Keugene48
136 posts
Jan 20, 2011
6:14 PM
|
I loved to go to drive ins when I was a kid. Mom and Dad would decide in the early evening to go and the preparations would begin. Mom would sometimes fry hamburgers and put them in buns and wrap them in aluminum foil. Then we would pop popcorn in our special popcorn pan (very heavy with a crooked lid). The popcorn was dumped in a brown grocery bag, one for the front seat, one for the back. We had a thermos for water, sometimes take Cokes but they were a special treat on paydays. We grabbed pillows and blankets and we were ready. After we arrived at the theater Daddy would drive back and forth trying to get the best spot. Then hooked the speaker on the door, find out the speaker didn't work and we would drive around some more to try to get another good spot. Then we opened our foil wrapped soggy warm hamburgers and homemade popcorn and warm water and ate it like it was good. Some people would flash their flashlights on the screen, kids would play in the playground or sit in chairs by their cars. I loved the sound from the speakers, even though it was tinny and muffled, the advertisements and the songs. We resisted the dancing hot dogs and soda cups and waited for the movie to start. About the middle of the first movie Daddy would go to the concession stand and buy us ice cream cups with little wooden paddles to eat it with... that was the only thing we ever were allowed to get at the concession stand.
We hardly ever stayed for the second movie, my dad was a morning person and he didn't like to stay up late. But we kids were sleepy too.
Then when I got to be a teenager I could go to a drive in on a date but I had to take my brother with us. He was a pretty good chaperone, never told what he saw or blackmailed me. Of course having a brother in the back seat limited what did go on anyway... guess that was the whole idea. My mom was convinced that the root of all evil began at a drive in. She was pretty much right, at least for me the times I sneaked out without bringing my brother.
I haven't been to a drive in in years. One more thing from my childhood that is gone, although there are drive ins still around. But what is the point? We can sit around in our PJs drinking Cokes and eating popcorn in front of the TV with a screen almost as big as the one in the drive in and pop in a movie any time we want. Only the surround sound is not tinny and muffled and there are no dancing hot dogs.
|
cilla46
19 posts
Jan 20, 2011
8:26 PM
|
Your post sure does bring back those hot summer nights at the drive-in!My mom did the popcorn thing too but we would drink warm iced tea with ours!
Every once in a while we would get something from the concession stand if my dad could afford it!Those days were some of the best.
|
FAITH
16 posts
Jan 27, 2011
10:08 AM
|
Yea, we'd do the homemade popcorn thing but Dad always stopped at Lawson's and got a couple of those fruit drinks in milk cartons like you get at school for my sister and me. I don't remember what he and mom drank, but it was probably beer...
|
smurfnana
22 posts
Feb 20, 2011
8:00 AM
|
I guess we were the lucky ones. Mom always made a jug of Kool-aid to take with us! We still do the drive in a few times each summer. Only difference is we take microwave popcorn and a cooler of pop. Our daughter has a Chevy Tracker, so she and her husband open the back and lay in it, and we have a truck. Last summer, we decided to get an inflatable mattress for the back of it, and we lay there. The gks usually have a blanket or chairs, until the youngest decides she'd rather sit with us on the truck. It's still as much fun as it ever was!
|
Falconboater
5 posts
Apr 06, 2011
11:37 AM
|
Dad worked at East Dayton Tool on Keowee and Leo Streets. We lived in the Five Oaks neighborhood. Everyday during the Summer, he wuold come hom for and on his way back to work take us to Phillips Aqautic Club to swimm all afternoon. At 5:00PM we would walk over to the shop and come home. Lois Schmidt who ran the business was the daughter of "Old Man" Phillips who used to ride around in the golf cart. Lois's son Mike is the famous Phillies baseball player Mike Schmidt. On the weekends we would head to Grand Lake where we had a cottage.
|
marty52
4 posts
Apr 08, 2011
9:35 PM
|
ahhhhh,,,southland 75, many great memories. remember billie the kid in kettering? you know i never understood the demographics and markrting. whenever a disnney film was playing, like ol yeller,or swiss family robinson, the line was backed up 4ever. who was doing marketing and what didn't they get??
|
tlturbo
242 posts
May 13, 2011
7:23 AM
|
I never went to the drive-in's with parents - not sure why. But after I started dating - that was another story.
