Here’s more good news from the continuing saga of the Starlite Drive-In Theatre in Wichita KS. Owner Blake Smith, who also owns the Admiral Twin Drive-In in Tulsa OK, received an extension on the loan that the city of Wichita gave him to buy the Starlite’s digital projectors. The full story is available, with a bit of video that I can’t embed here, at KWCH, Wichita’s News Leader.

The Starlite began its life as the single-screen Rainbow in 1953. The drive-in underwent extensive renovation in 1974, including a large new projection and concession building and a second screen, and became the Landmark Twin. In the intervening years, the name morphed into the Landmark Starlite and then to just the Starlite that it is today.

The struggles began in 2016. After longtime owner Jim Goble passed away, Chuck Bucinski bought the Starlite, but soon began saying the drive-in was in financial trouble. In the summer of 2018, he pursuaded Wichita to change the Starlite’s zoning to allow for industrial uses, “strictly for estate-planning purposes”, but announced its permanent closure in October that year. The community rallied, and Smith was able to buy the drive-in to keep it running.

The Starlite did well in 2019. Smith said he was considering selling season passes for 2020. Uh oh. The Covid pandemic tamped down the Starlite’s business that summer, and audiences have been slow to return in the years since.

Part of the package deal that Smith got in 2018 was a loan from the city to buy new digital projectors to replace the pair that were no longer there after Bucinski’s departure. That $200,000 was a heavy burden considering the covid-initiated drop in attendance. From KWCH’s report, the city council was delighted to help keep the Starlite open, extending the loan till 2031. It’s always nice when local officials recognize a drive-in’s value to the community.

Thanksgiving often means (for me) a trip from Carload World Headquarters in Denver to Kansas City MO for a family dinner, and that’s the way it went last week. On the way back, my family indulged me with a stop at the last active Stuckey’s restaurant, gas station, souvenir shop in the state of Kansas. That’s where I took a picture of the only six feet of real Stuckey’s in the whole building – a small display with several varieties of pecan logs, some hard candies, and a bag of pecan pieces.

The experience reminded me of a lot of the Route 66 icons that I visited just a couple of years ago. All too many of them are just faded suggestions of what they looked like in their heyday, the way that several buildings along I-70 are clearly repurposed or abandoned Stuckey’s. You can tell by their ceiling ridge.

And that got me thinking that just as Route 66 history parallels that of drive-in theaters, so does Stuckey’s history, sort of. Like drive-ins, Stuckey’s was invented in the 1930s, (by William Stuckey, of course), and most were built in the years after World War II. Eventually the total hit 368 restaurants in 30 states. (You can find a wonderful 1975 location guide preserved today on Flickr.) Although Stuckey’s locations numbered less than a tenth of total drive-in theaters, they too were found along major highways. They were also known for wide structures, in this case plenty of advertising billboards to lure motorists.

According to a March 2022 article in the Washington Post, the Stuckey’s chain might have begun fading in the 1960s when it was sold to Pet Milk. It definitely suffered after the late 1970s after Illinois Central Industries (ICI) bought Pet Milk in a hostile takeover. ICI closed and sold many Stuckey’s locations; by the time the family repurchased the chain, it was down to 75 stores. They’ve grown by a few dozen since then. More than ever, they’re concentrated in the southeast. The location near Paxico KS is the third-farthest north, behind outliers in Rockport IA and North Stonington CT, and about 35 miles east of the western-most full-sized Stuckey’s, in Italy TX.

As with drive-ins, I remember visiting Stuckey’s stores when they were still active, though past their prime in retrospect. Unlike drive-ins, the experience today is a lot different. In the past, Stuckey’s splattered its name and pecans all over each store and built-in restaurant. Today, you’re more likely to find a Stuckey’s fragment – the company calls it “the store-within-the-store concept” – than an old-time free-standing location. Even in Paxico’s Stuckey’s, with its tall roof ridge, most of its generic Kansas souvenirs could be found anywhere in the state, and the quiet restaurant showed no signs of pecans.

Like drive-ins, Stuckey’s was an American icon, albeit not as ubiquitous. Most of them are gone, and many of the remainders are not the way they were. They’re another relic of the postwar highway boom, and last week, I was happy to get just a glimpse of its history in action.