Nights at the Edgewood Drive-In

by Pa Rock
Shameless Reminiscer

There was a time in America when the term drive-in referred to an outdoor setting where people went on warm nights to park in a field, hang a speaker on their car window, and watch movies on a giant screen. Often there was a playground for the kiddos up under the large screen, and a snack shack that served a full menu of popcorn, cold drinks, hot dogs, and other movie fare. Drive-in theatres are mostly a thing of the past now, with the occasional holdout that manages to stay open more as a curiosity than anything else.

The drive-in theatre of my youth was the Edgewood, located on busy Highway 71 just south of Neosho, Missouri. From the highway it appeared to be a fine old southern plantation mansion with a two story white facade framed by magnificent white columns. The owners of the Edgewood liked to brag that it was the most beautiful drive-in in America, and my mother would note, with a sense of pride, that she had traveled to many places and never seen one that was any nicer.

When I was very young my parents owned a truck stop in Goodman, MO, with my mother's sister, Christine, and her husband, Bob Dobbs. My mother and aunt ran the restaurant while my dad and uncle managed the gas station and garage. It was the kids' job - me, my sister, and our two cousins - to stay out of the way. We played hard!

It was the 1950's. Many people had television, but it had yet to reach out and control our lives. The age of wonderful radio programs was just coming to an end. Movies were the most popular form of escapism at that moment in history. Neosho, just ten miles up the road, had the closest movie theatres. The same family owned them both - the indoor Orpheum for winter viewing, and the Edgewood for outdoor viewing during the late spring, summer, and early fall. It was always a very big deal when the drive-in opened for the season.

Drive-in's originally charged by the car, regardless of how many people were crammed into the vehicle. Each car only took up one space and used one speaker, and the more people - the more refreshment sales. Toward the end of the era, many started charging on a per person basis - causing legions of flexible youth to enter the premises in the trunk of a car, and hoping, of course, that once they were past the gate their friends would let them out!

A typical night at the Edgewood consisted of a cartoon and two or three movies, separated by intermissions where everyone ran to the restrooms and snack shack, and the kids headed to the playground. The Edgewood playground was surrounded by very large plywood cutouts of Disney and other cartoon characters. It housed several swings, slides, teeter-totters, and a merry-go-round that the big kids kept running wickedly fast!

A nice thing about drive-ins back in the day was that the management didn't go nuts if you brought in your own food. My mother would have the cooks at the cafe pack us an evening meal to eat in the car while we watched the movies. One night she couldn't decide what type of sandwich she wanted, and told to cook to just surprise her. She was surprised alright when she bit into her sandwich later that night and discovered that it was a potholder slathered in mayonnaise between two slices of bread. From then on whenever anyone mentioned Florine's surprise sandwich, everyone in town knew how it was made!

Drive-ins began to disappear in the 1960's as the concept of daylight savings time came into vogue and caused the sun to stay out longer. (The shows couldn't be seen on the screen until after dark.) I remember going to the Edgewood on August 5th, 1962, with my sister and mother. I know the exact date because when we returned home we learned that Marilyn Monroe had died that day. The very last time that I can remember going to the Edgewood was in sometime in 1969, and I suspect that may have been its final season. I was home from college and a group of friends and I were there to watch Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower. Actually we were there to visit and drink beer, but Cactus Flower was a nice diversion.

The Edgewood has been closed for decades, and the fine old plantation mansion facade was bulldozed many years ago in the name of progress. Today the site is occupied by a business that sells cattle trailers. But I can't drive down that stretch of highway without fondly remembering the place that was such an important fixture of my youth.

I doubt that drive-ins will ever make a comeback because there are so many other diversions available in modern life. But those of us who wax nostalgic for the good old days still have the option of parking in a field and watching movies on our iPods!

No, no, they can't take that away from me!

7F2

I was listening to Michael Feldman’s “What Do You Know” program on National Public Radio last Saturday when the host made a statement to the effect that high school kids today have never known a time without cell phones. That simple remark set me spinning on the subject of how fast things are changing. Just on the topic of telephones alone, I have lived through an amazing array of technology.

