Joy!

The showman with his name in the lights on Canal Street and throughout the South

by

For more than half a century, those turning onto Canal Street in downtown New Orleans have been greeted by a massive marquee featuring three proud, red letters: “JOY.” The Joy Theater opened as a one-screen movie cinema in 1947, closed in 2003, and fell into disrepair after Katrina; it eventually reopened in 2011 as a multimedia venue featuring predominantly live music acts. What many passers-by fail to realize is that the Joy Theater in New Orleans was one of many theaters sharing its namesake, and that the man responsible for them is in many ways as bold and unique as the marquee bearing his name.

Joy Houck Sr., who named the Canal Street theater and many others for himself, was born to a poor farming family in rural Magnolia, Arkansas, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The particular year of his birth is somewhat disputed, partially because, according to his granddaughter Cheryl Houck, Joy doctored his birth certificate to avoid being drafted into World War I, despite his patriotism. Cheryl is one of few surviving family members and the self-proclaimed sole remaining “family historian.” The Houck family is full of interesting characters, predominantly pilots and showmen, and at the forefront of their collective story is Joy: a boy who grew up on a farm in Arkansas with dreams of making it in show business. 

Joy’s entrepreneurial spirit started early. Cheryl describes her grandfather’s attraction to anything cutting edge: “Anything new, he wanted it,” Cheryl said of her grandfather. “Back when the first Model T cars came out in their town, my grandfather would charge you a nickel to take you for a ride in an automobile. I mean when he’s a little kid he’s doing this…He didn’t get past the seventh or eighth grade. Didn’t need it. He had to go work on the farm. Doesn’t seem to matter, he made something of himself.” 

In 1943, just four years before he would have his name put up in lights on Canal Street and after he had become a massive success with his other cinemas and ventures throughout the South, Joy discussed his early years on the farm in an interview for Box Office magazine: “I used to follow a plow across those Arkansas hills, but my mind wasn’t on farming. I was thinking the whole time about how I was going to get into show business.” In 1923, when Joy was only twenty-one years old, he followed those dreams to Hope, Arkansas, where he secured an investor and built the first hard-top theater (as opposed to a drive-in) in the state. 

Every time that son-of-a-b**** looks out his window, he’ll know that I’m still in town.’

Though this first venture failed within a few months, Joy was savvier and more determined, and after briefly returning to the farm to save up funds, he was able to afford a truck, second-hand projector, and a tent. Thus began his second foray into show business: traveling throughout the Texarkana region showing silent movies and staging vaudeville acts in areas that had no concept of a cinema. Later, he obtained audio equipment for screening “talkies.” Joy learned when putting up traveling shows in Louisiana to cross the river from Baton Rouge to Grosse Tête for Sunday screenings, which were allowed in Cajun Country but legally banned in much of the rest of the state at the time.

In 1933, Joy purchased a building in Rayville, Louisiana (in Richland Parish), that became the first “Joy” theater. He continued to tour the tent shows, too—“just in case,” he told Box Office Magazine. Three years later, he opened the first movie theater in New Orleans and gave it the same name, though this was not yet the iconic venue that still sits at Canal Street and Elk Place today. He later moved on to the Joy Strand, another New Orleans cinema in decline he purchased and updated, and in a few years “Joy”-branded theaters had popped up all over Louisiana and the mid-South. 

Joy Houck’s monumental business savvy, despite his lack of education, is undeniable. He eventually produced his own films, often had his son direct them, and would distribute them through his own company, HOWCO Productions, back to himself to screen in his own theaters: “Making money at every end,” remarked Cheryl. Films he made include King of the Bullwhip, starring Gretna-born Western staple Lash LaRue, and another called Bootleggers, featuring a young Jaclyn Smith. When Smith later rose to fame as a result of her role in Charlie’s Angels, Joy re-released his movie with a new poster featuring her prominently, now titled Bootlegger’s Angels. 

According to Randy Houck, Joy’s nephew and another “family historian” who passed away in 2016 but left many anecdotal written vignettes of his uncle’s life, Joy’s career really took off in the 1940s. In 1947 the famous Canal theater was installed: “Joy had a rather plush ‘apartment’ in the Joy Theater on Canal Street, and that’s where he lived when in New Orleans,” Randy noted on the online forum Cinema Treasures; “I recall several Mardi Gras in New Orleans, as the marquee was a great place to watch the Canal Street parades.” According to Cheryl, that grand marquee was built so large with the intent “to piss somebody off.” Randy’s account of the hilarious instance of Southern pettiness is as follows: 

