Drive-In Movies

Elm Road Drive-In in Ohio Photo: Wikipedia

I am not sure if many drive-in theatres still exist today or that people know what we are talking about. I shared recently memories of drive-in cinemas with my friend Chriss R.  

Nobody thought that you could get in the back seat of a car at a drive-in movie and nothing was going to happen. “Nice girls” like her were in peril of losing their reputation if they ever went to such movies with anyone but a group of their girlfriends. “Dating couples who went were looked at suspiciously and were whispered about.”

As a child, when Chriss went to the drive-in with her parents, she frequently talked them into letting her bring home one of the stray cats that were always swarming around the concession stand looking for discarded food or mice. Crocodile tears always softened her daddy’s heart. When mom took her, she could squeeze maybe the purchase of a Bit-o-Honey candy bar, no bringing stray cats home for sure.

My hubby remembers going to the drive-in movies as a child in his pajamas and loving the cartoons, the soda, and the popcorn. The sound was always muffled but they did not care, it was fun. He had his first date at the drive-in movie and his first beer with his best friend Jeff.

Drive-in theatres are uniquely American, a development born by the love of cars, a country easily accessible through endless roads, and necessitated by a population spread out from sea to sea, in areas with small communities far away from the nearest town.

Bass Hill Drive-In Cinema in Australia Photo: Wikipedia

How expensive was to develop a drive-in movie location when compared to a movie theatre in the city? One needed land, a small concrete block concession stand in the middle, poles with speakers, plenty space to park the oversized gas guzzlers of the 1970s, and a very large outdoor screen with a projection room.

Chriss is sure that today drive-ins are no longer needed. “When you can live together and play around without public shame, who needs the darkness and privacy of a backseat at an outdoor movie? Who says liberalism isn’t bad for business?”

My first encounter with drive-in movies was with my husband, in the late 1970s in Houston, MS. The town had 3,000 people on a cats and dogs rainy day. Of course, we were only interested in popcorn and the Amityville Horror movie that was playing then.

I was taking in the novel experience in our solid metal, 1962 puke-green Impala Chevrolet which used to be his grandpa's fishing car. It was missing an essential ingredient for comfort - large pieces of foam in the middle of the seats, so we used towels to make it seat-able. We were kind of embarrassed to drive it to church and park it next to all the brand new Cadillacs and Lincolns, but at the drive-in, no problem.

We could also eat sunflower seeds and spit the hulls out the window like the “uneducated, barefoot, and pregnant” Mississippians that we were. We were really interested in high school students having a clean-the-grounds job at the end of the movies for the entire summer.

I loved the Woody Woodpecker cartoons and those of Heckle and Jeckle, the talking magpies, that preceded the movies and during intermission when we could buy hot dogs and candy so we could get diabetes in our 50s and become beached whales. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckle_and_Jeckle

To my knowledge, nobody's window fell out from holding the heavy sound speakers which we had to hook onto the lowered driver’s window. There was not much that had not been torn in the car by the previous owner who was an avid fisherman and threw all his junk in the back seat, letting it steep in the steamy southern weather, often turning into a moldy paste of curious origins which I had to clean with own little city girl hands.

The car burned two quarts of oil a week and it was the nightmare of my father-in-law’s hundreds of heads of cattle who were peacefully grazing in the pastures, unaware that a gas guzzling, oil burning monster was speeding all over the place with me at the wheel, trying to learn how to drive.

Occasionally I would drive over fresh manure which would slushily splash up into the air and splatter on my Impala's back windows and doors. It was the poor cows’ revenge for disturbing their tranquility. I think they had memories of the daily scare I subjected them to because I always had to walk close to fences in case a bull or a cow charged and I had to bail out of that enclosure.

A quick search reveals that in 2014 there were 338 drive-in theatres left in America. The youth of today would probably consider them a nuisance, an antiquated way to spend a weekend. But for many Americans of past generations it was a most entertaining way to spend Friday night, merging the love of cars with movies, dating, and making out in the back of their parents’ car. http://www.nerve.com/entertainment/drivein-theater-open-find-location

The tickets were affordable, an uncomplicated entertainment for small communities that had nothing else to do on a sticky summer night. Although today we have so much more to amuse us, the disappearing drive-ins remain part of the Americana and its nostalgia.  

 

 

Poplars and Nostalgia

I parked the rented beige Jetta under the tall tree that I had planted as an 8 year old, a life time ago. The entire street was shaded by poplars, painted white half way up the trunk to prevent insect invasions. The lush green trees have grown taller than the five story buildings surrounding them.

