Both Tim and Barb also, of course, remember the many challenges they faced — and weathered — throughout their tenure at the helm of the Palace, and the 14 additional small family theaters they owned around the country.

“We were just getting into color TV when my dad started us,” Tim said. “So we went through color TV. Then we went through videos. Then we went through cable. I don’t want to add streaming, because that’s a different story, but we beat all that stuff. People go to the theaters because it’s an experience of getting out of the house. This comes from Ben Marcus, who started Marcus Theaters. He always said, ‘There’s a kitchen in every house. But people still go out to eat.’ That was his theory in the movie business. There’s a TV in every house, but people still go to the theaters, and there’s a lot of truth to that. You like to sit in a dark theater with other people feeling the same experience.”

But movie-watching experiences at the Palace were not always the same as at other theaters — particularly when films in the horror genre were being screened, such as the mid-70s slasher "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

"That’s when we were a single screen and we had a spotlight upstairs. So we had somebody come in with a chainsaw — in fact, I think I did it,” Tim laughed. “I would walk up the aisle with the chainsaw. We had a lot of people just drop their mouths like, ‘Holy crap.’”

Sometimes staff members lent a hand in terrorizing audience members, according to Barb, who told an anecdote about their time showing the movie “It,” the 2017 version in which red balloons often float by when the satanic clown Pennywise is near.

“The helium balloons were starting to lose their helium, and people tended in this theater to sit right under where the balcony was. Debbie Fischer, our right hand at the theater, knew exactly when the scary parts in the movie were and she’d go and drop the balloons down right in front of them. I was in my office here and these two little girls came flying out of that theater screaming, and they scared me. Then they went down to the bathroom, and Debbie went and turned the lights off on them!” Barb said.

Fischer, who admitted to her role in this humorous episode, said the Palace also featured a number of memorable family-friendly events.

“For the movie ‘Frozen,’ we had a prince and princess day, and we had a really good turnout for that. We had some local beauticians come in and do children’s hair and makeup, and we all dressed up like princesses. They were extremely excited. To watch the movie in your princess dress, you can only imagine,” Fischer said.

Fischer said the Palace has even hosted a wedding — her daughter Shanell’s.

“Her and her husband just thought it would be a good place to get married,” Fischer said. “I had asked Barb and Tim and I kind of figured maybe they had had people that got married there before and they said they hadn’t, so that was the first wedding that was ever held there. And Barb and Tim really went all out. They had two movies booked for the afternoon, but they had no shows that afternoon and they made popcorn for all the wedding guests: it turned out very nice.”

The Suicks said special events like these, as well as interactions with customers and employees like Fischer, made their half century at the Palace most worthwhile.

“It was fun to have those people — they made it interesting and then they helped us be successful. The Bob Warren family had four generations that worked here at this location. So the grandfather, the father, the son…everybody. Now, Pat Frey and Jeff and Betsy Neufeld, they’ve had a couple generations of people that worked here. Betsy had four kids, so we would never put the first name of the girls on the schedule. They had to work it out amongst themselves who was working,” Tim said. “All together, we had about 175 young people that started here the 52 years. Most of them were from Antigo and they all basically were first year jobs, so that was a unique factor: we got to teach all these new kids.”

“I remember my nephew, Kalin Bornemann,” Barb said. “He was so quiet when he came here. And by the time he was done, he was just goofing around with customers and it really opened him up. It opened a lot of kids up. He’s an attorney now. It was always fun to watch them grow up and see what they turned out to be.”

Fischer called the Palace Theater the Suicks ran “family-oriented.”

“If a customer came in and asked them anything, they’d do anything within their power to make it happen if it was reasonable. It’s not crazy expensive like some theaters in surrounding cities are. We try to keep our prices reasonable for families because, to bring your children to the movies and give them snacks and everything, it can get really pricy, and families are on a budget. I know they do a lot with the school. They do a lot of donations for fundraisers. We have birthday parties there — people pick the theater for birthday parties and things like that. So they’re just very community-oriented and giving people,” she said. “I think the theater means a lot to the city. They had asked them to move the Palace Theater to the north side when that was kind of booming and getting bigger, but the Suicks refused. They said, ‘No, we’re going to leave it downtown — it’s a landmark.'”