Author Archives: mrdrivein

Nov. 9: Park Place Drive In, Marion VA

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It’s Day 313 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. It took less than an hour and a half to drive from the Pipestem Drive-In north of Speedway WV across the Allegheny Mountains to the Park Place Drive In in Marion VA.

According to Virginia.org, this was the location of the old Park Drive-In, which the web site says was open 1954-1983. A photo on Historic Aerials verifies that it was there, although the screen was much closer to Park Boulevard back then.

My reference books don’t provide much help. The 1955-56 Theatre Catalog listed the Park owned by William MacKenzie Jr., with a capacity of 200 cars. The International Motion Picture Almanacs for 1955-66 listed the owner as W. Mackenzie, eventually adding the capacity of 200. The Park continued to be listed through 1976, then fell off the IMPA lists and did not return.

I wish I could find more about what prompted Jerry Harmon to rebuild the drive-in as part of an entertainment complex on the site, opening in May 2000. That must have been a great story. Film Snobbery described the place in 2011 as “a complete entertainment complex. There are batting cages featuring fast and slow pitch softball and three speeds of baseball. In 2006, a brand new miniature golf course was built. There is an arcade with an assortment of games, pool tables, and air hockey. Possibly the best addition is the ice cream shop”.

In 2013, Harmon told Virginia Living that the conversion to digital projection was on drive-in owners’ minds. “I think there’s some that will go out of business, and I’m currently trying to save myself,” he said.

The conversion went through at the Park Place, which showed a Jimmy Buffett concert the following summer. On that occasion, Harmon told the Bristol Herald Courier, “The drive-in community is rallying behind this concert – just as it has with the digital conversion efforts of recent years.”

I particularly like the way the viewing field is laid out at the Park Place, as seen in the YouTube video of the day. There are no speaker poles; instead each row has marked parking spaces. And each row is a paved terrace with sloping grass medians in between. Very nice!

Alas, the drive-in closed for the season in mid-October. It’s another dark night for me.

Miles Today / Total: 75 / 35271 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 188

Nearby Restaurant: Since I was already at the hotel (see below), I went to its great restaurant, The Speakeasy, for dinner. It serves a lot of hamburgers and beer, but is also capable of a more substantial meal. I enjoyed the rib eye steak dinner with a baked potato and broccoli with enough beer to wash it down and then some. After all, I wasn’t going to drive anywhere when I left.

Where I Virtually Stayed: After the sameness of chain hotels, it was a nice change to stay at the General Francis Marion Hotel, one of National Geographic’s Top 150 hotels in North America. Like the Park Place, it was an older establishment that was thorough refurbished and reopened recently, in this case 2006. The price was very reasonable for such a historic place. My room was comfortable and the wifi was solid, although I went without a fridge. In the morning, a free continental breakfast had me ready for another day’s drive.

Only in Marion: Harry Chapin’s 1973 single WOLD was only a minor hit, peaking at on the Billboard chart. When I brushed against the radio business a few years later, I was told that the song, about an aging, hard-drinking radio disc jockey on the phone with his ex-wife, hit too close to home to get much airplay. So I was very surprised that WOLD-FM is alive and well in Marion. The station predated the song by five years.

Next stop: Eden Drive-In, Eden NC.

Nov. 8: Pipestem Drive-In, Speedway WV

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It’s Day 312 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. Winding down WV Highway 20 most of the way, it took me less than an hour to drive from the Meadow Bridge Drive-In, in Meadow Bridge WV of course, to the Pipestem Drive-In north of Speedway WV.

The Pipestem was late to the first wave of drive-in construction, probably opening on October 5, 1972. There was a “Watch for the opening date” ad in the Sept. 21 Beckley Post-Herald, then on Sept. 30 there was an ad for a triple feature that “starts Thursday, Oct. 5”. The movies that night were Le Mans (rated G), Lawman (GP), and Southern Comfort (X).

The Raleigh Register of July 5, 1973, in the middle of an article discussing the legality of X-rated movies, identified Ronald Warden of MacArthur as the owner of the Pineville and Pipestem drive-ins. Warden said then-recent Supreme Court rulings hadn’t changed his plans. “It’s not for the money involved,” he said. “It’s not what we like – it’s what the public pays to see. I don’t want to quit a good thing until I have to. Every time I don’t have an X-rated show, business drops off.” He stressed that he always showed X-rated movies as the third feature.

The drive-in’s first appearance on my shelf of International Motion Picture Almanacs was the 1978 edition. (It wasn’t in 1976, and I don’t have 1977.) The Pipe Stem (sic) was owned by R. Warden and had a capacity of 285. That’s how it stayed through the last IMPA list in 1988.

In 2012, the Bluefield Daily Telegraph wrote that Kenneth Woody owned the Pipestem Drive-In and had been coming to the theater for nearly three decades before purchasing it. “We try to show family-oriented films and try to keep in that line of stuff,” Woody said.

WTRF, Wheeling’s News Leader, wrote in 2015 that Woody bought the Pipestem in 2007 “from the original owner”, which would have been Warden or his family, I guess, “because he did not want to see it shut down.”

The owner and his drive-in keep a low profile, making it harder to find out any of this history and stuff. “Woody, the owner of three other Mercer County businesses, said he depends solely on regular customers and word-of-mouth and does no advertising,” WTRF wrote. Even the Pipestem’s web site is just a semi-official thing on Drive-Ins.org.

