Author Archives: mrdrivein

Dec. 11: Lynn Auto Drive In Theatre, Strasburg OH

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It’s Day 345 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. The drive across Ohio was just a little longer than I’d had recently, still less than an hour and a half from the Winter Drive-In in Wintersville to the Lynn Auto Drive In Theatre, northwest of Strasburg.

The Lynn is a treasure, one of a very few drive-ins opened before World War II that are still in operation today. It started its life as Boyer’s Auto Theatre, but when?

Almost everybody, especially the current owners, says that Boyer’s opened in 1937 after over a year of construction work. However, Kerry Segrave’s indispensable book Drive-In Theaters includes a list of the drive-ins that he could find with start dates that early but Boyer’s wasn’t on that list. On the other hand, The Daily Times of New Philadelphia OH wrote on May 26, 1939, “Boyer’s Auto Theater, the first of its kind south of Cleveland, will be opened to the public tomorrow evening … by Roland and Karl Boyer”. It’s possible that was just a season-opening announcement, but the tone sounds like a grand opening and the first ads I could find follow afterward. Even if its opener was as “late” as 1939, that’s still an amazingly long run.

Karl Boyer, brother of Roland (sometimes written as Rollin), was a partner in Boyer’s through early 1941 when Roland bought out his brother to settle a lawsuit between them.

The Lynn’s official history page says that Ward Franklin and his son-in-law Ray McCombs purchased the drive-in in early 1948. (They changed the name in honor of McCombs’ daughter, Judy Lynn.) Except The Daily Times wrote on Feb. 20, 1950, “The sale of the Boyer (sic) Drive-In Theatre near Strasburg to Ray McCombs of Jewett and Ward B. Franklin of Cadiz was announced today by the former owner, Rollin Boyer.” The drive-in stayed Boyer’s until the start of the 1951 season, when the ad for the Lynn Auto Theatre announced “Many Improvements, Including in-a-car Speakers and Ramped Ground”. I wonder if Boyer’s was still using loudspeakers in the 1940s.

The start of the heartwarming multigenerational era for this drive-in came in the fall of 1957 when Richard R. Reding and his son Richard W. “Dick” and his wife Eunice “Abby” bought the Lynn. They added a second screen in 1967. In 1970, Rick Reding joined his parents in the family business, and for the next two decades they owned and operated 12 theaters. Rick’s two sons Rich and Jamie now run the Lynn.

They added the modern marquee in 2005, converted one screen to digital projection in 2012, then converted the other the next year.

Cleveland.com wrote in 2013 that Rich and his family “live in trailers parked on the drive-in property. He said his life is tied to the place, the second-oldest operating drive-in in the country. … Reding said he learned the business at his grandfather’s side. The drive-in is in his blood, and, tough as it is, he can’t imagine making a living any other way.”

The drive-in closed for the season in October, and I’m glad it’s in good shape to return next spring.

Miles Today / Total: 62 / 38984 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 200

Nearby Restaurant: Campesino’s Grill serves up huge portions of Mexican food with beer on tap. Need more? I’m partial to the margaritas myself to cool off the heat from my carne asada. The fried banana for dessert topped off a wonderful, filling experience.

Where I Virtually Stayed: If you want to stay in Strasburg, you’re probably going to want to stay at the Ramada Limited there. There were cookies waiting at check-in. It had a bar with a putting green on-site and an adjacent McDonald’s. My king bed suite had all the modern amenities. And breakfast had a few hot items to go along with the continental favorites. All at a very nice price.

Only in Strasburg: Just south of Strasburg in Dover is the Auman Museum of Radio and Television. As recounted by Roadside America, the proprietor is Larry Auman, who has done a lot of collecting and restoration of mostly old television sets. “Larry’s museum is designed to appeal to more than just electronic gearheads. ‘I didn’t want to just show the TV sets,’ he said. Pop culture and accessory products thrived in the rich mulch of America’s most important invention, and Larry has lots of them: TV-themed toys, comic books, salt and pepper shakers, a novelty apron emblazoned, ‘No TV Until You Help Me.'”

Next stop: Magic City Drive In, Barberton OH.

Dec. 10: Winter Drive-In, Wintersville OH

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It’s Day 344 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. Driving mostly through West Virginia, it took me less than an hour to go from the Hilltop Drive-In Theatre, southeast of Chester WV, to the Winter Drive-In in Wintersville OH.

The Winter was a late entrant in the first wave of drive-ins, opening in August 1969. It was planned and built by the Skirball Investment Company, and it was huge. Its screen was about 120 feet wide, and its lot could hold about 1000 cars.

The Skirball folks added a second screen in the late 1970s, and the International Motion Picture Almanacs listed them as the owners through their 1988 edition. A commenter on Cinema Treasures said that the Winter “closed for several years during the 1990s”. The United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association said it reopened in 1997. Waymarking wrote that its third screen was added in 2001 and the fourth in 2004.

I don’t know who reopened the Winter and added all those screens. My first solid info after those events came this year when owner Ross Falvo and manager Debbie Harris noticed that they simply weren’t going to find many more current 35mm films to show. The drive-in had opened on one screen to start the season but would need to shut down without a way to play more movies. The embedded video of the day (from WTOV, the Upper Ohio Valley’s News Leader) talks about the Winter’s GoFundMe campaign to raise money for digital projectors.

