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 Welcome, and
please set your parking brake. My name is Jessie Thomas. I'm thirty-six years old, and for nine months
a year I'm the band director at a middle school in central Pennsylvania, which means I spend my days
teaching sixth graders which end of the clarinet goes in their mouth. The other three months, my wife
Lisa and I pack a cooler, two lawn chairs, a blanket and a transistor radio into the station wagon and
go looking for drive-in theaters. As of Labor Day weekend we've been to twenty-three of them in five
states. This page is our record of it.
[ Why Drive-Ins ]
[ How I Rate Them ]
[ Summer 1999 ]
[ Drive-In Manners ]
[ The Ones That Closed ]
[ THE LOGBOOK ]
Why Drive-Ins
My grandfather used to take my brother and me to the drive-in on Saturday nights in the summer.
We went in our pajamas, in the back seat of a green Buick the size of a living room, and I can tell
you the plot of exactly none of the second features, because I was asleep for every one of them.
What I remember is the sky going from blue to purple to black over the top of the screen, the smell
of the snack bar, the speaker hanging on Grandpa's window, and the feeling that the whole world had
come out to sit in their cars in a field and look at the same thing.
That feeling is still out there, if you know where to look. Lisa and I went to a drive-in on our
first anniversary in 1993, mostly as a joke, and by the end of the first feature we'd decided to
see as many as we could before they're all gone. A teacher's summer is the right shape for it.
A LITTLE HISTORY, FROM THE BACK SEAT
The first drive-in theater opened in Camden, New Jersey, in June of 1933. By the late 1950s there
were thousands of them across the country, around four thousand by most counts, and just about every
town of any size had one on the edge of it. Today there are only a few hundred left. Land got
valuable, the VCR and cable came along, and an acre of gravel that makes money three months a year
started to look like a shopping center to a lot of people.
The old metal speakers on poles, the ones you hung on your window and then forgot about and drove
off with, are mostly gone too. Most of the drive-ins we visit now play the sound over a low-power FM station that you
tune in on your car radio. It sounds better, I'll admit it. I still miss the speakers.
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How I Rate Them
I'm a band director, so I grade everything. Every drive-in in the logbook
gets a score from 1 to 5 in five categories, for a top score of 25. Lisa scores them separately and
then we argue on the drive home, and the number in the logbook is whatever we agree on by the state
line.
| Category |
What gets a 5 |
| The Screen |
Big, flat, freshly painted, and a bright, sharp picture all the way to the corners.
A dim picture or a screen with a patch on it like a Band-Aid loses points. |
| The Sound |
A clear, strong FM signal from every row, with no country station leaking in during
the quiet parts. A working window speaker gets a bonus half point for nostalgia, which Lisa says
isn't allowed and which I give anyway. |
| The Snack Bar |
Real butter on the popcorn, a hamburger made on a grill and not under a heat lamp,
a pizza you'd eat at home, a short line, and somebody behind the counter who's glad you came. |
| The Intermission |
The old intermission reel, the real one: the countdown clock in the corner, the
dancing hot dog hopping into its bun, the cartoon snacks marching to the counter. A 5 is a
reel so old it's pink. A 1 is when the lights come up and nobody says anything. |
| The Field |
Good ramps, so your car tilts up at the screen. Grass or good gravel, no
mud holes, a playground under the screen for the kids before dark, clean restrooms, and trees
around the edge so you can't see the highway. |
Summer 1999: What We Saw
School let out the second week of June and the cooler was packed that Friday. Here's every double
feature we saw this summer, in order, with one line on each movie. Most drive-ins put the family
picture first and the one for the grown-ups second, after the little ones are asleep, which is the
way it was when I was the one in pajamas. (August has a hole in it. That's band camp. I help the
high school director the second week of August, and nobody goes to the drive-in during band camp
because nobody can stay awake past nine.)
| Night & place |
The double bill |
Sat., June 12
Moonbeam, Pa. |
The Mummy: big, loud, silly fun, and the desert looks right on a screen that size.
Star Wars: Episode I: the pod race was worth the gas money by itself. John Williams can do no wrong in this house.
The Moonbeam is where we opened our first summer and where we open every summer. |
Sat., June 26
Firefly, Pa.  |
Tarzan: the minivan next to us sang along to every song, every word.
The Mummy: second time. Still silly. Still fun.
Drive-in number 20, and the fireflies came out right on cue. |
Fri., July 2
Whippoorwill, Pa. |
Tarzan: Lisa insisted.
Notting Hill: Lisa insisted on this one too. I liked it more than I'm going to say here. |
Sat., July 17
Polaris, N.Y. |
Muppets from Space: Gonzo finally gets his own story, and he's earned it.
