His ties to his homeland seem mercurial; he never set foot in Greece again although he did assist his relatives financially and even brought his brother, Nicholas, to live in the United States.

He left San Francisco in 1897, and made his way to Canada's Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush, ending up in the mining boom-town of Dawson City.

Originally scheduled to open less than two weeks after the fire, on February 26, 1900, the Orpheum Theatre had its first "typical night of 'wine, women and song,'" closing at 2:30 the next morning, and taking in over $3,000 ($109,872 in 2023) for "wine and other 'concoctions.'"

In autumn 1900, he and performer Kathleen 'Kate' Rockwell started working and living together, after she left the troupe that had brought her north from Victoria, BC, just the previous August and joined Pantages's Orpheum company.

[6] Pantages moved to Seattle, Washington, where he opened the Crystal Theater, a short-form vaudeville and motion picture house of his own.

Throughout the 1920s, the Pantages Circuit dominated the vaudeville and motion picture market in North America west of the Mississippi River.

In the late 1920s, with the looming advent of talking pictures, David Sarnoff, the principal of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which held a number of patents in film/sound technology, established the film production company Radio Pictures, in which Joseph P. Kennedy held an option and a managing interest, and moved to acquire control of the KAO theatres through quiet purchases of the company's stock.

In 1927, Kennedy and Sarnoff were successful in gaining control of KAO and, in 1928, changed the name of the company to Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO).

Pringle, an aspiring vaudeville dancer, alleged that Pantages had attacked her in a small side-office of his downtown Los Angeles theater after she came to see him to discuss her audition.

Newspaper coverage of the trial, particularly by William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner, was strongly antagonistic towards the Greek-accented Pantages while portraying Pringle as an innocent victim.

Both before and during the trial, stories in the Examiner portrayed Pantages as alone, aloof, cold, emotionless, effete, and "European", while the American-born Pringle was humanized through portraits with her family, emotional outbursts in court and interviews in the press.

Pantages engaged attorney Jerry Giesler and San Francisco lawyer Jake Ehrlich to file an appeal on his behalf.

He sold the theatre chain to RKO for a lower sum than that originally offered—far less than what his "Pantages Greek" vaudeville palaces had cost him to build—and went into retirement.

[citation needed] Pantages died in 1936 and was interred in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Benediction, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.