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At Screenland Armour, a small independent movie theater in North Kansas City, you can smell the buttery aroma of popcorn before you even walk in.
“If a building didn't smell like popcorn and I went in to watch a movie, I'm questioning where I'm at,” says Screenland Armour owner Adam Roberts, who naturally swears they have the best theater popcorn in town.
No matter the time of year, it’s nearly unthinkable to see a film without popcorn. From the smallest one-screen indie to the biggest multiplex, they're inseparable.
So it might be shocking to find out that, 100 years ago, popcorn was actually banned from inside movie theaters.
America’s love of movie popcorn was not an overnight phenomenon — it took the Great Depression, World War II and Kansas City itself to become the classic concession it is today.
Because it was right here that a widow named Julia Braden first talked her way into a movie palace lobby — and helped to pioneer the world of theater concession stands.
Popcorn’s peculiar rise to fame
Popcorn is far from a modern invention. Nearly 10,000 years ago, indigenous communities in what is now southern Mexico realized that if certain types of otherwise-inedible kernels reached a high temperature, they would burst through that tough seed coat.
The popped corn — which came from a tall grass called teosinte — got incorporated into all kinds of feasts and celebrations. It took thousands of years of cultivation, though, to develop the crop we know today.
Eventually, popcorn caught the attention of European colonizers who arrived in the 1400s.
“And then the problem was, once you heated the popcorn, it popped all over the place. So how do you pop the corn and then catch it?” asks Andrew F. Smith, author of Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America.
In the mid-1800s, Americans started using wire baskets to cook popcorn over the fire, making it both easier to cook and more delicious (since it wouldn’t get ashy and dirty).
Americans became sort of obsessed with popping corn, Smith says, embracing it as a whimsical recreational activity. People would host popcorn parties and compete over who was better at popping it.
"Its popping still enthralls observers, young and old," writes Smith. "Popcorn is America's gift to the world, and what a wonderful, fun-filled bequest it is."
The popcorn recipes of yore were also much more expansive and creative than the limited and more narrow-minded ways we eat popcorn today. In addition to the beloved Cracker Jack (a combination of sweet caramel corn and peanuts), popcorn also used to be a regular ingredient in soup, salads, cookies, biscuits, taffy, and pie.
At first, it was difficult to make really good popcorn, says Smith. But that all changed in 1893 at the World’s Fair in Chicago, when Charles Cretors & Company unveiled the first popcorn machine. The device tossed popcorn as it cooked, making it way easier to produce popcorn in bulk — and by the early 1900s, you could find popcorn as a readily available street food at fairs, parks, and baseball games.
One particularly famous popcorn machine was invented by Charles Manley right here in Kansas City. Originally named Burch Manufacturing Co., the company was located on Wyandotte Street in Kansas City, Missouri.
Braden’s famous ‘Golden Flake’ popcorn
Julia May Braden was born on June 10, 1862, the daughter of a hardworking German immigrant. Raised on a farm in Illinois, she grew up churning butter, gathering eggs and sewing. After she got married, she took up work as a traveling purveyor of medicine, lotions, and ink.
Around 1900, she settled here in Kansas City — and, to make money, she jumped headfirst into the popcorn, peanut and candy business.
“After my husband died, I wanted something steady to do,” she told The Kansas City Star in 1931. “I saw the popcorn stands, how clean they were, and it seemed to me that anyone used to doing every kind of work, as I was, could run one. I have worked 16 hours a day for 16 years.”
Braden was a tough competitor in the already-packed field. She branded her popcorn as “Braden’s Golden Flake Popcorn” to stick out in the crowd — even going as far as to put an advertisement in the newspaper warning that her popcorn was a “registered trade name” and that “any infringer will be prosecuted.”
Braden wasn’t bluffing, either. She got into spat after spat with other business owners, all of which were described in great detail in the local newspapers.
In 1927, for example, Braden heard rumors from “certain members of the popcorn-eating public that she buttered her popcorn with poison.”
Naturally, she bribed her customers with a “liberal reward” to provide information on who was responsible for the slander. She claimed to have discovered it was a competing popcorn wagon at Prospect and 31st, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Clyde Cannefax, and promptly filed a lawsuit charging them with unfair business practices.
“It was all uncalled for,” Clyde Cannefax told the Kansas City Times back then. “Not only that, but Mrs. Braden walked past our stand the other day while we were popping corn. She had her hands on her hips and her chin in the air and walked with a little twist.”
The Cannefaxes had been in Kansas City for 10 years, and said they never encountered any trouble “until they encountered Mrs. Braden.”
Four years later, in 1931, Braden was back in the newspaper complaining about a new competitor, V. E. Welbaum, a former employee of hers who was now selling popcorn just down the street, at cheaper prices than she was. Braden also claimed that while Welbaum was still in her employment, he started “putting salt in [her] sugar” to ruin her product.
“Price slasher, trying to starve both of us,” Braden told the Times. “But if he wants battle, I’ll give him battle.”
Now, to be clear, we’ll never know whether Braden’s accusations against her rivals were true, or if she was simply making up rumors herself to get ahead of the competition.
What we can definitely glean from her behavior, however, is that Braden was a difficult woman to ignore — a force to be reckoned with.
And certainly the kind of woman confident enough to walk into a space where she wasn’t allowed.
At the movie palace
Back in the 1910s and ‘20s, movie theaters in Kansas City were grand, beautiful structures with ornate ceilings. You can still see some of these historic cinemas today around town, like the Gem Theater (built in 1912), the Madrid Theatre (1926), and the Uptown (1928).
Going to the movies was a formal affair, with people dressing up for the occasion.