Unfortunately, the results from that fundraiser was as disappointing as is typical. When WTOV celebrated the grand re-opening of the Winter on Aug. 24, Falvo had paid for two projectors himself. So two of the four screens were operational again, with a third planned for the coming weeks. Falvo said it was all worth it. “It’s amazing the people we get here on the weekends and weekdays that now are the grandparents that whenever they first started coming here were the children.”

The drive-in closed for the season in October, and I’m glad it’s in good shape to return next spring.

Miles Today / Total: 25 / 38922 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 200

Nearby Restaurant: The best place in Wintersville, Giannamore’s Pizza, is closed on Sundays so I went for a place closer to my hotel in Steubenville. It’s pretty much all they do, but the Capri Sausage & Meatball serves up some amazing Italian sandwiches. With easy take-out from their little place, I was glad that my hotel was within walking distance.

Where I Virtually Stayed: Google said the closest hotels to the Winter are in Steubenville, so that’s where I went. According to TripAdvisor, the best-rated hotel in town is (pausing to take a breath) Best Western Plus The Inn at Franciscan Square. Sure enough, my clean, comfortable room had all the modern amenities, and breakfast had a great variety to start my day, all at a surprisingly nice price.

Only in Wintersville: Data from Steubenville, just a few miles east, have become the centerpiece of air pollution studies, according to a 2006 article in The New York Times. It wrote, “Three decades ago, Steubenville’s reputation for having the country’s foulest air made it a magnet for researchers in the young field of environmental epidemiology.” Intergenerational studies were continuing on the residents still living it town decades after the polluting factories had shut down.

Next stop: Lynn Auto Drive In Theatre, Strasburg OH.

Dec. 9: Hilltop Drive-In Theatre, Chester WV

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It’s Day 343 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. There were more twisty highways this day, so it took almost an hour and a half to drive from the Starlight Drive-In, northwest of Butler PA, to the Hilltop Drive-In Theatre, southeast of Chester WV.

The Hilltop opened in July 1950, owned by Charles “Chuck” Pittinger with help from the Hanna Theatre Service. Hanna ran a lot of drive-ins back then, and Pittinger definitely has a Hilltop link. The Weirton Daily Times named him as the owner of the Hilltop Inn (in 1956), Hilltop Club (1959), Hilltop Lounge (1965), and Hilltop Inn again (1967). I’d bet that those were all names for the same place.

By the late 1970s, the Hilltop was listed as owned by “Anas Weir”. Was that a name, a company, or some of both? By 1984, it had dropped off the national lists. Brian Butko, writing in his book Greetings from the Lincoln Highway, said the Hilltop (just a ¾-mile detour away), “was closed from 1984 to 1989.”

Then the Hilltop’s history returns to solid ground. Longtime projectionist Joe Danko, who kept a ledger of every film shown there since 1951, bought the Hilltop in 1988. His daughter Katie Beaver helped resuscitate the drive-in, and she told the Daily Times in 2013, “We had to live down a reputation and prove that it was going to be a family drive-in again because they had been showing smut movies.”

They knew in 2013 that digital projection was coming, but in 2016 things got serious. In May that year, Beaver said she wouldn’t open for the season until she found a new projector. Today’s embedded video of the day comes from WTOV, the Upper Ohio Valley’s News Leader, as it reported the Hilltop’s plight from the drive-in’s empty field.

That changed a little in September 2016 when she found a distributor with a few current 35mm prints so the Hilltop could open for a few weekends, as recounted then in the Daily Times.

Over the past off-season, the Hilltop somehow found its digital projector. I can’t find any details except that the drive-in’s web site announced the change. However it happened, it was great news.

I had written about the Hilltop last year, but before my virtual visit I hadn’t grasped how close it is to the tip of the northern West Virginia panhandle. It’s barely a mile west of the Pennsylvania border and 2½ miles southeast of Ohio. The drive-in closed for the season in October, and I’m glad it’s in good shape to return next spring.

Miles Today / Total: 48 / 38897 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 200

Nearby Restaurant: When the drive-in is closed, I go looking for an old-fashioned diner. and when it’s cold and threatening to snow, I look for hot soup. Connie’s Corner took care of me very well for lunch, with homemade tomato soup and a fresh grilled cheese sandwich. In its cozy setting, it was the perfect antidote for late fall chills.

Where I Virtually Stayed: The closest hotel that I could verify was open is the Holiday Inn Express in the town next door, Newell WV. It was as nice as any HIE location, starting with warm cookies and hot coffee to take the edge off a blustery day. My room had the full set of modern amenities, and the standard HIE breakfast had those wonderful cinnamon rolls.

Only in Chester: The world’s largest teapot has been a fixture in Chester since it was built in 1938. According to the local library, it started its life as a 12-feet high, 44-feet wide wooden hogshead barrel for a Hire’s Root Beer advertising campaign. Its builder, William “Babe” Devon, added a spout and handle, plus a large glass ball for the knob of the lid. After a long life, it was restored by the city of Chester in 1990.

Next stop: Winter Drive-In, Wintersville OH.