Hot Summer Nights

A long time ago, in a land far away, there existed a recreational phenomenon known as The Drive-In. The drive-in was, at its root level, an outdoor theater, a place to go to watch movies from the relative comfort of your own car, but in reality it was more than that – oh, so very much more. It was a place where families and neighbors gathered for the communal experience of watching films, sharing a picnic basket or Frito Pie from the concession stand, and a place where many a teenaged boy came of age.

Sadly, the drive-in has gone the way of the brontosaurus, poodle skirts, Fizzies, and Astroworld - extinct, goneski, outta here.

There were two drive-ins that played a major recreational and social role during the halcyon days of my youth – the venerable South Main Drive-In and the McLendon Triple Drive-In. Both of these landmarks were within four miles of my childhood home in south Houston.

My first memory of the outdoor movie experience was at the South Main. My parents wrangled my brother and I into our 1960 Ford Starliner, along with a basket of Sunbeam white bread sandwiches and a cooler full of six-and-a-half ounce bottles of Coca-Cola. You know – the short ones in the thick green glass; the kind that would glisten with beads of sweat in the humid Houston summer night and make the roof of your mouth hurt because you guzzled the ice cold syrupy goodness way too fast.

South Main Drive-In

I was six years old at the time, and the movie was To Kill A Mockingbird. I remember this for two reasons – it was an excellent film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, and also because the buzz around Houston was that this was one of THOSE films, full of scandalous behavior and things that people just didn’t talk about in Texas in the early 1960s.

There was a playground at the base of the screen where all the kids played before – and often during – the movie. In those days, parents let us kids run off and play, regardless of our ages. My brother was just a tyke (he was three and a half at the time), and my mom told me to “look out for Greg while you boys play on the swings”. There was no worry about abductions, getting hurt (nothing that a little mom-spit couldn’t fix, anyway), or losing our way.

At one point during the movie I had to pee, but it was after dark, I didn’t know where the bathrooms were, and my parents were engrossed in the movie, so they told me to pee by the car. Again, this was fairly common during those days - at least for kids it was.

The McLendon Triple

In 1970 I was a sophomore at Madison High School (yes, the same school that Vince Young would attend some thirty years later). During the fall semester word spread that the McLendon company out of Dallas was building a three-screen drive-in in the shadow of the old South Main drive-in, about a mile and a half from the school. A den of iniquity in our very backyard!

The McLendon opened to boffo box office, and was the most popular destination around for most of the kids at Madison. On Friday and Saturday nights you could catch a triple feature of monster movies, teen flicks, or Hollywood features. The state-of-the-art concession stand and projection building was in the middle of the huge lot, and if you scored just the right spot you could turn around and watch three movies at once!

I will never forget the long lines of cars streaming into that wonderful place, the sound of gravel crunching under the car tires, the heavy ribbed speaker that you hung from the car window, and the smell of popcorn wafting across the acres of cars on a warm summer evening.

When I was a senior at Madison, I drove a snow cone truck to earn enough money to buy myself a van. It was a ’66 Ford Econoline window van, and I tricked that baby out, let me tell you! I installed bucket seats out of a wrecked Pinto, brown shag carpet, and a raised platform just inside the back doors which was covered in four inch thick foam rubber and a – ahem – “bed”. It had a Craig 8 track tape player mounted on the floor between the front seats and a beaded curtain between the front and the back. My dad helped me install paneling on all the walls, and I jacked up the rear end with a lift kit and added some big-ass Goodyear tires and slotted mag wheels.

My buddies called it The Love Truck.

The Love Truck before I installed the window curtains.

We would pile into that bad boy and head to the Triple, but instead of pulling in normally, I would back in so that we could open the back doors and lay on the bed to watch the movies. And to answer your question, yes, we did close the doors on occasion, particularly if my date was Linda Schick, a buxom young brunette with a penchant for peasant shirts, love beads, no bra, and making out.

The Love Truck is long gone now, as is the McLendon Triple and the South Main Drive-In. This aerial image of the McLendon was taken in 1995. The screens are gone, but the concession stand and grading remain, as do the ghosts that once inhabited the summer and winter evenings of my teenage years.

My memories of those experiences remain as vivid as ever. Sometimes I wish I could return to those days – to feel those feelings of excitement and joy and freedom; to see and taste and smell once again the sights and flavors and aromas of The Drive-In.