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“The drive-in movie where we’d go, And somehow never watched the show. We will have these moments to remember.”
— Song lyrics, American singer and actor, Bing Crosby
“Was that a drive-in movie?” I asked out loud.
Quick braking and a U-turn on Texas 36 South leaving Gatesville recently answered my question.
The marquee where I parked proclaimed the entrance to “The Last Drive-In Picture Show.”
There I beheld a small family entertainment complex in a small Texas town. A drive-in theater.
With a walk-in and a miniature golf course.
Drive-in movies were born during the 1930s.
The era when growing numbers of families could afford a car and gas was cheap.
At the peak of their popularity in the late 50s and early 60s, more than 4,000 drive-in theaters in the United States offered movies viewed from the comfort of an automobile.
Texas was home to more than 400 of them, more than any other state in the union.
The Pleasant Drive-In Theater on Highway 271 South in Mount Pleasant is my first drive-in moment to remember. It was the late 1950s and loading up the family for movie fun was a frequent summertime
treat.
Mom and Dad took in the movie from the comfort of the car. But my sisters and I bailed out to play on the playground equipment under the screen before the movie started. Then as the lights dimmed and the previews rolled, we headed for popcorn and metal lawn chairs outside the concession stand in time to catch the cartoon. Great fun for a gradeschooler. However, the man who always left the concession stand in the middle of a movie to walk the back row of cars with a flashlight was a mystery. “What is he doing,” one of my sisters asked.
“Probably looking for people trying to sneak in under the back fence” was my best theory.
That mystery was solved a few years later.
The summer before I entered high school. That’s when I learned that what was playing on the screen up front was often secondary to playing in the darkness of the back row where dating couples parked.
Another few years down the road, relief from classes at Kilgore College in the late 60s was The Kilgore Drive-In, located south of town on Highway 259. The college town theater opened in August of 1950 and flourished for several years before closing in 1975.
It provided entertainment for generations of college guys like me.
Some who were lucky enough to get a date. And for others who engaged in the thrill-seeking exuberance of youth by hiding with a car trunk full of other guys to sneak in.
By the time I settled in Center in the late 70s, the Apache sat at the edge of town on Texas 7 East before it closed in 1985.
The last movie I saw there was “Easy Rider.” Owners Mike and Nita Adkison hosted the East Texas Ramblers motorcycle club in Center where Cushman drag races culminated a day of cycle rallies. Then, as darkness fell, the iconic motorcycle movie lit up the big outdoor screen.
American movie viewing was changing drastically as the 70s approached. Television had become commonplace rather than a luxury.
Feature movies broadcast on television debuted in September of 1961 with Saturday Night at the Movies featuring the 1953 Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable film “How to Marry a Millionaire,” presented “In Living Color.” By the time we were ringing in 1970, there was a feature movie on TV almost every night.
Faced with declining revenue, drive-ins began closing. Real estate that used to grow rows of speaker stands were growing shopping centers, manufacturing plants and trees as nature reclaimed the land in some places.
Even today, ghosts of movies past, framework skeletons of long-gone drive-in movie screens overgrown by trees, still spot the landscape. Recognized only by those who know what they once were.
However, drive-ins have not screened their final movie yet. They’re making a comeback.
Some say the pandemic spurred additional interest in the outdoor movie experience when most theaters were closed.
Truthfully, the renewed interest in the drive-in movie theater experience had already begun more than a decade before.
Today, Texas is ranked fifth for the most drive-in movie theaters in the US, a few of them with the country’s newest stateof- the-art facilities, like Gatesville.
Taking photos of The Last Drive-In Picture Show there, I remembered the drive-in days when I saw Rock Hudson, Humphrey Bogart and Doris Day movies on the big outdoor screen at the Pleasant Drive-In Theater.
I remembered junior high Saturday mornings racing through the drive-in on bicycles with Eddie Dial, jumping the many rows of raised terrain “humps” designed to enhance movie screen viewing through a windshield.
And other under-thestars movie moments to remember were recalled at “The Last Drive-in Movie in Texas.” A few of which may or may not have included admission via hiding in the trunk of a car. Or being spotlighted with a flashlight in the back row.
