I’ve been looking into the entreprenurial career and life of ABQ’s Joseph “Joe” Barnett recently, a name perhaps even you long-time Burqueños have never run across. To illustrate his importance to our town, and as a bit of backward storytelling, let’s first catch you up on the entirety of Mr. Barnett’s life via this Journal September 17, 1954 obituary.

I love obituaries for many things, including the kernel of fiction writing inevitably woven within the recounting of facts. That’s not to say Barnett’s obituary, or any obit, is a fabrication. It’s still, technically, “non-fiction,” but every obit reader knows much of the real story lies in what is NOT contained in the words printed. The art of obituary is kinda like the widespread observation that music isn’t in the notes, but the silences between those notes.

And speaking of art, the life of Joseph Barnett does have a few thematic similarities to that of another late 19th/early-20th Century character, the fictional Charles Foster Kane. Both Orson Welles’ thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst and Joe Barnett were savvy outsider capitalists who built our cities and culture at a time lusciously ripe for largely laissez-faire development.

Barnett’s entree to ABQ and wealth began immediately via saloons/gambling/drinking. Unlike many other saloon-keepers, Joe made permanent his wealth and influence through numerous “New Town” (i.e., Downtown) real estate holdings and his expert navigation from increasingly prohibited amusements to more acceptable vaudeville theater and the nascent movie industry.

Having looked at Barnett’s saloon days in prior posts, let’s take a two-pronged look at his theater/movie days.

We’ll start today with a single, very well-written 1937 recap of early ABQ theater/movie house history, an obit if you will. Then tomorrow or so we’ll fill in some of the spaces between the musical notes outlined in the brief history below. Along with its relaying of local movie history, also note the author’s funny, and extraordinarily still relevant references to rain patterns in our fair city.