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Tucson Driv-In Theater |
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The truth about our first drive-in movieFrom the Arizona Daily StarSunday, January 27 1991
A photo of the Tucson Driv-In taken during construction. The large round concrete holes were for speakers! This was one of the early drive-ins that blasted the sound through the floor board of the car, long before the invention of the window speaker.
Paddle wheels once trolled the Santa Cruz, Pancho Villa had a
suite at the Pioneer, and the Midway was the first drive-in movie
theater in Tucson.
Lies, lies, nothing but lies.
Well, OK, "misstatements" then. Which brings us to the task at
hand, that of putting to rest yet another falsehood concerning that
font of culture and occasional heavy breathing known as the outdoor
picture show.
For the record, Tucson's first drive-in movie theater opened at
6:15 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 25, 1940 - a full eight years before
pigeons ever roosted atop the Midway's screen.
"Golden Boy," starring William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck and
Adolphe Menjou, was the first movie on the bill, along with "A Bride
for Henry."
Three dimes got you in the gate, one dime for kids under 12. Of
course, that did not include, ahem, those who watched for free.
"We never had enough money to go in there, so we'd sit outside
the fence and watch it from our car," says longtime Tucsonan Jim
Lochner, then a high school student. "If you had the windows down,
you could hear the speakers."
The drive-in sprawled across 11 acres of what would one day
become Southgate Shopping Center. Its nearest neighbors along South
Sixth Avenue included the Pima County and Veterans' hospitals, along
with a couple of tourist courts.
"It took up that whole corner between 44th Street and what's now
the freeway," says Lochner. "But the freeway did not go down there
then. All we had was the Benson Highway, which dead-ended at South
Sixth Avenue."
Tucson Driv-In Theatre was the rather generic name of this
southside picture show, built by Radio Corporation of America.
"The plant is laid out to form a semi-circular amphitheatre, with
cars parking in single lines on ramps," reads a newspaper article
that ran the day before the drive-in's debut.
Its 66-foot-high screen, the article goes on to say, "was placed
in a position selected to minimize interference from the moon."
Continuing along this vein of extremely thorough reporting, the
article also mentions that the housing for the screen "contains
enough wood and plaster to construct six bungalows."
Perhaps the most novel feature of the drive-in, however, was its
"system of 250 concrete speakers through which sound is piped to
each parking space."
Concrete speakers attached to your car window? Don't be silly.
These speakers were set in the ground, allowing the pear-shaped
tones of Hollywood's finest to drift up through the floorboards.
"We drove right over the speakers," says Rosalie Callahan Dayton,
one of a carload of girls who regularly motored out to Tucson's
first drive-in "every time the show changed."
Back when Tinsel Town really knew how to grind them out, that
would have been just about every two or three days.
Just two days after its grand opening, the drive-in was already
advertising a new weekend double bill: "Good Girls Go to Paris,"
featuring Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell, and "Across the Plains,"
starring Jack Randall and Rusty, the Wonder Horse.
Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry were also big draws, reports
Dayton. "They had western series they'd run, just like when I was a
member of the Mickey Mouse Club." (A Saturday morning kids' show
that ran at the Fox-Tucson).
Wholesome entertainment this - more than a decade removed from
the lurid "Reform School Girl" type of movies that would flicker on
many an outdoor screen of the '50s.
"Good Lord, we would have all been shocked," says Dayton. "Back
then, nobody even mentioned the word `brassiere."'
As for popcorn and other snacks, says Dayton, everyone brought
their own. "I don't remember any snack bar there."
Walk-ins were also welcome. "They had a row of seats down front
for people to sit," remembers Armando Membrila, a frequent patron.
By and large, however, the drive-in was designed for the
customers in cars, taking pains to welcome "such persons ordinarily
unable to patronize standard theaters since they may attend in
pajamas and dressing robes."
This picture show, the article goes on to say, "also will solve
the amusement problems of mothers with babies or small children."
Every eventuality, it would appear, had been anticipated, with
management promising that the "show will go on under any conditions
except a blizzard or pea soup fog."
Or war.
On Christmas night 1941, 18 days past the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, the Tucson Driv-In was still putting on a brave front.
Reads that day's movie ad: "Hurry up! Tonight's the last night
for `You Belong to Me,' with Stanwyck and Fonda. The second feature,
`The Gay Vagabond.' Tomorrow we'll have `Little Men' and Gene Autry
in `The Singing Hill."'
But even the singing cowboy couldn't save Tucson's first drive-in
from the reality of a wartime halt in new car and tire production,
to say nothing of gas rationing.
On Feb. 27, 1942, the drive-in was still carrying its Christmas
Day double bill - though the tenor of its ads was beginning to show
some testiness behind all that folksiness:
"Come on out - I need some more attendance and don't ask for any
passes right now, we're fresh out." Signed, "Barney."
And that, it would appear, was that. If movies continued to grind
on into the spring of '42 at the Tucson Driv-In Theatre, they did so
bereft of newspaper advertising.
Exactly when the wood and plaster screen - enough for six
bungalows, remember - came crashing down is somewhat hazy as well.
Says Dayton: "All I remember is, I drove by there one day, and it
was gone."
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