LAKEWOOD DRIVE-IN – The Class of ’66 Yahoo website is full of chatter about going to the drive-in, and some about where people went parking. My seven-year-old granddaughter, peeking over my shoulder yesterday, saw the word ‘parking’ on my computer screen and asked me if my friends on the website couldn’t find a place to park.
How do you answer that question? Yeah, parking was a serious issue in 1966.
My memory of the Lakewood Drive-In was the same as several folks, sneaking up to the fence in the back, jumping said fence, turning on the back row speakers as loud as possible and jumping back to safety before Charlie Finnerty (I think that was the owner’s name) caught us.
Of course, if there was a car in that row with steamed up windows, it was even more fun because the folks inside frequently were too engrossed in developing their interpersonal skills than to spot the miscreants peeking in the windows.
At least until somebody laughed or screamed at what they saw.
While my myopia prevented me from getting much in the way of sex education, the preference of teenagers of that era for white undergarments gave a key to some activities. Maybe colored underwear was still a dream in Calvin Klein’s mind.
The drive-in was also a place you could sneak in a bottle of some awful liquor (Southern Comfort comes to mind) mix it with Coca-Cola and get puking drunk, always a great strategy to impress your date. Then there were the eaters – the people who would go in the snack bar and come out with trays covered with things the staff claimed were French fries or hamburgers or corn dogs. The aliens in some of the feature films looked more appetizing than those hot dogs covered in, well, best not to consider it for long.
There is a drive-in in Sacramento not too far from my house, a five-screen job, so you can park kind of in the middle and watch any of the movies. You can also park on the freeway and watch with field glasses if you are retired from United Airlines and can’t afford the ticket.
But in this new drive-in, the big thing is to go in a honking-big pickup truck, sitting in lawn chairs in the bed of the truck and turn up the truck stereo nice and loud with a good rap music selection. The game seems to be how to turn the bass up loud enough to knock the people sitting in the next truck off their chairs - but not piss them off so much that they come over and start a fight.
And people wonder why home video is so popular.
I’ll save a posting about going parking for another time, but one big question:
Anybody else ever get their car stuck up to the axles down in Celeron in an area called the bum roads?
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