Researching The American Drive in Theatre Chapter 1 Low hanging fruit First thing to consider is having your head examined. There is much involved, and it involves tedious work. Consulting old books, Searching old newspapers, searching the internet, locating people, and patience. You will likely feel like a skip tracer before very long. In many cases, you are locating families of builders that have long since passed. Making cold calls, explaining who you are, what you want, and why they should help you. It’s a long road. I am going to approach this in two parts. The first will be what I have come to think of as “Low hanging fruit.” Information that is usually easy to find, still interesting and does not require a lot of digging. The second part will be the better quality material, such as information, details, long ago forgotten pictures and memories. Sometimes it is easy to find, but usually not. ADAMTHEWOO said “It was RIGHT HERE” ©Adamthewoo Williams Most of the people that do drive-in research, do so as a labor of love. It was an important part of family outings during the 50’s through the 70’s. We want to know, “What was that?” and “Where was that drive-in” We want to relive the experiences of our childhood. Those were usually, without exception wonderful and fun times. Memories of movies both good and bad, pensive trips to the concession stand, again, good and bad. Later, we would progress to our first trip to find the bathroom and back to the car ALL ALONE and AT NIGHT! Perhaps you have memories of a drive-in theatre in your home town. If you are lucky, several memories. Each drive-in had its own flavor. Some were genuine family attractions that were always well manicured, freshly painted and kept up. Others were dumps. Drive-ins that were built cheap and never kept up. Those had a tendency to fall down the ranks pretty quickly. Family movies, to questionable movies, to the dreaded X rated movies. Closing at some unknown time, for unremembered reasons, with little or no advertising. You will discover that tracking the end of a drive-in is much harder than finding its opening. The first item of business is where to start? Dou have a particular theatre in mind, or do you want to know what the options were when you were a kid? The only difference is having a specific starting place. A theatre you remember. If it is a specific theatre, you can visit the site, if you remember where it is. Ask parents what the name of the drive-in was, maybe brothers, sisters, friends. Someone will likely give you that starting place. If you only remember roughly where it was, drive through the area (if safe!) Ask older businesses if they remember what and where the drive in was located. If you are sure, take a look around. There are often subtle reminders, light poles, screen tower moorings, maybe a bit of the ramp structure at the end of the parking lot. These are good clues. Attempt to ascertain the address. . . NEXT STEP: The Library! The New York City Public library. © http://visit5thavenue.com/ 2016 You have two avenues of opportunity at this point. Choices include older phonebooks , City Directories or Newspapers . Each has its own advantages. OLDER PHONEBOOKS Are a good place to start as they are not overwhelming but allow you to see what theatres were available and open in any given year. Drive-in theatres are usually listed in with Theatres in the Yellow pages. As some may not be familure with the concept, before cell phones became widespread, phone books were divided into a white pages and a yellow pages section. The white pages listed SWBT subscribers by name. They were useful if you needed to find a given person or business. Yellow pages on the other hand, listed businesses by category, say physicians, Auto repair, restaurants or theatres. (Note there are two spellings “theatRE” and “theatER.” The RE spelling was a bit more formal, while “theatERs” were usually moving picture houses. Many drive-in theatres used the more formal and older “theatRE” spelling. Not all . . . but many. Left © Wesley Horton 2016, Right © Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. 1971 The image on the left, shows a phone book which has been rebound with a more durable binding, while the picture at right shows the page of theatres and the drive-in theatres picked out. Thirteen drive-in theatres, of which two were twins in OKC in 1971. If you don’t have an address, this will give you the physical address. In some cases, theatres that were located out of town were included in town phone books, as that was where the drive-in drew their crowds from. Consider too, that some of the theatres were actually in suburban areas. A good example is the SOONER TWIN DRIVE-IN THEATER, which was located in Midwest City, a community to the East of Oklahoma city. The AIRLINE DRIVE-IN was for a number of years outside of the city limits for Oklahoma City. Examples are numerous as most drive-ins were built OUT of town in the 50’s and 60’s. If you are looking in a small town, from years ago, you should call the city library and inquire about phone books for that city first. Many small town libraries do not keep older phone books, for those you may have to resort to a historical library. Ask about such facilities at, of course, the library. CITY DIRECTORIES Another great source of information, and much less well known than phone books. Whereas phone books make it easy to find a person or business by NAME or BUSINESS TYPE, City Directories present it in a totally different way. There are two well-known Directories, POLK’S CITY DIRECTORY and the CRISS-CROSS Directory. Whereas