Capitol Theatre

I have a large silver plated trophy cup with an applied sterling silver riband engraved “ Capitol Theatre Cup. The cup is engraved ” For Basket Ball Nanaimo B C 1922".It is further engraved “ Trustees P.Maffeo,G. Green,T.Lewis”. I can post a photo if you like.

bottlejim: Your Capitol Theatre Cup sounds like an interesting item, but as Mike Rivest has found that this theater didn’t become the Capitol until 1927, your 1922 cup must not be related to it. I did find that a Peter Maffeo was a member of the Nanaimo Board of School Trustees in 1922, so the two other trustees named must also have been members of that board.

Googling Capitol Theatre Cup, I found that there were cups of that name awarded in Winnipeg and Regina, as well, during the 1920s and 1930s. There were also Capitol Theatre Cups in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, the latter at least as late as 1964. I also found references to an Empress Theatre Cup (Edmonton, 1916) a Strand Theatre Cup (Emporia, Kansas, 1925) and a Fairbanks-Stillman Theatre Cup (Cleveland, 1926.)

Awarding cups was recommended as a public relations gambit in a 1927 Chalmers Publishing Company book called Building Theatre Patronage, by John F, Barry and Epes W. Sargent. As some theaters awarded cups earlier, this was not an original idea from the authors, but something that was likely fairly common already.

As for your cup, it’s possible that there was an earlier Capitol Theatre in Nanaimo that we haven’t found out about yet, or it might have been from a theater somewhere else in British Columbia. The only Capitol Theatre that we have listed as open prior to 1922 in BC is the one in Vancouver, a Famous Players circuit house opened in 1918, but it’s always possible that there was one closer to Nanaimo that we haven’t yet identified.