Oh, those memories of boy and girl friends cuddled together in the family car at the Drive-In Movies. Drive-In theaters began in the early 1900’s and showed silent films. Then with the advent of massive car ownership in the 1940’s and 1950’s, Drive-In theaters expanded from about 150 to over 4,000. When VCR’s, color TV and cable came along in the 1970’s, the drive-In theater numbers took a drastic plunge to just a few hundred before the Baby Boomer Nostalgia era in the late 1990’s took the number up to about 500. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s the drive-Ins had big white screens, projection buildings, fast food concessions and some had playgrounds.
I remember my first drive-in trips in the 1950’s with my three siblings, mom and dad packed in the car and the speaker for each vehicle was wired to a metal pole and you hooked the metal speaker on the driver’s window. The sound was usually extremely poor even with the volume on full blast. You could tell the worst speakers by the number of cars that moved to different locations for better speakers after the previews started. Of course, rain was always a downer, and you had to view the movie as the windshield wipers went by, and there were no intermittent wipers at the time.
Usually the film presentations had already been at the indoor movie theaters, but a big family like ours could get by with a movie at minimal cost. Each row of speakers were on a little mound so your car would point upwards and people in the back seat could see (sort of) around the heads of those sitting in the front seat. I remember at intermission in the middle of the movie how the concession building and restrooms would have long lines threatening you to miss part of the movie after intermission. At the end of the movie there was a very long wait for the throng of cars to exit. Some tried to leave early and would turn on their headlights before driving off which put a glare on the screen and others would honk in anger at those cars.
Without exception, all my senior members at our golf club fondly remember attending drive-in theaters back in the day. One theater in our area is now a Kroger store and parking lot, while the one in my photos is the old Fork Union Drive In located in the small town of Fork Union. That drive-In opened in 1953 and hung on until 2013. It is still there but in severe disrepair.
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