What a crummy way to start the new year. The Beacon Drive-In Theatre in Guthrie OK has shown its final movies. According to the Guthrie News Page, the drive-in was sold a few days ago and will be replaced by a credit union building.
The Beacon was built in 1949 and opened on April 22, 1950. Its final program was at the end of 2024, and sales negotiations apparently continued all of last year. It makes me deeply sad when a perfectly good, historic drive-in closes like that. Let’s all hope for better days ahea.
The Tee Pee Drive-In in Sapulpa OK is my guiding light sometimes. When I get depressed about drive-in closures, the Teepee reminds me that renewal is possible. Under the right owners, half-derelict drive-in theaters can come back to life with modern amenities and respect for the past.
So I enjoyed it even more than usual when the news crew at KOTV, Tulsa’s News Leader, took their families to the TeePee to see how much fun a December visit can be. The only drawback to the loving 3+ minutes of video they posted is that, unlike most news videos a few years ago, I can’t embed it here. Please go enjoy it on the KOTV page for yourself.
The extra-clean, newborn Tee Pee. Screen capture of a KJRH news video on YouTube
Joni Rogers-Kante grew up going to the Tee-Pee Drive-In just west of Sapulpa OK. The drive-in, sometimes spelled “Teepee,” lived a good long life from 1950 into the 1980s, then went dark off and on until its final shows in 1999.
Meanwhile, Rogers-Kante founded SeneGence USA. A few years ago, she got the idea of bringing Sapulpa’s drive-in back to life, and after many months of work, it’s ready to hold its grand opening on April 15. There’s a nice video about those plans on YouTube; too bad I couldn’t embed it for you here.
Technically, the Tee Pee sort of reopened last October, according to a story in the Tulsa World. It wasn’t quite finished, but it had enough together to show a couple of Halloween-themed films.
The screen was always in decent shape, though it looks better than ever now. The real trick to reopening the Tee Pee, in my opinion, was finding a way to overcome its traffic issue. Just a couple of years ago, there were two ways to reach the drive-in. You could loop around to the west and return east over a couple of twisty, slow miles of the original Route 66, now Ozark Trail. Or you could find a way across the 99-year-old Rock Creek Bridge, which recently reopened as a one-lane, 4-ton-rated bottleneck. (A third path might be to cut through the back of the VFW Hall’s parking lot.)
The Tee Pee’s owners neated sliced through that Gordian knot. They got a new road built to cover the one block from the current 66 to Ozark Trail, curling around the back of the viewing field. I’m a little chagrined that I never considered that elegant solution.
If you want to read more about the Tee Pee’s long history, pick up a copy of my book, Drive-Ins of Route 66, preferably the second edition, which had more photos and was correct more often. Just be sure to cross out the line that says “Closed: 1999”.
