Drive-In, Part II

Judy remembered her days at the drive-in in the previous blog comments.
Which triggered off me remembering more about my drive-in days.
On occasions some of us would slip in the drive-in. A friend, Larry, had a '57 Ford with a large trunk. It could hold three teenage boys. One evening it was my turn to drive. I paid for my one ticket and entered the large parking lot and went directly to the back row. I got out, looked around, and went to open the trunk to let my friends out and from nowhere appeared a man with a flashlight. He said, "You can't park here son, this is the colored section."
I said "Yessir!" And as I started back to the car and he was walking away, he turned around and said, "And you better let those boys out of the trunk, they might smother to death."

Back then it was a fad to have drive-in car speakers hooked up to your radio in your bedroom. I didn't get to get on at that fad because my father was the Chief of Police and I knew he would figure out very quickly how I acquired that speaker.

A lot of teenage romance sparked in the cars.... I think some bunches of girls went together just to cruise up and down the aisle looking for cars they recognized, then pull up beside them, to check out who that male had a date with - and then the rumor mill and the gossip circuit would travel faster than Broadband or DSL to bring the news to all nosy teenagers in a five mile radius.

It was always nice to get to know the people behind the concession counter at a drive-in. They controlled the free refills - but you had to buy the first one. Little did they know that practice is still carried on today, but now, completely legit.

Once Homer the local notorious homosexual parked by a few of us teenage boys and kept asking us did we know so and so, and did we know so and so else, and so on. We finally asked where was he getting all these names and he pulled out a Marietta High School year book, The Olmpia and said, "My menu."

One night at the drive-in a gang decided to give Homer a good beating (remember, this is the south in the late 50s). Homer was proably over 40 years old and overweight, yet he outran some of Marietta High's top athletes and jumped a wide ditch that no one else could leap over and one kid even broke his leg by falling into the ditch.

I bet that was hard to explain to his parents - why he fell down a ditch behind the drive-in.