It was certainly not the kind of place where you could eat crunchy, messy street food. In fact, if you tried bringing in a bag of popcorn from outside, Smith says a theater employee would kindly but firmly ask that you check it at the door.
“They had rugs on the floor,” Smith says. “They didn't really want people coming in and eating things and dropping them on the floor and then having to clean it up.”
Theaters also discouraged the snack because eating popcorn is loud — and prior to 1927, they were only showing silent films.
“At that time, it was literally cans of films that would be shipped around from place to place,” says Bobbie Bagby Ford, the current co-president and chief creative officer at B&B Theatres — a national movie theater chain based in Liberty, Missouri.
In the 1920s, Bagby Ford’s great grandmother was a silent piano player at a Salisbury, Missouri, theater.
“She’d basically make a soundtrack to our lives during parties and stuff,” Bagby Ford recalls.
Movie theaters were critical cultural institutions in the 1920s, offering news as well as entertainment, and they became even more important when the Great Depression hit in 1929. More than ever, people needed an escape from the real world, and movies with sound had just started to gain traction, which made the theater more accessible to the masses.
“People didn’t have to be literate,” said Smith. “They could go in and they could have a good time for a couple of hours.”
Movie theaters weren’t immune to the financial stress of the 1930s, though. Thousands closed across the U.S., and theater owners desperately looked for new sources of revenue.
An obvious solution stood just outside their own lobbies: snack-slinging street vendors. So why not bring those popcorn sellers inside, and take some of that money for themselves?
“The goal was to get people into the theater. So, your cost of admission was relatively low,” says Smith. “The real goal was you wanted to make money on your concession stand.”
Fragrant, buttery popcorn proved particularly profitable because of the smell, which you can immediately recognize even before seeing it. And unlike sugar, popcorn wasn’t rationed during World War II.
“Chocolate, candy, and sugar — those things were all prevented. But there were no restrictions on popcorn,” says Smith. “It really saved theaters in the ‘30s during the Depression and during World War II.”
Julia Braden’s Empire
It’s unclear exactly when Julia Braden first entered the movie theater.
A 1931 Kansas City Star article claims her first stand was in the lobby of the Linwood Theater in 1915, the same year the theater opened. However, Andrew Smith finds this fact almost inconceivable.
“It would have been very unusual prior to the 1930s if anybody started selling popcorn in lobbies,” he says.
Admittedly, though, Smith laments he only learned about Braden recently — she didn’t appear in his landmark book about popcorn, back in 1999.
These days, however, Braden’s name has found its place in the history of movie theaters and popcorn, even though facts about her life remain scarce.
What we know for sure is that Braden was one of the earliest popcorn sellers to push their way into the theater lobby, cementing her place in an impressive cohort of entrepreneurial women during the Great Depression.
“Popcorn sales just generated because of people like Julia Braden,” Smith says. “They figured out how to work the system, and they made a lot of money compared to a lot of other people. She was a tremendous success.”
By 1931, Julia Braden was operating four popcorn stands around Kansas City all near or in movie theaters: Linwood (31st and Prospect), Isis (31st and Troost), Lindbergh (40th and Troost), and South Troost (57th and Troost).
In all of her years of popcorn selling, Braden claims she was never held up or robbed. A reporter queried it might have been a result of the “sweet, motherly look on her face,” but it was more realistically a result of her cautionary approach to business. (She deposited money at the bank a whopping three times a day.)
Back then, popcorn sold for 5 or 10 cents a bag, but it was incredibly cheap to make. Braden claimed she was buying 100 pounds of butter a week, and contracting 500 acres of land annually to grow her own corn.
She famously sold mushroom popcorn — which produces round, relatively even kernels — while most contemporary movie theaters like B&B sell butterfly popcorn, which is more irregular with bumps and wings.
If we can believe her, Braden’s ventures made her a fortune of about $15,000 a year, which is the equivalent of more than $300,000 today — a staggering income.
Braden was living with three adult relatives at the time, and told The Kansas City Star she was on the cusp of realizing the dream of owning her own home.
"My Troost and Fifty-seventh street stand will be right in front of my home, and that will make it easy to look after one of the stands myself," she said.
She retired sometime around 1936, and lived in Kansas City until her death.
According to her obituary, Braden passed away on Saturday, Dec. 30, 1950, at the age of 88. She had a son and was survived by two grandchildren.
Today, she's buried at Maple Hill Cemetery in Kansas City, Kansas.
A match made in movie theater heaven
They were born generations apart, but Julia Braden shares some similarities with Bobbie Bagby Ford at B&B Theatres.
At the end of the day, Bagby Ford admits B&B Theatres is also in the popcorn business. And like Braden, its employees are competitive about it.
“We do taste testing every year and spend a lot of time looking at the different ways popcorn pops,” says Bagby Ford. “ Some of the most interesting fights that I've heard from my grandparents and their friends in the industry was whether you put the kernels in before, or you wait until the oil is hot. There’s a whole debate about that.”
These days, a small bag of popcorn might cost you $6 at minimum, but just takes 60 cents to make — a markup of 1,000%! The prices differ from location to location, of course, but popcorn sales overall generate nearly 40% of all movie theater profits.
“It's our largest source of revenue, actually,” says Bagby Ford. “We make our income from concession sales and obviously popcorn is our number one seller.”
Popcorn saved movie theaters back in the 1930s, and even in 2025, it’s still keeping movie theaters around.
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported, produced, and mixed by Mackenzie Martin, with editing by Gabe Rosenberg and Suzanne Hogan.
Join Suzanne Hogan and Mackenzie Martin for an interactive live event about how popcorn and movies met: 7 p.m. on Jan. 22, 2025, at the B&B Theatres Mainstreet KC. Get tickets now!