“Uncle Joy began to make it really big in the picture show business during WWII—that’s what we called it: not the theater business, the picture show business—and he became an icon in the industry. When he realized that he needed to have his headquarters in a film distribution city having many theaters in the mid-South, he opened his corporate office in New Orleans, Louisiana, the film distribution center for that region. Paramount Pictures had a truly grand theater on Canal Street: the hub of the activity for New Orleans was the Saenger Theater…The President of Paramount Pictures had a regional office on the second floor of the Saenger, overlooking Canal Street [at the intersection of Canal Street and Elk Place], and Uncle Joy felt it appropriate to make a courtesy call to the man, and went to his office to meet him. When Joy walked in and introduced himself, the other fellow wouldn’t stand from behind his desk, nor did he respond to Joy’s outstretched hand to shake it. All he said was, ‘I don’t need to know you, I’ll have you run out of town within two months.’ Now that kind of thing didn’t set too well with a man such as Uncle Joy, so he bought the corner lot directly across from the corner that the Saenger sat on, and he built a very large theater on that corner with a sign almost a hundred feet high, loudly proclaiming ‘JOY.’ My uncle always said, ‘Everytime that son-of-a-b**** looks out his window, he’ll know that I’m still in town.’”

While “vindictive” is a word Cheryl uses to describe her grandfather, and the story of the marquee certainly reinforces that notion, she also provides countless examples of his incredible generosity. He was known to pay for funerals for his employees and their family members, and Cheryl even credits Joy’s generosity as the reason Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse exists today: “My grandfather’s favorite steakhouse was Chris’s steakhouse, where he had his own table, and when Chris died, Chris’s wife [Ruth Fertel] changed the name to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and eventually faced losing her business,” Cheryl explained. “Joy Houck gave her the money to save the business, and that franchise is now all over the world.”

Another venture and passion of Joy Houck’s that may seem odd juxtaposed against his theaters is his involvement in aviation. By 1940 Joy was one of the first few hundred individuals to receive an “Airmen’s Certificate”, which existed prior to the advent of pilot’s licenses. Within a year he was flying his own planes from his own airport, which he gave a name that is easy enough to guess: “Joy”. Though Joy was married three times, having one child with each wife, his third wife, Hazel — Cheryl’s grandmother — was a pilot from a poor family herself, who Joy met at another airport he purchased when the prior owner was killed flying in an airshow.

“He said he landed at that airport that she managed, and he taxied up and saw the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen in his life,” Cheryl said. “When he bought that airport he told everyone who worked there ‘If you tell that woman I’m married, you’ll be out of a job’… my grandmother was literally the only woman that could, and chose to, manage Joy Houck. She was not easily intimidated, and she was damned intelligent.”

These traits are unsurprising, considering that in 1938 Hazel Houck took a solo flight in a two-seater Fleet Aircraft with an open cockpit, and in another instance flew a plane that flipped entirely upside-down in a wind shear. She even trained pilots for the second world war—naturally, Joy owned flying schools by this point, as well. The United States government attempted to appropriate his massive fleet of planes for the war effort, but Joy went to court to fight the case. After winning, he offered to sell his entire fleet to the government for only one dollar, providing evidence of his unique yet intense brand or patriotism, and staunch adherence to his principles.

Though cinemas and airports might seem a strange combination, Cheryl explains that many of the Houcks, including her grandfather, exhibit symptoms of what today might be diagnosed as ADHD. 

From his initial endeavor charging five cents for Model T rides, Joy would go on to open so many theaters, airports, drive-ins, and bowling alleys that his descendants can barely keep a complete record of his ventures. Cheryl has a document detailing them: it is seventy-nine pages long. “And there wasn’t a page in there without a ‘Joy’,” she said “Let me put it this way: this man put his name on everything.” Sure enough, in addition to the many “Joy” businesses, his daughter was named Joyce Mae Houck; his son Joy N. Houck, Jr., became an accomplished actor, director, and producer.

[You might also like this peek inside the redesign of Baton Rouge's River Center.]

Joy Houck Sr. lived to experience the majority of the twentieth century, passing in 2000, two days before what was believed if not proven to be his ninety-ninth birthday. The most impressive of his physical namesakes that remains today is the the cinema-turned-modern-music-venue that sits diagonally across from the Saenger in New Orleans, along with the approximately eighty-foot lighted marquee that heralds it. In making his namesake marquee so grand, Joy ensured that no one—especially the President of Paramount Pictures at the Saenger—would forget it. 

“It’s not just that you have this beautiful, iconic landmark,” Cheryl said to Andrew Portwood, general manager of the Joy Theater today. “You’ve got this guy’s flagship, his crown jewel.”  

thejoytheater.com