En Passant: Once upon a time…

THIS PAST weekend I was reading a book, and the bloke, who was in New Hampshire in the good ol’ USA, and who was writing in about 1998, mentioned that he’d taken his family to the drive-in across the border in Vermont.

Taken his family to the what?

Ag, my child, to the drive-in, and I was thinking just that; that youngsters nowadays have got no idea of what a drive-in was all about, and never will have. The bloke in America said that this drive-in in Vermont was one of the very few still left, that on the night he went to it there were only about five cars there, and I think he said it closed shortly afterwards.

Goodness me! Hands up all who remember the drive-in? No one can tell me exactly when the one in Vryheid closed. I’m not sure it was still going when I arrived here in February 1983, but the screen was still there on the side of the Vryheid/Hlobane road.

No, I think it was closed by then, so I never did get to go to the Vryheid drive-in. With my folks, as a child, I have a vague memory of going to the drive-in only about twice, once in Durban when we were on holiday back in the late 1950s.

Then living and working in Eshowe, we used to very occasionally go to the drive-ins near Empangeni. There were two, both out of town, the one being the Forest Drive-in on the Mtunzini side, and the other was the Cactus Drive-in which we got to via Nkwaleni. And I remember once climbing into my old Morris 1000, a 1963 Morris 1000, and banging down to Durban from Eshowe, on that dreadful, old, single-lane deathtrap from Gingindlovu to Stanger, to the drive-in at Umhlanga Rocks, and then toddling home afterwards in the middle of the night.

You know, thinking about it, kids in towns like Vryheid now will never experience the drive-in, but nor will they have the bioscope, the old Empire Theatre, a proper movie house to go to and remember. Ag, shame, hey?

So, Oupa, what’s the drive-in?

My child, once upon a time there was a case of perfect serendipity, a coincidence of time, a fortuitous synchronicity. What happened was that two emerging, burgeoning industries, the automobile industry and Hollywood reached a mutually beneficial state of development. Cars and cinema: cinema and cars.

It was a dude called Richard Hollingshead (“Big Dick” to his mates down at Joe’s Bar & Grill) who first had the idea and patented it in May, 1933. He realised that everyone wanted to go to the movies, and that more and more people were driving cars, so he thought, Why not show the movies outdoors on a big screen, and people could sit in their cars and watch the movie and the kids could sleep on the backseat, save getting a baby sitter, no mess, no fuss.

He opened his 400-vehicle drive-in in June 1933 in New Jersey, and the rest, as they say, is cinematic and automotive history. To start with the film’s sound came from a huge speaker on a tower, which was far from ideal (and probably a damned nuisance to anyone living nearby), then they tried a row of speakers in front of the cars, and finally, in 1941, each car was given its own speaker, with its own volume control.

This is what we remember. Each parking bay had a… I dunno, it looked like a lowish parking meter, I suppose, and the driver opened his window, leaned over to this “meter-looking dingus”, unhooked the top which was the actual speaker (connected by a cable to the pole), and hung it on the inside of the half-up window glass.

So that everybody could see, without have to look through the back window and windscreen of the car in front of you, the screen was elevated and the whole area was terrace-ramped (how else would you describe it?). Each car besides its speaker-pole, was in effect parked on an up-ramp; your headlights if they were on, pointed at the elevated screen, regardless of where you were parked – at the back, front, left or right. Everybody could see.

And each drive-in had a shop, a fast food sort of shop. I dunno, there was no KFC-type of outlet in those days, so I suppose it was a cross between a tearoom and a restaurant. (Oupa, what’s a tearoom? Shaddup!)

And at this shop you could get cooldrinks, sweets and chips, ice cream, hoddogs (what? hot dogs), burgers, slaptjips, pies, popcorn, chewing gum, peanuts, bubble gum, (Ag, please, Daddy) etc, but if your Ma had anything to do with it, she’d have made boring old sarmies and a flask of tea in order to save money. And then at the interval, these poor peanut butter-smeared kids, noses flat against the car’s windows, would enviously watch the lucky kids making their way like moths to the brightly lit cafeteria and hoddogs and Coke.

Drive-in movies gave its patrons complete freedom.

Without disturbing anyone else who was watching the movie, you could talk, drink, smoke, fart, belch, pick your nose, belt your kids, cuddle, cafuffle, polafunk, undress, impregnate, moan, weep, cry, sob, cuss, snooze, snore.

Yep, that was the drive-in. Gone for ever.