With apologies to the Walton family and the other nice folks at Walmart, I am not planning to patronize the drive-in movie theaters in their parking lots.
But the company should be applauded for its plan to put temporary drive-in theater screens in the parking areas of 160 of its stores beginning this month.
Drive-in patrons will see major motion pictures without leaving their vehicles. Folks my age did that in the old days when there were drive-ins in nearly every town.
The Walmart movies will allow today’s younger generation to experience a form of entertainment that has about faded away.
When the Rancho Drive-in opened in Springhill, it offered us kids a new sense of freedom.
Parents had always inspected the family cars after we used them for dates to see if we had been on red dirt roads to park at the gravel pits or oilfields.
After we got a drive-in, teenagers could park and make out at the theater without putting mileage on the odometers and getting red dirt on the tires and hubcaps.
The outdoor movies also let us escape the vigilance of an old usher named Charley at the indoor theater. He wore an official gray usher uniform and waved a flashlight to keep us from talking, chewing gum or putting our feet on the seats.
There were not many rules at the Rancho. Kids going to the concession stand often walked in front of the projector, casting oversize silhouettes of their head on the giant screen.
Horns blared from cars across the big parking area when the film broke or got fuzzy or the sound quit.
It was hard enough to hear what was happening in the movies under the best of circumstances with those scratchy, squawk box speakers that hung on the car windows.
A lot of those speakers got ripped from the posts that held them by movie goers who drove off without remembering the devices were temporarily attached to their cars or trucks.
Drive-ins got even more interesting when I went to college in Natchitoches and started going to movies at the Chief Drive-in.
There was no way we could have gotten our hands on alcoholic beverages to sneak into the drive-in in Springhill. Folks at every place in town that sold booze knew our parents and our preachers.
But it was cool in college to smuggle some Schlitz beer or Thunderbird wine into shows at the Chief . That resulted in a lot more speakers being snatched off their stands.
College students then could imbibe a little even at the indoor theater on Front Street. There was a package liquor store next door. Guys would get a half pint of bourbon or sloe gin to mix with their concession stand soft drinks.
People would go into the movie cold sober and leave walking into street signs and parked cars.
Drive-in theaters in their heyday had the benefits of privacy and freedom, but they had some drawbacks.
For one thing, there were only about six days a year when the weather in Louisiana was perfect for drive-in theaters. Other times, it was too hot, cold, humid, rainy or foggy.
And mosquitos were a nuisance. You could buy one of those insect repelling coil things at the concession stand. It smoked when you lit it. That made it hard to breathe with the windows up. We put the windows down, and more mosquitoes got in.
A big advantage of drive-ins was the price. Admission was a quarter a person and another quarter for the car.
But that didn’t include the cost of all that mosquito repellent and replacing car windows that cracked when we drove off with the speakers still attached to them.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES