The Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater - Medford Oregon. Back in the day, the Medford Oregon theater was called Hunt's Craterian, a vaudeville theater, that derived its name from Crater Lake. That is, until a little 14-year-old girl named Ginger Rogers danced there in 1926.
Little Ginger went on to great fame and fortune, and in 1940 she bought a ranch upriver from Shady Cove. She was one of the first big celebrities to call Southern Oregon home, for at least part of the year. In the early 1990s, Rogers helped kick off the multimillion dollar fundraising campaign to restore the theater. She died in April 1995, before the renovation was finished.
Within weeks, a Medford Oregon couple, Charles Gorr and Loraine Hart, launched a petition to include Rogers' name on the theater marquee, and some 3,300 people signed on. A longtime friend of Rogers wrote a guest opinion in the Mail Tribune supporting the idea, and things just took off from there. By the fall of 1995, the board of directors of the Craterian Performances Company unanimously agreed to the name we know it by today: Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater. And, in March 1997, the theater reopened. Most of us locals just call it The Crate.
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