The heyday of drive-ins brings an almost idealized picture of life in post-war America to mind. Like tail-finned cars and early rock and roll, the outdoor theaters are icons of a time period that many people think of as the best years our country ever experienced. Of course, that sort of nostalgia is conveniently forgetful of many terrible things that were going on at the time, such as segregation and McCarthyism, but many still think of it as a golden age in this country's history. In the case of car culture it certainly was, and the idea of heading down to the drive-in with a carload of friends or a date was an appealing one at the time, especially with young people.
Cars have long represented a certain amount of freedom to teenagers and young adults, symbolizing the ability to get away from the watchful eyes of adult authority figures and to do what they wanted to without supervision. Drive-in movie theaters were once an ideal place for kids to go have a night of cheap fun. Most of them played the kinds of B-movies that teenagers of the time would probably have flocked to, and the privacy of being in one's own vehicle instead of exposed in a movie theater was almost certainly appealing. It's likely that quite a few young people rounded second or third base for the first time watching a Roger Corman film at their local drive-in.
The first drive-in that I experienced was The Twin City Drive-In, which operated in my hometown of Rosenberg from 1950 until it closed in 1983. I was fascinated with the place as a small kid in the '70s, primarily because it had a feature lots of drive-ins shared -- you could see the films being played as you drove by on the road running behind the place. Since that theater tended to play B-Movie horror films by that period in its history, I'd caught a few glimpses of things flickering across the huge screen that my mom would not be pleased by. I'm pretty sure that the first pair of bare breasts I ever saw on a screen came compliments of the Twin City Drive-In, and that screen facing one of Rosenberg's main drags.
I only got to go to the theater once that I remember, when a re-release of Pinocchio made its way through town. Unfortunately, the very nature of a drive-in theater made a car mandatory, and the Twin City closed for good a couple of years before I could drive. There's no longer any sign that the site (which has since been redeveloped into a strip shopping center) once was the location of Rosenberg's drive-in movie theater, but I still occasionally pause to look wistfully at its former spot as I drive through.
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