By JOHN EBY

Dowagiac Daily News

Dowagiac is getting a September movie premiere and a House of David baseball museum ESPN rates third behind Cooperstown, N.Y., and Canada, and the Wall Street Journal ranks as one of 101 national pastime places to visit before you die.

It will transform the Zeke’s block in the former Mr. K’s Wearhouse storefronts and probably the entire downtown — especially after next month’s premiere whets appetites dormant since Paul Pugh’s play for what some regard as the most riveting story in American history.

Nearly three years in the making, filmmaker Jim Sawatzki, along with Chris Siriano of Riverside as executive producer, will debut this one-hour PBS documentary produced with the help of Siriano’s House of David Museum.

Free showings will take place at Southwestern Michigan College’s Dale A. Lyons Building theater on Friday evening, Sept. 17, at 7 p.m. and on Saturday, Sept. 18, at 2 p.m.

The movie, “A Compelling Curiosity — A History of the Israelite House of David,” the Benton Township religious colony, will then show at Beckwith Theatre in downtown Dowagiac on Sept. 23 at 7 p.m.

All shows are free to the public, with copies of the production available for purchase, along with Siriano’s 2007 book, The House of David.”

Sawatzki, though a Colorado filmmaker, grew up in Benton Harbor and graduated from Michigan State University.

He has been producing local history documentaries in Colorado for the past two decades.

His work has been seen on PBS affiliates and nationally on the A&E Biography channel.

Sawatzki is a Telly Award-winning and Emmy- nominated producer/director.

Siriano, owner of the House of David Museum in Riverside he established in 1997, said Wednesday night, “I’ve always liked that town. As I travel around giving talks about the House of David, Dowagiac is always there with open arms, standing room only, not far from my own backyard.”

Only a smattering of his 100,000 visitors trickle in from Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, but there’s no telling where else on the globe, such as Oxford, scholarly guests will travel from to Berrien County.

“It’s an amazing draw to southwest Michigan,” said Siriano.

Siriano, who hopes to open in November before Thanksgiving, envisions the block looking like Zeke’s.

One factor in him deciding to move to Priest Lake is that his 18-year-old daughter will be living in the new East Hall while attending Southwestern Michigan College and he hopes to “participate in her life and to teach her college friends the story” about the world-renowned, bearded barnstorming baseball team of the 1920s to 1940s.

“They were the only white team in the Negro Leagues. They set the world on fire. One thing led to another,” he said. “It excites me to feel I’m going to a city that has other very important museums. I’ve been to them and I appreciate what they’re doing.”

Dowagiac is already home to The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College and The Heddon National Museum owned by Mayor Donald Lyons’ family in part of its old fishing tackle plant on West Street, now Lyons Industries.

“I get baseball people from all over everywhere,” he said. “I want to take that to the next level” because his current location “in the middle of nowhere” suffers from lack of lodging and dining variety.

Siriano said he was recently interviewed by the editor of Obesity magazine for a September cover story on the House of David’s vegetarian lifestyle and longevity. Its three remaining members are 97, 87 and 80.

Besides baseball scholars, Siriano is sought out by amusement park historians.

“The movie’s done, it’s amazing and I can’t wait to teach the nation a bit of local history,” Siriano said, adding it contains footage of the baseball teams, midget autos, trains and its musicians at the White House.

“It’s been one heck of a journey,” he said.

“Dowagiac is a feel-good little town and its architectural preservation excites me. I really like Zeke’s. It looks like Disneyland. I want to complement his building. It will be a knockout with a crew of magical Amish carpenters. The whole city will be shocked by what they’re amazing at. My dad was an historian and I love history. Dowagiac is a beautiful historic city moving in the right direction, and I want to be part of it.”

We interviewed Siriano in 2007 and didn’t recall him having a position on Dowagiac one way or the other.

“Paul Pugh (owner of Olympia Books and a guiding force of Beckwith Theatre which twice staged his play on King Ben) put it on the map for me,” Siriano responds. “He’s a cool guy with a passion for the House of David story and writing a play put me on notice. It’s because of him I started going to Dowagiac, and it opened my eyes.”

Siriano knows the House of David story, but moviemaking is not his forte or something he was interested in doing himself.

When he saw a story in The Herald-Palladium about Sawatzki’s film credentials (www.palmerdivideproductions.com) coupled with his knowledge of the story from growing up here, he filed the clipping for future reference.

Sawatzki “about flipped out” because a House of David project had “always been a dream of his, an amazing story he lived around as a kid. We had a $250,000 budget,” and he did it for a fraction of that because he regards it as the capstone of his career.

“We had a blast,” Siriano said of their three-year odyssey.

Siriano, who graduated from Western Michigan University, originally inquired with the Downtown Development Authority about the city’s two storefronts that previously housed Daylight Donuts, the pet shop and the small storefront that sits at the rear of this site.

After touring the three storefronts, it was evident to Program Director Vickie Phillipson that the multiple projects he had in mind for Dowagiac were better suited for Ken Schutter’s property and perhaps the adjacent storefront, owned by Kathy and George Markham, which was also available for sale.

The House of David, founded in 1903, was comprised of a group of Christians who lived an independent and communal life.

They generated their own electricity, grew their own food and built elaborate mansions.

They once operated an amusement park.

Round Oak Restaurant’s ornate back bar came from the colony.

The museum Chris founded, which now spans 4,000 square feet, houses one of the first House of David steam engine trains and hundreds of pieces of their famous pearlized ivory artwork, along with artifacts, baseball memorabilia, posters, photos, wooden souvenirs and artwork.

When the museum relocates, it will take on a new and longer name, House of David Baseball and History Museum, as Chris puts greater emphasis on baseball history, positioning the museum even greater as a national destination.

Siriano’s Sept. 10, 2007, book chronicled in 200 vintage images the amazing-but-true saga of Kentucky broom maker “King” Benjamin Purnell.

He founded the House of David Museum in the spring of 1997, the same year the religious sect inspired Pugh.

After building the world’s largest collection of House of David memorabilia, Siriano founded the House of David Historeum and Preservation Society, a not-for-profit corporation established to save and restore the House of David Amusement Park and mansions that exist today on the colony grounds.

Under his guidance, Siriano’s preservation society completely restored Diamond House, a nearly 9,000-square-foot mansion with stone staircases, stone interior and exterior columns, intricate carvings and passage ways.

Next, his preservation society turned to restoring the 100-room Shiloh Mansion with its three-story interior staircase, said to be the biggest home in Michigan.

Partial to float-building, the House of David won the Blossom Parade grand prize for 36 years. The colony last entered in 1964 because fire destroyed its art department the next year.

Purnell “arrived in Benton Harbor with only a covered wagon and a dream and would set out to create an empire of huge mansions, bearded baseball teams, world-class entertainers, a giant pre-Disneyland amusement park (with a beer garden, eight steam trains, a zoo and a mini-mansion constructed from 6,000 pieces of granite and marble), diamond, gold and coal mines and a 2,600-acre island in Lake Michigan,” Siriano wrote.

Michigan sued the House of David and Purnell for fraud. Purnell was born in 1861 and died in 1927, with a split from Mary Purnell and her followers occurring in 1929. The only book he had to read until he was 13 was a Bible.

Pugh assembled a 29-member cast to revisit the 1927 trial.

Pugh’s adaptation of “The State of Michigan vs. the House of David and Benjamin Purnell” portrayed the three-month trial which sought to abolish the House of David as a public nuisance. The trial ran to more than 15,000 pages of transcript and called more than 300 witnesses.

Pugh attributes the continuing fascination with the House of David to “unmistakable” parallels with modern cults, such as David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco.

The House of David benefited from building a self-sufficient business empire with its own print shop, tailors to make band and baseball uniforms, machine and carpenter shops, farming, a vegetarian restaurant which pioneered the first mock-meat kidney-bean burgers and an ice cream store which invented waffle cones introduced at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

Eden Springs, a 33-acre amusement park opened in July 1908, sustained the colony with revenue it produced despite free admission and helped membership thrive to more than 1,000 adherents during World War I.

Music played a key part, too.

When 85 Australians joined in 1905, they brought with them some of the best musicians in the world, including maestro Clarence “Chic” Bell, a trumpeter.

Park concerts were performed by a variety of bands when there was little money for more elaborate entertainment in the 1930s.

Plays were acted on an auditorium stage so big they could play basketball.

There was a girls band, a ukulele band and a famous jazz band which appeared on stage with their backs to the audience, long tresses flowing behind them.

They whirled around while playing a snappy tune and delighted the audience to find out they were young men instead of young women.

They were all young people who grew up in the colony who became quite professional and skilled musicians, dazzling audiences throughout the 1920s.

The Syncopep Serenaders did a number of tours where they did openings of hotels and vacation spots throughout America.

The “whiskered wizards” danced around the stage while they played, which the country had never seen before.

They toured in a Ford Model T they had to carry over muddy roads.

The Symphonic Jazz Orchestra was invited to play before every American president from Woodrow Wilson through Gerald R. Ford.

But the baseball team, organized to entertain local teams and to raise revenue selling tickets at the gate, was the House of David’s most famous advertisement and its most successful revenue venture.

Sports Illustrated profiled the team in 1970.

Grover Cleveland Alexander pitched for the “Jesus boys” in 1931-1935 but was not required to grow a beard.

In 1928, pitcher Percy Walker struck out Babe Ruth twice in one game.

With a colony full of young families, they were one of the first to try Christian daycare and they had their own school.

House of David had Lakeside Vineyards in the 1920s, making and selling grape juice.

In fact, with the help of the “World’s Largest Cold Storage Facility” built in 1932, the House of David invented the first process of putting acidic grape juice in a can, which it sold to Welch’s.

It had holdings of more than 100,000 acres of farmland.

The House of David also had a camper trailer factory, a celery factory on the Paw Paw River, world-class jewelers, three cruise ships, a dairy farm, a four-story hotel with handmade 40-foot columns that combined 16 minerals (exterior hematite made it sparkle in the sun), a vegetarian restaurant, a jam and jelly factory and, because of the colony’s reluctance to rely on the outside world for anything, used gigantic turbine engines to generate its own electricity.

During World War II, it implemented the very first German prisoner of war work camps in America on its farming and cold storage facilities.

The House of David was also one of the largest Oldsmobile dealers in America. Walt Disney bought one of the trains pre-Disneyland.

The stone-terraced hillside entering the amusement park “valley” with a large fountain in the center “looked like something out of the Roman Empire,” Siriano wrote.

An archway connected the Bethlehem and Jerusalem mansions. The Bethlehem mansion collapsed during a storm.

In 1932, the House of David introduced midget gasoline-driven autos for children.

They invented bowling alley pin-setting machines in 1934 and later sold the patent to industry leader Brunswick.

They also built their own pool tables for the billiard room and penny arcade.

House of David Museum, (269) 325-0039

www.houseofdavidmuseum.org