On a regular schedule, the Marxist community and street organizers would show up and corral everybody to a day of volunteer work, sweeping the streets, picking up trash, mowing the grass, planting trees, shrubs, pick up garbage, rocks, and pull weeds. Adults would work quietly, fearful of saying something that would be reported downtown, but the kids laughed and ran carefree in their exuberant playfulness.

The hill where I used to run sleds in wintertime was now occupied by 9-story apartment buildings, so clustered together that one could touch a neighbor’s hand in the other building through the bedroom window.  

Near the stairs leading to another housing project below, there was a patch of heaven where I ran my sleigh many winters ago, laughing, falling, and rolling in the snow. It was now strangely covered in asphalt on a 30 degree incline.

I walked down trying to retrace my steps but I froze at the bottom of the hill. A large pack of street dogs was approaching, barking and growling. I went uphill quickly, regretful that I could not continue my exploration. The street below, with 40 or so homes still standing, was familiar – three of my school mates lived there with their families. I was surprised that these homes had not been demolished to make room for more high-rise ugly concrete block apartments. Utilizing every inch of space to the max was a primary goal of city planners.

My former home, a tiny match box sized apartment on the fifth floor, still painted the same dirty sea foam green, was oozing decay and pollution stains. Nothing has changed since 1977 when an earthquake damaged many buildings but somehow left ours with cracks and a bathroom window dangling chunks of concrete from the reinforced steel bars, like a loose tooth.  That was my family’s bathroom window. The concrete bar was still missing and the window looked odd.  Why fix it, nobody was going to climb to the fifth floor and invade the home through the gaping hole in the bathroom. The only addition to the old building was a security entry at the main door. All apartments had been bought for $30,000 each by the former communist era tenants who used to pay subsidized rent to the Communist Party.

The sidewalk was cracked, leading to the shopping center where we bought our milk, bread, bones with meat on them, wilted vegetables, and the few groceries available for which we stood in line a few hours every day. I was shocked that the building still stood. Half of it was abandoned in a pitiful state of decay; the other half did not fare much better but it was occupied. A lone, dingy grocery store sold a little bit of everything - the shelves were full of food and merchandise. I don’t know why but tears welled up in my eyes. I remembered the empty, clean shelves of my childhood, the pharmacy, the bakery, the dairy, the “cofetaria” selling sweets, the book store, and the pub always full of people who were trying to drown their sorrow in beer and plum brandy. They were long gone. The young shopkeeper ignored me after a cursory look at the middle-aged woman in front of him.

My old elementary school was still behind the shopping center, surrounded by the same fence and locked gates. It was freshly painted a happy yellow. The educationally-themed mosaic created by a commie artist on the left hand side of the building was still intact. It showed mother education as a goddess of communist learning holding a book adorned with a hammer and sickle.

I will never forget the misery and torture the dictator Ceausescu had subjected my people to during his reign of socialist/communist terror. Some individuals have short memories though, especially those who try to excuse the horrible treatment of a nation as a “fatherly,” well-intentioned attempt to rid the country of the national debt to the west.

A professor who used to be the communist party secretary to the university system during Nicolae Ceausescu tried recently to blame Ceausescu’s demise on his announcement in 1989 that Romania had paid off all its debts to the west; additionally, Ceausescu allegedly forbade the Romanian government to seek any foreign credit. In other words, Romania had become such a threat to the one world government bankers and their ill-gotten interest-based fortunes that they were able to get rid of Ceausescu and “punish him physically for his insolence.” Perhaps this professor forgot that Ceausescu did not consult the Romanian people if they were willing to suffer so much hunger, cold, poverty, neglect, misery, torture so that Romania would owe no money to the west. He also forgot the brutal abuse, imprisonment, and swift punishment citizens suffered if they dared to criticize the communist party.

This professor’s national debt explanation makes for an interesting conspiratorial theory. The powerful western bankers cowed by a “maverick” defiant dictator who stood in their way to control the world financially. God forbid Ceausescu’s move would be copied by other dictators and turn into a contagion around the globe, robbing the bankers of their fortunes acquired by shameless interest charged to poor countries. Did someone force his hand to sign on the dotted line? Did the dictator with an elementary school education not become a wealthy billionaire from these loans, and lived a life of luxury while his people starved? Did I miss something here?

Communism did not die behind the Iron Curtain in 1989 – it re-emerged in a more nefarious form around the globe, promoted by the compliant media and hypocritical Hollywood. McCarthy was right about some of them after all.

The has-beens of the old communism and total government control are nostalgic for the good ole days of totalitarianism, romanticizing the past, trying to reclaim their positions of power and privilege. The global communism of U.N. Agenda 21 is making great stride, using environmentalism, land preservation, zoning, and care for the planet as a tool. And the Fabian socialists in the west are winning the hearts and minds of low information voters who believe anything they are told over and over by the main stream media.