Nov. 30: Brownsville Drive-In, Grindstone PA

Brownsville Drive-In marquee with scary clown

Photo from the Brownsville Drive-In Facebook page

It’s Day 334 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. After a long drive the day before, it was refreshing to need just a half hour to get from the Skyview Drive-In in Carmichaels PA to the Brownsville Drive-In, just south of Grindstone PA.

This drive-in owned as Ficks in April 1949, the brainchild of Isadore J. “Izzy” Ficks. Ficks Drive-In Theatre, Inc. incorporated in 1950, and a year later the company deeded 9½ acres with buildings to Izzy and someone named Margaret B. A. Moody. In March 1954, Ficks announced he had bought out “the Moody interests” in the Ficks Drive-In.

Remember Louis Stuler and Duard (or Durwood or Durward) Coe, who founded the Skyview in Carmichaels? They bought the Ficks and renamed it the Brownsville before the 1959 season.

According to TribLive, John “Preach” Sebeck and his brother, Tom Clark Jr., bought the Brownsville in 1972 after working at the drive-in in high school. (The article says they bought it from Ficks himself, but we know that’s not accurate.) “Clark and Sebeck tried to keep everything the same when they took over the drive-in and only restored the things that really needed it.”

At some point in the 1980s, the Brownsville became a twin. The 1993 photo of the drive-in at HistoricAerials.com shows two screens, and its 1969 photo shows that the main screen used to be northwest of the concession stand before moving to the west side. Soon after that 1993 photo, the Brownsville added a third screen.

In 2007, the Route 40 Classic Diner was transported in four separate parts from Mattoon IL to the front of the Brownsville. The diner and drive-in are both managed by Charlie Perkins.

In 2014, the Brownsville caught a bit of a break. Honda’s Project Drive-In had given away digital projectors to nine drive-ins the year before, and it had some leftover cash in its Indiegogo account. As the 10th highest-voted drive-in, the Brownsville received that amount plus a donation from vAuto towards a new projector.

On this last night of November, the drive-in had been closed for the season for several weeks. It’s nice to know that it’ll be back next spring.

Miles Today / Total: 16 / 38630 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 199

Nearby Restaurant: Of course I had to eat at the Route 40 Classic Diner on the drive-in grounds. They’ve got the decor just right, with the black and white tiled floor, the neon jukebox in the corner, and metal-trimmed tables. I ordered a late breakfast with hotcakes and plenty of coffee, listened to the music, and imagined I was back when the Ficks was showing movies.

Where I Virtually Stayed: Google said the closest hotel to the Brownsville is the Hampton Inn & Suites California University – Pittsburgh in Coal Center. That’s a mouthful! I didn’t even know there was a California University of Pennsylvania. Anyway, the Hampton was the typical high quality, with cookies and coffee at check-in, a room with the modern amenities, and the Hampton quality breakfast in the morning.

Only in Grindstone: Grindstone is an unincorporated area, so let’s turn our attention to Brownsville, the nearby borough. According to Wikipedia, Brownsville attracted major entertainers in the early postwar years, who also were performing in nearby Pittsburgh. Mike Evans wrote in his book Ray Charles: The Birth of Soul (2007) that the singer developed his hit “What’d I Say” as part of an after-show jam in Brownsville in December 1958.

Next stop: Comet Drive In, Connellsville PA.

Nov. 29: Skyview Drive-In, Carmichaels PA

It’s Day 333 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. Having finished my sweep of the drive-ins of the southern US, it was time to return to Pennsylvania to start the final survey of mostly closed-for-the-season theaters. It took over 5½ hours to drive from the Twin City Drive-in in Bristol TN through the full height of West Virginia to the Skyview Drive-In just a bit north of the border in Carmichaels PA.

The origins of the Skyview, and even its early spelling, aren’t perfectly clear. To start, every anecdotal reference I’ve found, including the drive-in’s official Facebook page, says that it opened in 1946. They’re all wrong – it was 1948. The 1948-49 Theatre Catalog listed the Carmichaels Drive-In as under construction at that point. A later newspaper clipping mentioned a lawsuit against the drive-in’s owners which alleged “when the theater was opened in 1948, reddog and earth was heaped up near the headwaters of a brook” and so forth.

Was it really called the Carmichaels? If so, not for long. The 1949-50 Catalog listed it as Carmichaels, and Pittsburgh radio station WESA‘s list said it was “Formerly The Carmichael’s Drive-In”. Yet its first advertisements in the newspapers of nearby Uniontown in summer 1950 were as the “Sky View”.

And then there’s the spelling issue. Its vintage sign shows it as the Sky View in all caps and a small gap between words, exactly like those first newspaper ads. By the 1960s, those ads were for the Sky-View, with a hyphen. Today its official Facebook page calls it the SkyView, one word, two capital letters. But the logo and the self-description on its web site has it Skyview, one word, one capital, so that’s how I use it.

From all accounts, Louis Stuler and Duard (or Durwood) Coe owned the drive-in from the time it opened. Stuler passed away from a heart attack at the age of 47 in 1961. Coe continued to own the Skyview for a while after that.

By 1978, the Cinemette Corporation of America had taken over the Skyview, and by 1984 it was owned by G & G Theaters, Inc. Then it all gets fuzzy for a while. The Southwest Pennsylvania Rural Exploration blog says that the Skyview’s “second screen and additions to the original screen (to facilitate wide-screen format) were added in 1986.”

