Please remember to replace the speaker on the post when you leave the theater... Movies and fun under the stars... A literal death in Big Sky Country....***
We've all heard stories of the death of the drive-in theater. The number of drive-ins has been declining steadily since the 1960s, in many cases the drive-ins were the victims of high land values.
The worst news of all came within the last week. The Libby Drive-In Theater in Libby, Montana was destroyed by high winds. Literally, the death of the Drive In.
It made me stop and think about my own experiences at drive-in theatres. I can remember the rare occasion that my sister would take me to the drive-in, usually to see some "B" movie that the walk-in wouldn't show. Something scary, maybe, like "The Screaming Skull" or the Sci-Fi flick that I can't remember the name of, that gave me nightmares of a huge robot walking through the front windows of my house when I was six. The State Drive-In Theater, it was called. There are condominiums there now.
The drive-in was invented in 1937, in New Jersey. They hit their peak in the 1960s, when there were over 225 in California alone. By 1977 they were on the decline, but there were still over 190 in California.
My good friend Jedi Master Mina tells the story of her mom breaking open the piggy bank, piling all the kids into the station wagon and going to the drive-in on May 25, 1977. You can guess what movie they saw! At the time her family was very poor, and the drive-in was the only outing they could afford for a long time. You know those kids appreciated it all the more, knowing how difficult it was for mom and dad.
I can relate. In 1977, I had a baby and a husband in college. We had enough to get by, but nights out and babysitters were luxuries we couldn't afford. We saw Star Wars the first time in a regular, indoor theater while we were in our old hometown for a weekend. My sister babysat for us (she was crazy about SW and insisted that we HAD to see this movie).
Of course, we loved the movie and were dying to see it again, but when we went back home to San Jose, there were no free babysitters and I wasn't taking a 7-month old into a theater, and $4 apiece for tickets was a lot of money. Then came the day I picked up a newspaper, and there in the movie ads was the Winchester Drive-In... playing Star Wars. I think it was $1 per person night. We packed up our own snacks, made a baby bed in the back seat and were off as soon as the sun went down!
It became the first of several outings to the Winchester Drive-In; those $1 nights were a bargain. The Winchester is now an office park.
I remember driving by another Drive In on the way to the Winchester... it was called the El Rancho, and at that time played only Spanish-language movies. What I remember most was the mural painted on the backside of the screen, visible from the expressway, of a cowboy on a rearing horse with the typical western desert background like an old 50s western.
In 1984, we went looking at condominiums and ended up living on the site of the old El Rancho Drive-In. Weird.
I've been bopping around the Internet today looking for information on and pictures of Drive-Ins. There are several sites celebrating the nostalgia of the drive-in, lists of open and closed Drive-Ins... The Drive-In has even been commemorated by a postage stamp.
In Indianapolis earlier this month, a landscape worker found a human skeleton in a wooded area of the former Pendleton Pike Drive-in on the city's northeast side. Fun under the stars didn't work out for someone. The site was being prepped for redevelopment.
Nowhere did I see any statistics on how many people have been conceived at drive-ins... Just a stray thought...
Thanks for stopping by my blog.... Don't forget to replace the speakers on the poles before you drive off...