AH YES - the Southland 75 - I assume you mean the one near where the Dayton Mall in Centerville is - next to I-75? That was a favorite place for the corvette crown to go - we would line up along the back end, put the tops down and sit on the back deck. One incident I'll always remember. If you know corvettes, behind each seat was a recessed compartment in the fiberglass floor. Behind the passenger seat it held a battery if memory serves me but the one behind the drivers seat was empty. Being fiberglass with a drain hole in the bottom if made what else??? A great cooler. Before I was 21, I had friends that would buy me a bottle of Cold Duck (man what we would drink back then), put ice in that compartment, stick in the Cold Duck and head to the drive-in. I remember one night my gal friend and I leaning on each other as we staggered to the restrooms at the concession stand.
And yes, I remember Billy the Kid Stepp - raced a couple of his cars up at Shelby Raceway in my 69 vette.
|
PaulH
25 posts
May 18, 2011
7:46 PM
|
tlturbo--Actually the battery was behind the driver seat. At least in the 68-82 models. The jack was stowed behind the passenger side, but there was room to put some drinks.
Once during the summer of 71, I was driving north on Dixie almost to Needmore when there was an explosion in my 68 T-top and I was instantly covered with glass and a really foul smelling sticky liquid. I quickly pulled into some parking lot to figure out what the heck happened. The lid on the passenger side box was wide open and inside was the remains of a half gallon bottle of Bali Hai wine. The week before, I had gone to the drive-in with a date and we poured some into paper cups and put the bottle back there and I forgot about it. All the driving around that I did apparently shook it up enough and it built up pressure til it just blew. I had to hose out my vette in a car wash and then got a shop vac to get the water and glass out.
Oh yeah. I had to hose myself down too. A deputy sheriff had followed me to the car wash. When he smelled the sour alcohol on me, he smelled my breath and laughed when he looked in my car as I told him what happened. He was still laughing when he drove away.
|
JBlair
40 posts
Jun 05, 2011
10:49 AM
|
Keugene48,
'Really enjoyed your entry.
The first guy I ever went to a drive-in with came back into my life 30 years later, we hit it off again, and decided to go back to the Belmont Drive-In east of Woodman for old times sake. We didn't intend steaming up the windows again as we had many times; 30 years later bodies don't work the way they did originally! But we could only stay so long because the mosquitoes were awful. The speakers were even worse than we remembered, or could that have been our older ears? Ah, aren't couchs and remotes wonderful?
Last Edited by on Jun 05, 2011 10:50 AM
|
Tkambitsch
1 post
Aug 01, 2011
7:59 PM
|
I was recently introduced to Mike Shulz and Beth Habegger two members of the Nassau Street Lay Marianist Community. They are UD grads from several years ago that didn't want to just go out and get regular jobs after graduation. They have begun an urban farming operation on abandoned land between Nassau St., Beaumont Ave., Andrews St., and St. Paul Avenue. That land was once the home to Cool Pool, where many east dayton kids spent quite a few hours during the summers of the mid-sixties.
Beth and Mike and their community of about a dozen volunteers and
interns rent one house and now just bought a second house that border their "farm." They grow veggies and sell them at markets and to restaurants in the Dayton area and also host meals for the poor in the Twin Towers district. They have two other plots of land in the neighborhood that they are developing as urban farms. All in all these are some pretty impressive young people.
I visited Beth and Mike after work this past Friday. We had some
beers, toured the grounds and hung out at one of the houses to talk
about the neighborhood and of course I couldn't help but share with
them much of my hist ory of the area. They had only one grainy
photocopy of a photograph of Cool Pool in its day. Otherwise they are pretty clueless about this chunk of east Dayton history. I promised that I would try my best to give them a better picture of the place. I went looking through our family albums in my possession but didn't find any. I've ask my St. Anthony's class of 1969. Nom luck. Does anyone have photos of Cool Pool?
|
dave5838
10 posts
Aug 14, 2011
1:42 PM
|
I've got to return to Dayton. Drive-in movies are no longer around where I live today. Great memories of drive-ins.
|
Falconboater
20 posts
Feb 24, 2015
11:29 AM
|
Melody 49 Drive in, in Clayton is still open. My wife and I go there at least once a summer
|