One more note: I’m not 100% sure that Woody still owns the Pipestem. Sure, daughter Karen Woody wrote on that Drive-Ins.org page that her family owns the Pipestem. The WV Secretary of State shows that Pipestem Drive-In Theater, Inc., with officers Kenneth and Barbara Woody, was incorporated in 2007 and has filed reports through 2017. However, I’ve seen several business sources online that claim the Pipestem Drive-Inn (sic?) Theatre, same phone number, is owned by Jimmy Warden, and that its president is Patricia Warden. Is that an echo of the ownership before Woody bought it, or something else?

At any rate, the drive-in closed for the season several weeks ago. It’s another dark night for me.

Miles Today / Total: 38 / 35196 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 188

Nearby Restaurant: I stopped for lunch at Moe’s American, Greek & Italian Restaurant in Athens just south of the Pipestem. Of those options, I chose the pizza, which might have been more American than Italian because it came with the kind of New York-style thin crust that I prefer. I also saw a Philly cheesesteak on the menu – is that Greek or Italian?

Where I Virtually Stayed: The kind of hotels I tend to frequent were in a cluster in Princeton WV about 12 miles south. And since one of those was a Hampton Inn, well that’s the kind of hotel I really frequent. A Cracker Barrel was just across the quiet cul de sac, which was great for dinner. This Hampton had cookies and a popcorn machine at check-in in the lobby, which was a pleasant surprise, and its breakfast was the very nice Hampton standard.

Only in Speedway: Since Speedway is just a little unincorporated place, I’ll talk about Athens, a true town just south of Speedway and home to Concord University, which was founded in 1872. The town used to be called Concord too, but somebody noticed in 1896 that there was another Corcord in West Virginia, so it renamed itself after the famous Greek center of learning.

Next stop: Park Place Drive In, Marion VA.

Nov. 7: Meadow Bridge Drive-In, Meadow Bridge WV

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It’s Day 311 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. I-64 took me most of the way of my hour and a half drive from Hull’s Drive In in Lexington VA to the Meadow Bridge Drive-In in Meadow Bridge WV of course.

This tiny drive-in, which never held more than 180 cars, opened on July 4, 1953 as the N & R Drive-In Theatre, owned by Ned Garten. Details about its early days are very sketchy, and the part I find most curious is the number of times Garten tried to sell it. An ad in The Raleigh Register in July 1954 listed the “new drive-in theatre” for sale, and a similar ad appeared in September 1956. The “For Sale ads” got larger and more serious in June 1958, as Garten wrote that he was moving to Florida for his health and offered the N & R for $15,000, less than the cost of the projector. That might have been when the sale finally happened; the following year, one “Roger Ned Garten” of Ft. Pierce FL attended the family reunion.

The majority of what I could find about the drive-in came from a single lengthy article in The Register-Herald in 2013. That article said that after Garten, “the Thomas Theaters company ran it. Then one of the shareholders purchased the location outright.”

I turned to my shelf of International Motion Picture Almanacs to see how their information lined up. The IMPAs had Garten through 1959, then the drive-in was off the lists until 1978. By then it was listed as the Meadowbridge (sic) and owned by B. Hartley. In the 1980-82 editions, the owner was L. Thomas, which must be that Thomas Theaters that the newspaper mentioned. In 1984, the IMPA showed J. Boyd as the owner.

Now we pick up the newspaper’s narrative. “Word on the street was that the theater was going to turn X-rated because its screen faced away from the road. That’s when (current owner Howard) McClanahan stepped in and decided to make an offer.”

In fact, the Meadow Bridge had already shown a fair number of X-rated movies, a fact hinted at in the article and verified by 1973-74 ads in The Raleigh Register. Anyway, McClanahan was listed as the owner in the 1986 IMPA.

McClanahan had worked at the Meadow Bridge (or was it the N & R?) when he was young, and he maintained a day job until 2001. Since his retirement, he’s been able to devote his attention to his little drive-in. “I don’t know what I’d do if we didn’t have this place,” he told The Register-Herald. “Plus, I have this problem — when I buy something, I never get rid of it.”

The YouTube video of the day comes from WVNS, Lewisburg’s News Leader. It was shot in 2013 during the Project Honda contest to win a new digital projector for several drive-ins. The Meadow Bridge already had its digital projector, but was trying to win anyway? I guess it could have passed it along to a neighbor.

At any rate, the drive-in closed for the season several weeks ago. It’s another dark night for me.

Miles Today / Total: 105 / 35158 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 188

Nearby Restaurant: The best place to eat in Meadow Bridge is almost certainly Carol’s Restaurant, home of the local legend, Carol’s hot dogs. They’re grilled and covered in some homemade concoction of chili and other stuff. There’s also all the coffee you can drink and plenty of other standard fare, but what’s the point of typical food? For dessert, the chocolate cake was an excellent companion to one more cup of Joe.

Where I Virtually Stayed: One of these days, I feel like saying that there were no hotels anywhere near the drive-in, so I slept in my car. Not this time, not quite. There was a pretty good one, the Sleep Inn in Beaver, less than a half hour away. My clean, comfortable room had all the modern amenities, and breakfast even had hot sausage and biscuits. For a solid stay like that, the price was amazing.

Only in Meadow Bridge: Just up I-64 in Sam Black Church, there’s a historical marker for the Greenbrier Ghost. It reads, “Interred in nearby cemetery is Zona Heaster Shue. Her death in 1897 was presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her mother to describe how she was killed by her husband Edward. Autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition’s account. Edward, found guilty of murder, was sentenced to the state prison. Only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.”

Next stop: Pipestem Drive-In, Speedway WV.