Look, there along the narrow street, heat twisting
the sea air, sweat beading on the brow of a young
man reaching down to pick up a 20-pound cinder
block. Turning, facing the scaffold and lifting, the
block is hoisted upward into the hands of another young man,
poised on the scaffold above him. The process is repeated, the
cinder block lifted to another level, where a third man waits in
the heat. And on, and up, until it reaches the top of the scaffolding,
where it’s laid on top of the blocks
that have come before.
Summer, 1946, the construction
crew of Luther T. Rogers
Inc. is hard at work
remember when
pumping a salt pool of sweat into the ground as block by block
the 40-foot walls of the Crest Theater take shape, becoming a
permanent addition to the landscape of Wrightsville Beach.
Luther “Buddy” Rogers Jr., a civil engineering student at
the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts
(later known as N.C. State), is home for the summer, working
crew for the construction company owned by his father and
grandfather.
“My fingerprints are on every single block of that building,”
says Rogers, 65 years later, from the front porch of his home
on Greenville Loop. Rogers would go on to become the mayor
of Wrightsville Beach from 1965 to 1973, and in addition to
his hand in the construction of the building itself, he would
“The big thing for us was that the popcorn machine was outside and
we could smell the popcorn popping as we walked by.”
witness the Crest Theater’s last run as a movie house.
Owned and managed by Jack C. Thompson, the Crest
Theater opened on November 24, 1946, with an event sponsored
by the Wrightsville Beach Lions Club, featuring a film
called Deception, starring Bette Davis. The theater’s 488-seat,
red carpet interior was outfitted with the latest in projection
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