Mary Belk: Theaters under the stars were best

What ever happened to drive-in movies? For that matter, who even remembers them? A 12-year-old girl interviewed on a television newscast said well, of course, she knew what a drive-in movie was. “You sit outside in lawn chairs and watch a big-screen TV.”

As a little pig-tailed girl there was nothing I liked more than jumping in the car and heading for an outdoor picture show. My love affair with drive-ins started when all my baby teeth were still intact.

Daddy bought a bluff of land overlooking the Chattahoochee River and built a rock cabin for a family getaway. He taught me to mix cement when I was five years old, my sister Jane and I working together mixing half a bag at a time. And our pay was an occasional trip to the local Langdale Drive-In. It was our daily lunchtime ritual to climb the hill to my Aunt Mary’s white clapboard house and search the newspaper hoping to find that a good movie was playing that night.

It was worth any amount of weekly work for a couple of hours at the drive-in. At half-past sundown, we’d pile in the Ford and drive down the blacktop road to the theater. Then we’d pick a spot to our liking and hook the speaker to a rolled down window. When the movie started, Jane and I sat spellbound watching Roy Rogers and Trigger tame the west while Daddy’s shoulders slumped as he dozed and slapped at mosquitoes.

Later as a teenager in Auburn, I spent lots of Friday and Saturday nights at the Auburn-Opelika Drive-In on Opelika Road. We’d stuff as many bodies as we could fit in somebody’s daddy’s car and head for an outside movie. The pictures we liked to watch at the drive-in were the scary ones like “The Blob” or “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”

I have a memory that comes sneaking up when I’m not thinking of anything in particular and catches me by surprise. We’re at the drive-in, my adolescent friends and I. It’s one of those hot muggy nights and we’re sharing bags of salty popcorn and drinking RC Cola from sweating paper cups. Truth told it’s the teenage sisterhood more than the movies that sticks in my mind.

The drive-in movie industry boomed in the ’50s and ’60s. But these days, drive-in theaters are on the endangered list with whooping cranes and red pandas. From 4,000 screens nationwide in 1958, the number of drive-ins has now dwindled to about 400. They declined with suburban sprawl and with the advent of videotapes.

I wish I could load my car with a gaggle of 21st Century children and take them to a drive-in movie. They have no idea what it’s like. Pulling into a spot and attaching the speaker to your front window. Munching Milk Duds and guzzling Coca-Cola through a straw. Big kids reading the credits to the younger one. Whole families sitting transported in a theater under the stars.

Mary Belk lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.