as submitted by Donna                                                                                                                               Back

My father started showing movies when I was a very young child. He was principal of the combined grade and high school in Oakdale, IL, a very small town in southern Illinois. He bought a projector and started showing movies on Saturday nights in the high school. Most of the small towns were too small for a theater, so he bought a big trailer to pull behind his car, loaded it with folding chairs and a tent that had side walls but no roof, and started showing movies on a regular schedule in many little communities. After teaching school all day, he’d drive to a town, hire some local boys to help him set up the tent and chairs, sell the tickets, show the movies, then fold everything back up and drive home so he could get up the next morning and do the same thing all over again. Gradually, he made enough money to be able to rent or buy theater buildings, so he could dispose of the tent, chairs and trailer. Eventually, he was successful enough that he could quit his teaching job and be in the movie business full time.

After World War II, he took a trip to Washington, D.C. on business, and on the way home, he saw a drive in theater in Ohio called the Melody. It was the first drive in he had every seen and he felt that with gasoline finally available, people would like the idea of going to the movies in their cars. He determined to build one in Tamaroa, where we had moved during the war, and he copied the name of the theater he seen in Ohio, the Melody. He bought 15 acres of farm land on Highway 51 south of town and with a local carpenter named Aaron started construction of the screen tower. He hired earth moving equipment to make ramps so the cars would be tilted up toward the screen for a better view, installed individual speakers and built a building to house the projection booth and a refreshment stand. Because they had to borrow a lot of money for construction, my mother became more and more anxious as the date for the opening approached, afraid we would be financially ruined if nobody liked the idea of driving to the country to see a movie. But people in the surrounding towns were excited. It was a new idea and people couldn’t wait for it to open. On opening night, no one was sure what to expect, but they needn’t have worried. So many cars lined up to get in that the state police had to direct traffic on the highway. It was an instant success.

One of the best features was the concession stand. Most indoor movies at that time were limited to popcorn for refreshments. Few even served drinks or candy and service was often limited to before the movie. The drive in refreshment stand was open before and during the movie. If there was a double feature, there would be an intermission so people could buy popcorn, hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecue sandwiches and pop. A sandwich cost about 35 cents. Popcorn was 25 cents a box.

One of the constant problems for the ticket sellers was people trying to sneak in without paying. They tried all kinds of tricks. Sometimes people would hide in the trunk of the car, or under a blanket on the floor of the back seat. Other times they would send in one person in a car, then their friends would sneak through the fields and come in from the rear. My father and the people who worked for him soon caught on to the tricks and would follow suspicious characters and catch them unloading their friends from the trunk or slipping through the corn and bean fields and make them pay.

When I was about thirteen, I finally talked my parents into letting me work in the concession stand. I got paid the same as anyone else, 50 cents an hour.

After a few years, to stimulate business, my dad got the idea of building a stage on the top of the concession stand and bringing in live acts. Most were country music stars from the Grand Old Opry in Nashville, Tennessee but there was an occasional B movie star. The movie would show first, then the live show would begin. That was very popular and I met singers who later became the icons of the country music business.

With the success of the Melody, my father began to look for locations for other theaters. Mount Vernon, Illinois, was about thirty miles away and seemed like a city to us with about 20,000 people. (Tamaroa’s population was 950.) My father had grown up near there and his sister, Mildred, and her family lived there. He decided that would be the best place for his second drive in. He built the Mt. Vernon theater there and hired his brother-in-law, Kenneth, to be the projectionist. That, too, proved to be a success. The drive ins were bringing in so much money that he gradually closed down all the indoor theaters to concentrate on expansion. The drive in craze was spreading and others were looking at getting into the business. Afraid that someone would build a competing theater in Mountt Vernon, my father built a second theater, the Starland. This one he made a little fancier, showed newer pictures and charged prices a little higher. That gave people a choice and proved to be successful, too.

In the next few years he tried further expansion by buying a drive in in Carmi, Illinois, in partnership with a man who owned the drive in theater in the town of Herrin. He also built a theater in the Chicago area in Zion. Neither of those ventures were as successful as the original three, and eventually, he sold them or closed them to concentrate on the Melody, the Mt. Vernon and the Starland. Those businesses provided our family with a comfortable living for many years. In fact, by the standards of southern Illinois, which then, as now, was a depressed area, we were wealthy. The drive ins sent my sisters and I to college and gave us a good start in life.