Founded in 1947 in
Lawrence, Kansas, by boyhood friends Arthur H. Wolf, a veteran of Calvin Films, another Kansas film company, and Russell A. Mosser of
Boeing-Wichita. The name was chosen to incorporate the key words "central", given that the company was located in the center of the United States, and "electronic" in honor of the "electronic age of the future". Centron successfully competed with large companies on both coasts, and was widely known for its high quality films, coming in on time and under budget. The company kept afloat for decades making many
technical instructions,
cooking and sewing demonstrations, teacher aides and safety reels. It added some
social guidance films in the 1950s to compete with Coronet Films, along with
zoological and
geographic topics that held stronger interest among school students.
Harold "Herk" Harvey was a principal director at Centron. His 1962 feature
Carnival of Souls was produced with several people associated with Centron. John Clifford, a Centron
screenwriter, wrote the script for
Carnival of Souls. One of his most popular educational series covered the land and people "south of the border", as the
Middle America Regional Geography and
La América del Sur series. Scripted by
Peter Schnitzler and shot in many locations by cameraman Bob Rose, they were made under some political difficulties for that time. At one point, the series almost had to exclude
Chile when government officials initially prevented film stock from leaving the country. One of Centon's most prolific scriptwriters was
Margaret (Trudy) Carlile Travis, and
Linda K. (Sam) Haskins also wrote and directed, two of the relatively few women working in the sponsored film industry. It was during this period that the company expanded its distribution of outside productions, including a number of
National Film Board of Canada titles. The 1970s was a particularly golden age for nature documentaries, especially the
Elementary Natural Science series of the team of Karl and Stephen Maslowski. In 1981, Wolf and Mosser sold Centron to the Coronet division of
Esquire, Inc. Production carried on, mostly in
Illinois, under the Coronet banner for a few years with Bob Kohl as primary head. In 1984, the
Gulf and Western Industries conglomerate took over the mother company and, in a swift move, Kohl successfully purchased Centron from Gulf and moved production back to Lawrence, Kansas. After continuing through to the end of the 1980s, including a series of instructional films for
Encyclopædia Britannica, Kohl sold the company facilities to the
University of Kansas in 1991, with the library of post-1984 films added to their archive by the time the company folded in 1994. Today, The Phoenix Learning Group has distribution rights to the Coronet library, including most of Centron's pre-1981 catalogue. ==Legacy==