Apr. 2: Georgetown Drive-In, Georgetown IN

It’s Day 92 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. It took almost two hours to drive from Paris KY through Lexington and Louisville to the Georgetown Drive-In in Georgetown IN.

The Georgetown opened in 1951 with a single screen. It added a second screen around the turn of the millennium.

According to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, a storm blew down the screen in 1996, but owner Bill Powell, Jr. called some friends and repaired it. His father had purchased the Georgetown in 1965.

“If there isn’t a drive-in going with a 50-mile radius of your community, I just feel like the community would be missing out on something,” said the younger Powell. “I’m just trying to keep something from the past alive.”

The Georgetown’s Facebook page says that it will be opening in May. Too bad it wasn’t open this Sunday evening; with the weather in the 60s, it would have been a nice night for a movie.

Miles Today / Total:  106 / 10305 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 46

Nearby Restaurant: I try to avoid most chains, so this was my first visit to an El Nopal location. (It’s just a regional chain, but I’d been seeing them in Kentucky.) The lunch combo starring a spinach and mushroom quesadilla provided a lot of tasty food for not a lot of money.

Where I Virtually Stayed: There was only one choice within Georgetown itself, so this was the first Red Roof Inn visit during my odyssey. That worked out well; my room was clean, the free wifi was solid, coffee was waiting for me when I arrived, and the continental breakfast got me going the next morning.

Only in Georgetown: This Georgetown IN is the town that was founded by and named for George Waltz in 1833. It’s important to make that distinction, because Georgetown IN is an uncommonly common name. So don’t confuse it with the Georgetown IN that’s an unincorporated area in adjacent Washington County, or the Georgetown IN that’s another unincorporated area named for George Cicott, or the Georgetown IN that was yet another unincorporated area that died out by 1882, or the more populous Georgetown IN that’s a “census-designated place” at the northern edge of the state.

Next Stop: Holiday Drive-In, Rockport IN.

Indiana’s Starlite Gets a New Owner

The Herald-Times of Bloomington IN just came out with an article (subscription required) that says the 62-year-old Starlite Drive-In has been sold to Brent Barnhart, owner of KJB Theaters, a small indoor theater group.

This is Barnhart’s first drive-in, but he said he got a better sense of the way Starlite operates by shadowing the former owners, Mark and Yvonne Freeman, last summer. Drive-ins emphasize meals more than indoor theaters, for example. Barnhart said he’d keep most things about the same, probably, and that he’s offered jobs to returning employees. The Starlite should reopen for the 2017 season “early this spring”.

According to property records, when the old owners flipped the drive-in after owning it less than three years, their $131k investment more than doubled to $300k. That could be the take-home message for 21st century drive-in owners: You don’t need to hope that the land will be worth more later because the drive-in theater itself might be worth more.

Project Drive-In roundup 4: The list that wouldn’t die

In the third installment of our roundup of candidates for Honda’s Project Drive-In, I predicted that Honda would choose more than five lucky recipients of digital projectors. What I really didn’t anticipate was that Honda would reopen voting for the second set of winners.

With another round of voting comes another round of candidates that we haven’t mentioned so far, along with some (marked with an asterisk) who saw new stories about them after voting was extended. If you’re reading this, you’re already online, so go vote for your favorite!

* This drive-in was in a previous roundup, but a new story has been published about it after Honda extended voting for Project Drive-In.