Drive-in theaters, and youth

Reid Cunningham on drive-in theaters, and youth:

When I was in high school, in Connecticut in the early 80's, the golden age of the drive-in movie theater had passed. But my blue-collar hometown still one.


The Portland Drive-In was the high school hang out spot. Long before cell phones, it was the place where there was a good chance you would find your friends on a Friday or Saturday night after a game, or after work. There were double features every weekend, running one of the movies first on Friday, the other first on Saturday, so you might go both nights to manage to see both movies in between talking with friends, and teenage comings-and-goings. As long as you were reasonably behaved, you could drink beer underage and hangout without risk of attention from the local police.


We all drove rusty hand-me-down cars, or old beaters we bought and kept running on shoestring budgets from minimum wage jobs. I drove a 1942 Ford pickup that was for sale on the side of the road for $450. It was patched together, and very slow, with a flathead 6 and low gearing, but reliable. Started in all but the coldest weather. A Jeep rear seat was bolted in the bed behind the cab facing backwards, perfect for watching movies. And there was the tailgate, for additional friends, and even the roof.


Admission was per person, so there was an incentive to occasionally stuff people in the trunk. The trick was to let people out when the owner wasn't patrolling. A few towns over, in Berlin, there was a bigger drive in. They ran triple features and charged per car. We would caravan over, ditching all but one car in the local department store parking lot and cram everyone into someone's mom's station wagon. In the summer with long days the last movie didn't end before 1:00 AM. We would head to the all-night diner for French fries before rolling home at 2 or 3 AM. No restrictions on teenage drivers...and our parents that were too busy, or tired, to worry much where we were.


Both drive-ins closed while I was in college.The Berlin drive-in became a strip mall. The Portland Drive-in survived longer than most because it sat in a flood plain of the Connecticut River, surrounded by tobacco fields that were enriched by the annual deluge. It was eventually sold, fill was brought in to raise the grade above average flooding, and it became a boat storage yard for a marina down the road, which it still is, 40 years later.

AL: John Brinckerhoff Jackson had interesting things to say about drive-ins and other neglected (and sometimes forgotten, or barely noticed) pieces of the American landscape. See out post on The Crapola Sublime.