Roxy Center to host Forney Brothers and friends a night of music

After several months of work refreshing the Roxy Center in Hopkins, plans are underway to celebrate a reopening with a night of special music featuring the Forney Brothers and special guests at 7 pm, Friday, June 20.

Jerry Forney has long wished to host live music at this venue and is calling on his musician friends to sing and play to raise funds to help operate the theater.

The show will kick off with some area musicians with ties to Hopkins like JR Gladman and Rick Titus then finish with the crew of Jerry Forney including his brother Larry. Phil Forney is still recuperating from a car accident and surgery that occured in May.

The Roxy Theater opened in the late 1940s as a movie theater and was operated for a number of years by the Ralph White family including his sons, Merle and Forrest. After the movie theater closed, the building sat idle until the mid 1990s when Hopkins Community 2000 purchased the building from Merle and a restoration began. Additional plans for the upper floor to house a youth center and updates to the theater to accommodate live performances were made. Live acts, school plays and Hopkins Picnic events were held there over the next several years.

With some damage to the theater after a storm occurred the Roxy hadn’t been used much for a while. Morgan Pope, a senior at North Nodaway at the time, undertook the challenge of fixing up the youth center, putting on a fresh coat of paint and getting things back in working order. A grant from the Gladys Rickard Trust supplied the resources to re-face the east wall, replace windows and repair other parts of the theater. Though there are still other projects the group would like to tackle, the theater is ready to be used again. There are plans for other live performances and the youth center to be open on a monthly basis.

For more information contact Deena Poynter at 660.541.1336 or Kary Owens at 660.562.0460.