FAIRMONT — No matter how successful, whether it runs for a night or for 50 years, every show has a curtain call.
The audience files out. The lights fade, and all is stillness.
On Wednesday, the final curtain call came for the Fairmont Theater. Though all that remains today is a pile of dusty bricks and twisted girders, for the Fairmonters who grew up with those silver screens, the show will go on.
“There’s a lot of memories in that theater,” said Ted Offutt, former Fairmont police chief and longtime city resident. “When I was a teenager, that’s where everyone went.”
Robert Tinnell, a movie writer, producer and director currently living in Morgantown, said that the films he saw growing up in Fairmont kindled his desire to make movies, and he credits the Fairmont Theater with helping to birth that passion.
