Here’s a video to tack on to the sad story of the closing of Guthrie, Oklahoma’s Beacon Drive-In for no good reason. That YouTube video, not the closing, is courtesy of KOKH, Oklahoma City’s News Leader.
Program note: Drive-in news was getting so slow in mid-January that I thought I could take a couple of weeks off. I was wrong. I’ll be catching up on the news for the rest of this week.
Happy New Year, everybody! I just wanted to let everyone know that my goal for 2026 is to post drive-in news about as soon as I get it. To make my work easier, I’m going to forgo photos and other graphics unless I really get inspired. I’ll link to the sources; you can usually find pictures there.
I’m also embarassed to say that I’ve got a huge pile of news that piled up last year. I plan to work backwards through the pile, posting the news with the date that I received it. That way, anyone searching for old news about a particular place ought to be able to find it. And here we go…
Reminder: Carload hosts a list of the Boxoffice magazines that are available through Yumpu.com. I just spent the last couple of days filling a lot of the holes in the collection and extending it a few years. As I type, you can find what’s available for 1948-1968.
As I wrote three years ago about this curated Yumpu list, Boxoffice used to host an amazing archive of its old issues, which were always the gold standard of theater industry news. In parallel, Yumpu also stored a lot of individual issues, but it was and is difficult to find any particular one, let along a chronological string of them. Alas, the Boxoffice vault abruptly disappeared about four years ago, so I went to work preparing this list of what’s available on Yumpu.
I keep figuring new ways to search for issues to fill the holes in the list. My latest: When I can find a copy of a given issue elsewhere, I’ll pick a headline phrase, then search for “yumpu boxoffice (that phrase)” to see whether Google has noticed it. That’s the source of most of the new issues that I added this week.
I’m surprised at the high percentage that’s available. Even counting the odd stretches (all of 1961, for example) where there are no Boxoffice issues on Yumpu, there are probably 75% of them over the 21 years I’ve listed. I compiled the whole thing mainly for myself, because it’s such a great tool for drive-in theater history research, and I’m happy to share it with you. Enjoy!