Ode to the Drive-In

Walking the aisles soliciting quarters, glimpsing movies -- and then some

The first drive-in and only “fly-in” on Cape Cod, Hokum Rock Road, Dennis, 1950 — let’s be clear, well before my time! From the “Independent Film Journal”

My first summer on Cape Cod was 1967. I was 13, at a sleepover camp in South Yarmouth, washing dishes to help my folks pay for it but mostly having a most amazing time once I got over being homesick (which took about two days). People I met are friends to this day, and those experiences showed me the beauty of staying on this side of the bridges, which I’ve done for most of 55 years.

I experienced many firsts, from the National Seashore’s dunes to the pine woods and ponds of the mid-Cape to playing baseball in a sandpit. Among them:

Going to the drive-in.

Cape Cod’s first drive-in opened in 1949 off Hokum Rock Road in Dennis, room for 1000 cars plus an airplane landing strip where people touched down, taxied up, watched a flick, then flew home. By the mid-1950s there were 4000 or more drive-ins nationwide with five on the Cape -- Teaticket (Falmouth), Hyannis, Yarmouth, then Wellfleet in 1957 – the only local one left of 300 or so remaining in the country.

My introduction in the 1960s was to a massive screen beside Parker’s River off Route 28 in West Yarmouth, where I reveled in movies like “The Dirty Dozen” with Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson – OK I’ll stop. But there was more to it, because as campers we were on a mission:

Between features, a short film would extol the most beloved philanthropy in New England, the Jimmy Fund. The pitch would tug on heartstrings, feature famous Red Sox ballplayers, and ask everyone to chip in to save kids from cancer. Viewers were informed that youngsters would be fanning out with cans in hand, slits on the top to insert coins or even folded bucks.

That was our cue. Each of us would take three or four rows and make our way from car to car, window to window, can to hand.

No one ever challenged us, required assurance we wouldn’t pocket the money, or told us to get the hell away from their car. Most coughed up a quarter or two, and I got over my shyness, enjoying this great excuse to wander up to any car and check out who was in there.

Good training for a would-be journalist.

I soon developed a strategy: Always volunteer to canvass the back three rows.

Can you guess why?

Hey, I was 13 years old. I noticed that cars at the far end of the tarmac seemed less interested in the movie. They also didn’t include kids. I had an inkling of what that might mean, and so acting innocent as a Jimmy Fund kid could be, I’d knock on those windows, eyes wide open.

I never saw much of anything “good,” usually just a guy with his arm around a girl who’d shift to fish some coin out of his pocket, never quick enough to interrupt any hot “making out” (though hope sprang eternal). The best was when I knocked on a driver’s window and an arm emerged from under a blanket spread across the back of a stationwagon, located a crumpled pair of pants on the front seat, and handed over a dollar. That kept me imagining for a long time. So did cars parked backwards that ignored me. I imagined fogged-up windows.

More than one summer I walked that drive-in, though by 1969 I’d navigated my first kiss and girlfriend, and began thinking more about the raging Vietnam War, walking on the moon, and whether Woodstock would change the world. But I still loved going, and many of the 50-odd summers since I’ve managed to get to the Wellfleet drive-in, grateful it exists -- and willing to put a quarter in a can if anyone from the Jimmy Fund stops by (which of course they don’t).

There’s one more drive-in memory I have to share, which splits the time between my teenage explorations and now. It was 2000, “The Perfect Storm” was playing, so we found a spot in the front row, huge screen towering over and enveloping us. The movie’s final shot began full frame on the resigned face of George Clooney as Captain Billy Tyne, alone below decks on the crippled Andrea Gail. Then inexorably it pulled back, revealing more and more of the monstrous waves around him, receding farther and farther until the boat was a fleck on a raging ocean that seemed to roil forever, sure to overwhelm him.

The giant screen did that shot proud; more than two decades later my jaw still drops thinking about it.

Haven’t subscribed yet? Here’s how to keep seeing a Voice:

https://sethrolbein.substack.com/welcome