Elizabeth Walker started working at the Skyview in 1999, and her husband Charles became manager in 2001. Together they bought the drive-in in 2007 and still own it today.

In 2011, the Walkers told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that they run the Skyview for the same reasons that patrons come. “The way I see it, you’re not going for the movie when you’re going to the drive-in,” Charles said. “You’re going for that fancy little word: nostalgia. It’s a piece of the past. It’s romantic.”

The Almanac of Pittsburgh wrote in August 2013 that the Walkers pooled their retirement savings and received money from two donors to buy used digital projectors. “We decided we would do everything we could to ensure it didn’t go down on our watch,” Charles said. This year, one of those projectors went bad, but they bought a replacement and kept on going.

The embedded YouTube video of the day has a dreamlike quality to it as shapes bend and wobble with the movement of the camera. I don’t know whether that’s intentional, but it’s kind of fun.

Miles Today / Total: 346 / 38614 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 199

Nearby Restaurant: The Hungarian Smokehouse in Carmichaels only offers its food to go, but it was worth stopping there to pick up dinner anyway. The special of the day was wings, cooked with a special smokehouse sauce. (I could have ordered Billy’s hell, but it sounded and smelled too frightening.) I added a side of baked beans and fries, and I was ready to bring my feast back to my hotel room for a relaxing dinner alone.

Where I Virtually Stayed: Surprisingly, Google doesn’t show any hotels very close to the Skyview, so I had to travel 11 miles west to Waynesville. There’s a Hampton Inn there, so that’s very good news. I had to drive through a shopping center parking lot to get there, but it had cookies and coffee waiting at check-in, a comfortable room with a king bed and all the modern amenities, and the great Hampton breakfast in the morning. When I drove back out past the Wendy’s, I wasn’t tempted to stop.

Only in Carmichaels: The Skyview is almost certainly the only drive-in theater across the street from a courthouse. Mind you, the building that holds the Magisterial District Judge of the Eastern District of Greene County looks more like a strip mall than a capitol. I’ll bet the judge’s decisions are just as binding as they’d be in a more ostentatious setting.

Next stop: Brownsville Drive-In, Grindstone PA.

Nov. 28: Twin City Drive-in, Bristol TN

Twin City Drive-In marquee

Photo from the Twin City Drive-In Facebook page

It’s Day 332 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. My drive was less than an hour and a half, heading down from the Central Drive-In Theatre, a few miles west of Norton VA, to the Twin City Drive-in just over the border in Bristol TN.

The Twin City was built in 1949 by Raymond Warden and Bo Diggs. In 1956, Diggs took it over, and in 1974 he sold it to his nephew Danny Warden. Danny and his wife Ellen Warden still own the place.

The Wardens have endured two crises. A tornado ripped off two-thirds of the original screen tower on Oct. 1, 1977, but the Wardens erected a replacement before the next weekend’s movies.

The second crisis arrived more slowly and I’m not exactly sure how it worked out. In August 2013, the Wardens were raising the alarm that they might have to sell the Twin City because of the need to switch to digital projection. “We’re going to show through this year, and unless something changes, that might be it,” Danny told the Johnson City Press. “You never know, though, we’ve had a couple of people who say they might be interested in buying it. If someone buys it and switches to digital, then it will stay open.”

Ellen had a slightly different perspective a couple of weeks later, quoted in the Bristol Herald Courier. “The digital conversion is something we can afford and we are blessed to be in that position because of the good business decision we have made over the years,” she said. “People have been buzzing around Facebook that they are scared we are going to close. As long as we can get those 35 mm prints, we’ll keep showing movies for those who show up. But with a digital projector, I don’t think it will be if, but when.”

As I said, I’m not sure exactly what happened, but by early 2014 the Twin City had its digital projector, and the Wardens still appear to be around. The Bristol Raceway is less than a mile away, and during race weeks the drive-in becomes a campground. This August, Ellen told WCYB, Bristol’s News Leader, “When we first started this in ’95 we filled up and turned them away,” but 2017 had been a disappointment.

I just missed the last weekend of the season; this place stayed open later than I had expected. I’m still looking for one more movie to reach my goal of 200.

Miles Today / Total: 63 / 38268 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 199

Nearby Restaurant: With the drive-in closed, I went looking for an old-fashioned diner and wound up at the Old Lighthouse Diner. It offers full-pound hamburgers, which were a bit much even for me. I picked a late breakfast instead, the Captain’s Breakfast with eggs, bacon, home fries, a griddle cake and coffee. Griddle cakes rule!

Where I Virtually Stayed: The top-rated hotel in town is the Fairfield Inn, so I chose it over the Hampton Inn. My room at the Fairfield had something that this Hampton didn’t – a mini-fridge. Plus there were cookies and coffee waiting for me at check-in and a nice breakfast in the morning featuring omelettes and bacon. It was one of the nicest Fairfields I’ve visited so far.

Only in Bristol: Bristol is home to a 70-foot long, three-story Grand Guitar. As Roadside America explained, Joe Morrell built it as a gateway between the interstate and his hometown of Bristol, the self-proclaimed “Birthplace of Country Music.” It opened in May 1983, it opened to the public and housed, among many other things, Morrell’s personal collection of hundreds of musical instruments. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.

Next stop: Skyview Drive-In, Carmichaels PA.