Star Wars: Episode I: third time for me. Don't tell my principal.
Five hours' drive for drive-in number 21. Worth it. See the logbook. |
Sat., July 24
Kettle Run, Pa. |
Inspector Gadget: opening weekend. The kids around us loved it. I liked the car.
Tarzan: we left at the intermission. I've done my time with Tarzan. |
Sat., July 31
Sandpiper, Ohio |
Runaway Bride and Notting Hill: a Julia Roberts double feature, which Lisa called
"a theme night" and I called "the long way to Ohio." Julia Roberts and Richard Gere back together
again, and it works. Drive-in number 23. |
Sat., Aug. 7
Moonbeam, Pa. |
The Iron Giant: the best movie we saw all summer, and the lot was half empty. Go, before it's gone.
Inspector Gadget: second time. The car is still the best part. |
Fri., Aug. 20
Whippoorwill, Pa. |
The Sixth Sense: don't let anybody tell you one thing about it. Bruce Willis like you've
never seen him, and the boy is remarkable. The whole field went quiet at the end. You could hear the crickets.
Runaway Bride: a nice way to get your heart rate back down. |
Sat., Sept. 4
Moonbeam, Pa. |
The Iron Giant: I made Lisa see it again. She cried again.
The Sixth Sense: second time, and it's a whole different movie when you know. Last show of our summer. |
That's nine nights out, four new drive-ins and eighteen features, counting the Tarzan we walked out on
and not counting cartoons. School started last week. The station wagon has a season's worth of popcorn under the seats, and I've been
told it will be vacuumed before the first football game.
Drive-In Manners
A drive-in is a few hundred families sitting in the same dark field, and it only works if everybody
remembers that. Here are the rules as we understand them.
- Lights off. Once the sun's down, your headlights are off, period. If you've got a newer car
with daytime running lights, find out before you go how to shut them off. On a lot of cars it's
setting the parking brake a click. Nothing makes a whole row of cars honk faster than a pair of
headlights during the opening credits.
- Leaving early? Parking lights only, and drive slowly. Same for coming back from the snack bar.
- Tall vehicles in the back. Vans, pickups with caps, and the new sport utility vehicles park in the
back rows or along the sides, where the drive-in tells you to. If you're sitting in a station wagon
behind somebody's conversion van, you are watching a conversion van.
- Buy something at the snack bar. This is the big one. Most of the ticket money goes back to
the film companies, especially in the first weeks of a new picture. The snack bar is what keeps the
lights on and the field mowed. If the sign at the gate says no outside food, respect it. We bring
the cooler for drinks where it's allowed, and we buy our dinner inside, every time.
- Watch your battery. Running the car radio for four hours can drain it. Bring a portable radio,
or start the engine for a few minutes at intermission. We carry jumper cables, and twice now we've
been the heroes of the back row.
- Keep it down. Your radio is for you. Windows up if your car is loud, and the same goes for
your kids, your dog and your uncle.
- The playground closes when the movie starts. Kids under the screen before dark are part of the
fun. Kids under the screen during the picture are a shadow show nobody paid for.
- Take your trash with you. Somebody has to walk that field in the morning, and it's usually the owner.
The Ones That Closed
Three drive-ins in our logbook have closed since we saw them. I keep them in the book anyway.
- The Starhaven, Pennsylvania. We saw it in 1994 and it closed after the 1996 season. The
screen stood empty for a year with the last show still on the marquee. It's a self-storage place
now.
- The Laurel Dale, Pennsylvania. Visited 1995, closed 1997, sold for a supermarket. They had
the best snack bar fries I've ever eaten. I've been to the supermarket. It's a nice supermarket.
- The Twin Pines Auto-Vue, Ohio. Visited 1997. A storm blew the big screen down in the spring
of 1998, and the owners decided they were too old to put it back up. I can't blame them. I sent them
a letter. They wrote back.
And the one that started it all, the drive-in my grandfather took us to, closed when I was in
high school. It's a lumber yard. When I drive past it I still look for the screen.
If you have a drive-in near you, go this fall, while the season lasts. Take the kids. Buy the
popcorn. It's the only way to make sure they're there next summer.
And if you'd rather have a roof over your head, the Friends of the Rialto are saving a 1927
single-screen theater over on Our Small-Town Movie Palace, with a fall
classic film series. Same idea, different weather.
» READ THE LOGBOOK: ALL 23 DRIVE-INS «
Cars through the gate since June 1997:
   
Know a drive-in we haven't been to? Tell us where:
[email protected]
Last updated Monday, September 6, 1999 (Labor Day)
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