both directories canvassed the city once a year, they were usually done at different times. Both are Good references. Mostly used by SKIP TRACERS, they were helpful in locating persons or sometimes businesses that, shall we say were less than Scrupulous in their dealings with others. Photos © Wesley Horton 2016 When using either resource, the key thing is to remember the listings are in order by phone number and address. Want to know who your neighbor was when you were 5? This is how to find it. LEFT the Criss - cross directory is a little more stripped down, but has the same basic information. Listings by Street address, phone number and sometimes included who the person worked for as well as what they did. RIGHT Polk’s City directories are available for larger cities and can be found in libraries today. They were leased to business for a year, then discarded. BY PHONE NUMBER: This is a handy feature, not one you will use much in researching theatres, but perhaps to track people down. Notice this 1966-67 version of CRISS-CROSS directory lists at the top, not by strict phone numbers, but exchange names. In this case, Skyline or SK1-XXXX. Ever have a disjoined phone number in your head? This is how to find out who it once belonged to. In this case, SK1- 1332. (top left of picture) BY ADDRESS: City directories also listed by ADDRESS. If you have an address and want to know what was there years ago, this is the place to look. If you know a drive in was located on a given street say “Western” (North-South Street) and was between 59 th and 74 th (major East West Streets) a Listings from the CRISS - CROSS Directory. Listed at the top as SK1- 1183 is the first number on the page. In the past the phone company used EXCHANGE NAMES which is what the letters you sometimes still see on the keys. If you look at the keys you notice the letter “S” is represented on the “7” key, and “K” is listed on the 5 key. We are looking for SK1- 1332, or as it was called, SKLYLINE 1- 1332. If nothing else it gave phone numbers a certain elegance that is long since gone. Looking down the page to SK1- 1332, we find it listed as: NORTH PENN TWIN THT NW 122&PENN. Same with peoples phone numbers. As noted before, not all exchanges are listed, and you may have to visit a historical or state library to locate the correct Criss- Cross directory. They were produced every year. Even then people still moved frequently. look though one of these will be of help. Let’s look: Polks City Directory, © 1971, Photo taken by Wesley Horton 2016 Streets are listed by address with major cross street intersections listed. As you look to increasing street numbers, in this case running South. Listings run in alphabetic order. NE, NW, SE, and then SW. Notice at 6930 is the WINCHESTER DRVE IN 6326606 . A little time with such a directory will rapidly acquaint you with its use. NEWSPAPERS When I first started drive-in research in 1978, the logical way to find a drive-in theatre and its opening date was to look at newspapers. Of course I had a knowledge of the cities drive-ins, their names and locations. Physical copies of newspapers older than a few months are not kept. Instead, Newspapers are microfilmed and stored on 35mm film. Ask a librarian how to locate a given newspaper and the basics of using a microfilm reader. It is actually a simple process. The way to find out when drive-in theatres first opened, was to pick a year you remember going to drive-ins (let’s say 1964 or 65) and look in the “MOVIES” Section. You will find theatres you remembered attending as a kid, even if you did not remember the name. Most of the theatres were listed. Start looking in July of 65 when most drive-in theatres were likely to have been open. The next step is to go back to the previous year and check July 4 of the year before, Continue until you found NO listing. Then move forward a couple of months until I find a listing and so forth. Great system, but time intensive. This is the basic newspaper search. It works for opening drive-in theatres. Openings are much easier to find than closings. I will go into closings ahead. But remember, new businesses wanted to ATTRACT attention. Large opening ads were norm for new drive-ins during the 60’s and 70’s. In the 50’s and 40’s less so. It was not uncommon to find full page opening ads in the 60’s and 70’s. Early days, small ads were the norm. A little reason dictates that it is easier to pull a phone book off the shelf and check theatres to find if your drive-in is listed. Search the phonebooks by year until you find the first year the Drive in theatre is listed, (always check a couple of years before as well). If you find a listing in say 1960 but not in the 1959 phone book, it is reasonable to assume the theatre opened late in 59 or early in 1960. At that time you have a starting point. Go to the newspaper and check for an ad in July. . If none move forward to Aug, then September. Sooner or later you will find it. It’s a time saver to find it in phone books first. A number of towns had more than one newspaper through the 1970’s. Soon after that many newspapers were bought out, or closed. Newspapers had differing followings. VASTLY DIFFERENT. In OKC there were two newspapers, the conservative DAILY OKLAHOMAN , (it was also the older paper dating to near statehood.) The Second paper was more liberal, THE OKLAHOMA JOURNAL . It lasted from the early 60’s until the early 80’s. Perfect timing, but short lasting. As an example, the DAILY OKLAHOMAN would only run wholesome family movies. There were scummy movies indeed, but they were not listed in the OKLAHOMAN . As a result, there were several theatres that never appeared in it. The JOURNAL , on the other hand, had no issues taking money from scummy theatres. © Oklahoma Journal 1976 (Now defunct) Notice “X” rated ads, Nudity, Narcotics, motion picture distribution, Every sort of nefarious activity! Page from Apr 16, 1976. The same basic ad from the Daily Oklahoman on Apr 16, 1976. The Riviera DI and NW Highway are Represented, but without any “X” rated content. No, your eyes do not deceive you, it is fuzzy. Internet Archival content lost definition about a year and half ago. I do not know if it was done as a cost saving action, or to diminish reposting. (Clearer versions are sometimes available but with mixed results) It did not end there. I discovered there was another drive-in, that was not listed anywhere. It was called the FAIRPARK Drive-in and was operated as “ OKLAHOMAS ONLY COLORED DRIVE- IN .” Was it due to racism? I have no idea, but this was July 17, 1948. Times were different. I was not alive at that time and was am not going to judge anyone on the matter. BUT it highlights the point that I had to modify my research. The OKLAHOMAN did not publish their ad, the JOURNAL was not around. Where to look? The answer was found at the State Historical society, which had microfilm newspapers from most of the state. I located a newspaper called the BLACK DISPATCH , which published the ad as well as a short story. Sadly the drive-in was located less than a block from the sewage plant, it stunk in the 60’s and certainly in the 40’s. The FAIRPARK was only open less than a year. There is also a certain level of frustration when searching for newspaper ads and articles, to discover that a small town may have had a newspaper but no microfilm off said paper. Such are the frequent headaches of drive-in research. ARTICLES -can also be interesting, and helpful to move past “Low hanging fruit.” In a small town, the opening of a drive-in theatre was often heralded as a major event. Frequently, small town papers ran articles about the new Drive-in Theatre. Everything from Advertisements that listed the contractors involved in building the drive-in, to interviews with the manager, lists of who worked there and such. This info will be helpful in the near future. If you have the time such content was usually anywhere from the evening before opening to a week before opening. It is worth the extra time to search for it. If you can, always make a copy of the ad and any article you find. However, depending on the quality and age of the microfilm printer, you may do just as well to focus the reader and take a picture with a smart phone or iPhone. Most of the pictures are just as good if not better than a print. The older the reader, the worse the prints are. Having an image editing program is very helpful in both cleaning up ads to reformatting the size, decreasing the memory size of the photo, Renaming it, rebalancing it, Adjusting the Gamma, putting stand out labels and focusing attention to a specific area of a page. More about this later as well. Finding a random article can be a pain. Some papers are offered in electronic form on the internet. The Daily Oklahoman is one example. Their archives are searchable online, which is good, but as you see above, they have degraded the quality. VERTICAL FILES -are frequently found in public libraries as are articles related to different subjects. Ask if the library has vertical files. They are usually housed in a set of file cabinets, and beyond that, are not in much order. Try looking for DRIVE-IN Theatre or Theater, Drive-in, Theaters, and streets they were located on, the name of the owner, OUTDOOR, Theatre names , Lots of possibilities, but you will find clipped articles with dates, often of things you did not know existed. DRIVE-IN SPECIFIC REFERENCES –THEATRE CATALOG Theatre Catalog is a publication that existed in the 1940’s through the mid-1950’s. A company called Jay Emmanuel published data from a trade publication into a yearbook about the latest in theatre technology and theatre construction. The publication became defunct long ago. It apparently was not purchased by another company, so copyright would have gone to public domain. The volumes are today as rare as hen’s teeth, but contain a wealth of information. Such information as: 1948-49 Drive-in Theatre list 1953 Drive in Theatre list 1955-56 Drive-in Theatre list of import, is the THEATRE CATALOGS information was the best researched and accurate listing of drive- in theatres. If it was listed here, it was generally accurate. The 1955-56 edition listed 4,340 separate drive-in theatres nationwide. I have made available copies of these lists, so as to simplify your search. Additionally, copies of several of the Theatre Catalogs are available on Drive-ins.com (DIDC) as .pdf files. The link is here: http://drive-ins.com/theatrecatalogs LEFT This is information from the 1955-’56 THEATRE CATALOG . It is generally considered the most accurate list of drive-ins that was compiled. It lists theatres by Film Category then city, state, name of Drive-in, the Executive (IE who made the booking and other decisions.) Mailing address and in parenthesis the number of cars the drive in held. Another valuable but limited production was the INTERNATIONAL MOTION PICTURE ALMANAC , published by Quigley publishing in NY city. They ran drive in lists by state from about 55 to 85 roughly. The lists were good, but when theatres closed, the drive in was not taken off the list, showing many drive-ins open long after they closed. But ownership info is fairly accurate. They have the