TBT…

Posted on by July 26, 2017

It’s cars…

Back when you could actually tell them apart…

And VERY few of them had AC. I can remember going for ‘Sunday’ drives as a kid, and first learned about the 2 55 AC there… And it was actually in a 53 Bel Air like the one pictured… Sigh…

Drive-ins are mostly a thing of the past, but they used to be VERY popular with teens and parents with kids, usually NOT on the same night…LOL There has been many a baby ‘conceived’ in a drive-in. And the best car to take to a drive-in was an early 70s Caddy. Seven in the seats and four in the trunk (not that I was ever involved in something like that)! And it cost something like three dollars a car… The one below is from the late 50s in South Bend, IN.

And you hung one of these in the window and cranked it up… Tinny, lousy sound, but who cared! 🙂

Sigh… I miss the cars, I miss the fun we had, and I know we can’t go back, but damn…

Comments

TBT… — 20 Comments

  2. I remember taking the 64 390 Ford Station Wagon to the drive in and backing up so the tailgate faced the screen.
    My girlfriend thought I was brilliant.

  3. Those speakers were a conspiracy by the Auto Glass Manufacturers. They broke more windows than cops dealing with a Sovereign Citizens during a traffic stops.

  4. I don’t think seeing the movie” was a priority with the fogged-windows crowd. I learned to drive a stick in a ’53 Bel Air, and learned to appreciate the rear-facing back seat in a ’62 Chevy station wagon. Further, Affiant sayeth not.

  5. There used to be a drive-in near where I grew up. We learned that they broadcast the movie audio via FM radio, in the 88.something range.

    Being dirt poor, my buddies and I would park a mile or so down the road, sneak through a corn field carrying a small radio (“boom-box”), and sit in the very back of the area, in a lightly wooded area. We could just see the screen enough to make out what was going on, and the radio provided the sound.

    Good times.

  6. Most of the theaters in urban areas are gone. The land was just too valuable. I live in a rural area and we do still have a drive in. It’s nice to have that bit of Americana nearby.

  7. When you said drive-ins, I first thought of A&W!
    As for distinctive cars, we used to (as kids) memorize the Motors Manuals which would show the grills and tails of makes and models of American cars.
    I hope a cop never needs me to ID a getaway vehicle newer than 1972.

  8. “Back when you could tell them apart”?

    I hate to tell you, but the cars in the first photo all look alike to me. I suspect that telling cars of any era apart is a function of when you got interested in cars. If you got interested in the 1970’s, then you an probably tell 1970’s cars apart, and maybe 1960’s as well, and consider the cars of the 1980’s and later an indistinguishable mass. And so on.

  10. My Stater-Wife and I used to go to the drive-in every weekend. After we got married, about a year later when we could afford it, we went back to our old drive-in. They added something new. Movies! What a novel idea. It was know around these parts as The Fingerbowl.

  11. the cars were great looking back then. I remember getting eaten by mosquitoes at the drive in. we would buy some wort of repellent you burned inside the car. man that stuff stunk but worked.

  12. Was no such thing as a driv-in anything out here on BIRI back then, but after I joined the Navy and I found out about them, I’d go to the one near Quonset Pt. every time the movie changed! Sometimes. there might be a person of the opposite gender in attendance!

  13. Had a high school buddy who’s father was a mortician. He once borrowed the hearse, and we got 20 people into the drive-in, for three dollars! There may have even been a movie involved, but I was there with Bobbi M., and I can’t swear to that.

    And while I learned to drive a stick shift on a Farmall tractor, the first car I ever drove was grandpa’s 1953 Ford sedan, flathead V-8 and three-on-the-tree.

  17. Thank you Sir. Yeah, going even further back to around ’60 my Mom worked at an A&W in West Palm Beach. Once we moved out to the western PB County ag region by Lake O, Biff Burger was it for drive-in burger joints, and we were lucky to have it and the old Lake Drive-In pitcher show…if it weren’t for that I might not have been a daddy at 17 and coming up on 46 yrs married at age 63!