I was reading the other day that one of the places, besides crowded bars and restaurants, to stay out of is movie theaters. That got me to thinking about movies when I was growing up. At it’s peak growth, Maysville had two movie theaters (that was before television.) I know both readers of this blog don’t believe there was a time before television — but I’m getting off the subject.
Something that there were a lot of when I was growing up were Drive-in Theaters. There are a few still left, but if you can find one, it’s the ideal place to go to a movie in the middle of this coronavirus thing. If you’ve never been to a drive-in movie, you park your car facing the big screen and the sound is piped into your car via a speaker.
When I was a kid, drive-ins were very popular. There was one just a few miles from our house and they often had “dollar nights.” That meant that each car was only charged a dollar to get in, no matter how many people were in the car. Normally, there was a charge for each person in the car.
Once when I was in high school, a friend whose dad was a farmer, borrowed his dad’s truck that he used to haul hay. It was an 18-wheeler with a big flat-bed trailer. We gathered up about 30 or 40 kids (that was just about all the kids in Maysville) on the flat bed and went to the movies. They initially said that dollar night didn’t apply to 18-wheelers with almost fifty people on board, but I guess they thought it was funny, or just plain stupid, and they let us in — and posted a sign that dollar night didn’t apply to 18-wheelers.
It was a lot of fun, and unfortunately — no, probably fortunately, the kind of fun kids today can’t experience. Imagine a flat bed truck tooling down the highway with thirty or forty kids. There were obviously no seat belts, and not even any sides on the truck. Of course that’s not the only thing we did that is totally unacceptable, or even illegal today…. I remember:
Building my own skateboard with old lumber and old metal roller skates, carrying someone on the handlebars, or the cross bar of a boys bike — no helmets, playing in the street (no supervision,) walking to school or the movies alone, and calling people on the phone asking if “their refrigerator was running,” of if they “had Prince Albert in a can.”
For those of you that don’t understand these things, ask someone that’s “mature,” or do some extensive research on your own.
But — if there happens to be a drive-in movie theater anywhere near you, and you’ve never been — GO!
— 30 —
Lol! While there are a couple drive-ins not too far away, but still a good way…our neighbors have come up with other solutions to movies with friends at home. These are young able bodied work and home guys who are bored but can’t do simple things like trim the bushes, weed the flower beds and or mow the lawn. (Sometimes we wish they had a goat.) And have said over and over they are bored… One day in the last couple weeks they were doing something in the back yard with white PVC pipe… we thought Hmmmm and the other neighbors, also disgusted with them and the appearance of their yard threw out suggestions. What they built was a rectangular frame held up by two posts on sled like feet. The ideas the other neighbors had were “chin up bars”, “God only knows” and a “movie screen”… sure enough they had a few friends over sat in chairs in the back yard and put up a digital projector. PVC movie screen, how bout that!
Now the new neighbor guys on our other side plan to hang a movie screen on the side of their house on Halloween night so they can sit in the drive watching a movie and use a remote control truck to drive treats down to the trick or treater’s!
Covid brings out creativity in some people!