following editions ___________________________ 1945 1947-48 1948-48 1950-51 1952 1953-54 1954-55 others exist, but only in a few libraries, and usually some colleges libraries. You will have to search for them through the library system. Drive-ins.com (DITC) is ran by Kipp and Jennifer Sherer. Scanning these old books and making them available is a true labor of love on their part. If you use any of the material, please credit them. INTERNATIONAL MOTION PICTURE ALMANAC (IMPA) is another annual publication that has been around for many years. It is published by Quigley publications, and can be found in some libraries. Although Quigley still publishes, they only printed Drive-in lists from around 1950 to about 1985. The information was usually published as simple lists, but was published every year. As such it was a good nationwide reference for drive-ins that opened after the last list (1955-56). The down side was the information was not consistent from one year to the next, and drive-in theatres that closed were rarely removed from the list. I know of several drive-in theatres that remained on the list for years after they were closed. Here are a couple of editions. 1951-52 Edition. 1951 - 52 EDITION Listed by STATE first , the City, then THEATRE NAME, CAPACITY and who operated the Theatre. Copyright 1951, 2016 Quigley publications. Conversely, the 1968 version was Spartan, in that it only listed city, theatre and capacity . I should note the copy appears darker as it was a photograph taken with an iPhone. © Quigley publications 1984, 2016 THE 1984 Version of the INTERNATIONAL MOTION PICTURE ALMANAC returned to listing the Theatre name , the mailing address of the theatre (not always the same as the physical address of the theatre), the CITY of the theatre, OPERATOR , and the Number of screens . This is a cleaned up list, but for example Video theatres, is listed when they cased operations on May 3, 1983. OTHER COMMON SOURCES AND ERRORS There are several websites that appear on the Internet. Many allow the addition of photographs, and personal reflections. Most of the information is good, however, occasionally incorrect information is present. How to deal with this when you encounter it? Getting onto someone’s website and posting a comment is fine, but unless you take the time to find evidence that it was incorrect, it is just another comment. The following is an accounting of how I have attacked the problem. Drive-ins.com is a great source. Its aegis was in one of the internet’s first drive-in theatre guides, “ Evil Sam’s Drive-in Theatre guide ” Ran by a trendsetter named Sam Graham, it allowed extensive commentary and user postings. The Evil Sam’s Drive-in Theatre guide appeared thusly on Feb, 6, 1998. It can still be explored on the way back machine at: https://web.archive.org/web/19980205232332/http://www.driveintheatre.com/ I had originally taken over the site, as Sam wanted to move on to other things. It worked well for a short time, but the shear amount of information being submitted was beyond my ability to keep up with at that time. As such, Kipp and Jennifer Sherer took over the sight, changed the interface and renamed it Drive-ins.com. Take a few minutes and see what state of the art was in 1998. Information was provided on Open Drive in theatres and Graveyards. The titles are self-explanatory. Open operational theatres, and closed theatres that still had some infrastructure standing. You may get a kick out the links for AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF DRIVE-IN ARCHAELOGY . Which were my first writings about finding drive-in theatres, and TIM REED’S “DRIVE-IN THATRE WORKSHOP ” which outlined basic information about building a drive-in theatre. (Tim Reeds material is missing sadly.) ON ERRORS DIDC had for a long time, a listing for a drive-in theatre called the TEE CEE Drive in of Guthrie Oklahoma. At some point, I found nothing to verify it ever existed. It was not listed in TC or IMDA. I notified Kipp, and nothing happened. I left it alone for some time, and found a few other bogus drive-ins listed. They also were not listed in TC or IMDB. What to do? I felt I needed information to explain or address any false drive-ins should I be asked about them. The issue was solved with a trip to the historical society which had both phone books, City directories, microfilm newspapers for most of the state. First check was old phone books. First, I made a listing of the errors, and the source publishing the errors: Tee-Cee DI, Guthrie (as listed on Drive-ins.com ) -The address listed is and has been something else. Rietta DI, Henryetta (as listed on Cinema Treasures ) -Obvious duplicate We will start with the TEE CEE in Guthrie. The poster of the information that such a drive-in existed made my job easier by claiming the theatre was open in 1974. If it was open as a theatre, it would be listed in the Guthrie phone book. (The location he quoted was within the city limits.) Look at aerial photographs, showed no drive-in theatre at that location, but it did show what looked like a drive-in restaurant. ) As theatres were proved or disproved, Strikethrough was used to keep the error on the list, but show it as disproven. As you can see above, listed under theatres in the 1974 phone book, there are two theatres listed, the BEACON Drive-in and the MELBA Walk in theater. NO TEE CEE theatre. The final nail in the coffin follows. As you can see above, there is a TEE CEE drive-in RESTAURANT. He had mistaken the name of a drive-in restaurant for a drive-in theater. If anyone asks, I can show them, there was a TEE CEE