The first telephone experience that I remember happened before I even started to elementary school. We were living in an old house in Goodman, MO., that was equipped with a crank phone hanging on the wall. My mom asked me to call my dad for some reason, perhaps to see if he was coming home for lunch. I pushed a chair up to the wall so that I could reach the telephone, cranked the handle, and put the ear piece to my ear. Violet, the operator, came on and tried to connect me, but it was just starting to storm and a loud noise came through the line. Violet came back on the line when the noise subsided and asked in a surprised voice, ‘Rocky, are you still there?” We tried again, but the connection couldn’t be made. I hung up the earpiece and had barely moved away from the telephone when a bolt of lightening came through the earpiece and left a black scorch mark on the wall. Timing was everything!

A year or so later we moved to a new house in Goodman and had a very modern black, rotary telephone that probably weighed in at close to ten pounds. The early years of elementary school brought occasional telephone conversations with friends, but the phone was in the living room and privacy was not an option. It was the only telephone in the household, and everyone recognized the need to limit the length of calls.

We moved to Riverview Court when I was ten. The court got its mail on a Noel, MO, rural route, and telephone service was from the perpetually sleepy village of Lanagan. Lanagan had crank telephones, but I knew how to handle those. Lanagan also had a telephonic concept that was new to me: party lines. A party line meant that several customers shared a telephone line. A half dozen or so households were on our party line, so making a call often meant having to wait until the neighbor was done sharing the gossip. If an emergency came up, the person needing the phone had to interrupt the on-going conversation. And it did need to be an emergency, because the person who was interrupted would invariably get back on the line and listen in. Each person on the party line had a unique ring code to let them know if the incoming call was for them. Ours was two long rings. A neighbor’s ring might have been two shorts and a long, or perhaps three shorts, or some other unique combination of shorts and longs. If you were calling someone else on your party line, you had to carefully crank out their ring code. Our telephone number was 7F2, and to this day I have no idea what that signified.

When I was sixteen we moved to the town of Noel. There we were blessed with rotary telephones again, but they were getting lighter and easier to move around. Our house had a rotary phone in the living room, and a rotary phone mounted on the wall in the utility room. The wall phone was an extension, so we were still limited to one person using the telephone at a time.

Push button phones began to make an appearance in the early 1980’s. The first time that I remember becoming aware of the enormity of that cultural change was around 1990 when I was a junior high school principal. A student came to the office to use the phone to call his mother. I directed him to an old rotary phone that was at an empty desk. He stared at it for awhile, and finally asked in a bewildered voice, “How do you start it up?”

In the mid to late 1990’s I worked in Child Protection for the state of Missouri. That job occasionally led me into remote areas where dangerous situations could arise. My agency began signing out “bag phones” to take along on remote visits. Of course, my county was so rural that most of the places we went were unable to get reception. Fortunately, county deputies often accompanied us with their radio-equipped patrol cars.

I entered the modern era in 2000 when I got my first cell phone. Since that time it has become a fixture in my life, and the necessity of having a land line at home has lessened to the point that I practically never use the one I have. But, in defense of my old fashioned values, my cell phone does not play music or games, compute, transmit television shows and movies, or take pictures. At least I don’t think that it does!

One more significant cultural change that has occurred over the years is the virtual disappearance of telephone booths. My first realization of this trend was in the movie “Superman” where Clark Kent (aka Christopher Reeve) prepared to jump into a phone booth to change into his crime fighting gear, only to realize that pay phones were no longer encased in booths! A few years later I was in London and heard that their famous red phone boxes were slowly being removed due to the public’s growing reliance on cell phones. Dr. Who did all of his time and space traveling in a British red phone box.

What’s to become of us mere mortals if Superman is reduced to changing clothes in an alley and Dr. Who has to take the bus?

Telephones have definitely evolved over the fifty plus years that I have been using them, but I have nagging doubts as to whether all of this evolution represents true progress. Are cell phones, the latest link in the evolutionary chain, great liberators that enable people to communicate anywhere at any time? Or are they virtual leashes that tie us to home, and office, and school, and the never-ending roar of civilization? Some days I yearn for the simpler time of crank phones and solitude – and the lightening be damned!