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from The Gisborne Herald....

The end of an era

By JOHN GILLIES | Wednesday, February 04, 2015



RAEY WHEELER kept filmgoing alive in Gisborne through its darkest days, but yesterday she, herself, succumbed to continued ill health.

She died in Gisborne Hospital after her latest setback, which included a bout of pneumonia. She was 85.

Mrs Wheeler was perhaps the last active theatre operator from the heyday of the Kerridge Odeon national cinema chain.

She turned around the fortunes of Gisborne’s Odeon theatre by investing $2.25 million and transforming it into a multiplex with three screens in 1995.

To do this, she and her advisers had to convince bankers that a woman past retirement age had the energy and business acumen to make it work.

As patrons responded to the greater choice of films, Mrs Wheeler continued improvements to the multiplex and added two more auditoriums.

But any prospect of such development looked to have been taken away from her in August 1991, when two Pacer Kerridge representatives came to Gisborne to tell her she was no longer required. She had been offered a franchise for the theatre but rejected the terms.

At that stage she had been with the Kerridge organisation for almost 32 years and been Odeon manager for nearly 21.

Two weeks later, she had bought the building.

At the time it was acquired by Pacer, Kerridge Odeon was debt-free and owned prime sites in nearly all major centres. But after the sharemarket crash of 1987, the Odeon theatre was among the properties sold to repay debt.

In 1991 it was on the market again, and Mrs Wheeler bought it and the neighbouring Quillars building on the Peel Street-Gladstone Road corner.

In April the following year she was back as manager of the theatre and before long was its independent operator.

In 2003, Mrs Wheeler was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal.

Contributions as a district councillor, Vanessa Lowndes Centre board member, Greater Gisborne committee member, and Business and Professional Women’s Club stalwart were the more obvious examples of her community service.

Less obvious were the children she had taken home “all over town” when they had no ride or the film had finished earlier than expected, or the youngsters she took a chance on and gave work in the Odeon.

For many years she kept an “emergency kit” on hand at the theatre — jumper leads for vehicles whose lights had been left on, a coat-hanger for opening cars locked with the keys inside, and a tow-rope.

Mrs Wheeler was an ardent champion of Gisborne. She and her friend and workmate Grace McGaveston collected the Alfred Cox fleamarket fees for Gisborne’s information centre for 15 years.

As gentlemen’s clubs opened up their membership, she was the first woman to be a member of the Poverty Bay Club.

Doreen Raey Jackson was the youngest of four daughters of Ted and Kathleen Jackson, who farmed two properties, one at Puha and the other at Te Karaka. She and her sisters milked the cows and helped with the cropping.

As a young woman, she worked in Te Karaka’s Lane’s Bakery and sold sweets at the picture theatre. It was at the theatre she met Ernest Wheeler.

At the urging of his aunt, Gertrude Wheeler, “Ernie” had learned to be a projectionist. Impressed with what Robert Kerridge was doing in the theatre industry, Gertrude Wheeler had another nephew, Wilfred, buy theatres in Hicks Bay, Te Araroa, Ruatoria, Tikitiki, Tokomaru Bay and Te Karaka. The chain was called East Coast Theatres.

After World War 2, Ernie Wheeler went to Te Karaka to be the manager/projectionist and married the young woman who sold the sweets.

Mr Wheeler took a position as theatre manager for Kerridge Odeon in Otorohanga. He and Mrs Wheeler stayed there for six years and had two children, Selwyn and Karl.

On their return to Gisborne, Mr Wheeler worked for the New Zealand Forest Service. Mrs Wheeler got a job as an usherette at the Regent a week after they arrived back. Grace McGaveston had started in the same role two months before. Another long-serving staff member, projectionist Darrol Walsh, had joined the Kerridge organisation four years earlier, as a tray boy serving ice creams and sweets inside the Regent Theatre.

The other Kerridge theatre in Gisborne, the Majestic, was modernised and reopened as the Odeon in 1969. Mrs Wheeler went there as cashier and within a year was offered the job of manager. She asked her husband what he thought and when he expressed doubts, it gave her just the incentive she needed.

She kept the theatre running when the film industry fell on hard times, particularly the 1980s.

She had already endured loss — Ernie had died in 1976 at the age of 58 — and she would know it again. Her younger son, Karl, died in 1997, aged 39.

In good times and bad, the Odeon sustained her. Family members pitched in as her health deteriorated in later years but, after a couple of hours on the oxygen bottle in the afternoon, she was usually ready to greet patrons for the evening session.

Her interactions with the public were sometimes terse — it seems everyone has a Mrs Wheeler story — but she came to be a Gisborne institution whose achievements were, at least, respected and often admired.

She is survived by her son Selwyn and sisters Doris and Ruth. Another sister, Mary, predeceased her.

http://www.gisborneherald.co.nz/article/?id=40408