Category Archives: Missouri

Is this MO venue a drive-in?

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This looks like it could be fun, but is it a drive-in? Photo from the Lakeside Ashland Facebook page

I’ve found a place that dances on the edge of being a drive-in theater. That bugs me. See what you think.

It all started with listicle buried under another story, all published by a Quincy IL radio station. It’s a surprisingly accurate list of the “11 Missouri Drive-In Movie Theaters Still Alive in 2025.” Most of the entries matched what I’ve got for the state, which sadly lost Independence’s Twin last November. On the bright side, Number 11 was the new (built in 2022) Twin Crescent Drive-In in Buffalo MO, so I added that to my list.

The Twin Crescent, which has only one, permanent screen, is very much a drive-in. It has clearly marked paths for cars to drive up and park to watch the show and listen via FM stereo sound. (By the way, three miles away on the other side of Buffalo, an Autoscope operated for 20 years. That was a different kind of edge case – up to 122 cars all watching the same movie on individual screens. Is it still a drive-in without multiple cars watching a single screen? But I digress.)

The fourth item on the radio station list was “Lakeside, Ashland,” which is south of Columbia MO near the airport. The place charges by the carload. It has a permanent outdoor screen. And it has a large, grassy lawn in front of that screen, with a double-row parking lot farther back. You can see the layout on Google Maps.

Even Lakeside doesn’t seem sure what it is. Its FAQ page includes the question, “Is Lakeside a Drive-In or do I bring chairs and blankets?” The answer: “You can do both! We have VIP front row parking for the drive-in experience. You can also see and hear the movie very well from several rows back. However, most visitors bring chairs and blankets to sit on the lawn.” Those lawn tickets are $10 per carload in advance to park and get out of your car, or you can upgrade to $30 for a place to park and watch, including unlimited popcorn and soda.

If not for that front row, hearing the movie behind waves of lawn chairs via 1933-style loudspeakers, Lakeside obviously would not be a drive-in. If it included radio sound and a lot of single-row parking so that everyone could listen and watch the movie, then Lakeside would definitely be a drive-in. Instead, this place is where “most visitors” park their cars and bring their blankets to the grass near the screen. You could say the same for any city’s “movie in the park” night. But there is that one row that holds about 20 cars.

Kudos to the radio station for including this edge case, but is it really a drive-in? It’s a tough call, but I’m voting against. Call me a modernist snob, but the lack of in-car sound disqualifies Lakeside. That also means that if someone there installs an FM transmitter that fixes the sound for the first row or two, I’ll either need to change my mind or find a new way to draw the line between drive-in and not-a-drive-in. What do you think?

MO’s Pine Hill reopens

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Photo from the Pine Hill Drive-In Facebook page

I’m worried that I gave listeners the wrong impression Sunday morning. I was talking about drive-ins on Road Dog Trucking Radio, SiriusXM Channel 146. The show was Dave Nemo Weekends, hosted by Jimmy Mac. (Thanks, Jimmy!) Towards the end of the segment, he asked me about the future of drive-ins. Last week, I spent some time pruning the Carload drive-in list, and seeing a dozen healthy drive-ins shut down since the start of the pandemic left me a little bummed out. I gave an example or two of drive-ins that were reopening, but the fresh memory of those closures might have made me sound less optimistic than usual.

Now that I’m back to rummaging around for good news, I found an item that’s particularly close to home for me. The Pine Hill Drive-In in Piedmont MO had been in operation since 1953, but it closed in 2015 and was put up for sale soon after. I saw this historic, intact theater and hoped that someone would take over and get it ready for movies again. That finally happened when new owners bought the place in the fall of 2021 and reopened it just a few weeks ago on Memorial Day weekend.

Alva “A.B.” and Maude Jefferis built the Pine Hill in 1953 and lived in a house they also built behind the back fence of the drive in. Maude made the newspapers in 1973 when she photographed a number of odd blinking lights “high above the drive-in movie screen that stands beyond a pond in Mrs. Jefferis’s front yard.” The Pine Hill passed through another couple of owners after that, and I’m happy that it stayed active well into the new millennium. Now that it has fresh owners, I hope the drive-in can stay alive for another 70 years.

Updated Drive-Ins of Route 66 now shipping

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Drive-Ins of Route 66, expanded second edition, front cover

The updated, expanded, sometimes corrected Second Edition of my first book, Drive-Ins of Route 66, is now available from Amazon and your local bookstore (if you ask them to order it for you). Sorry I didn’t mention it earlier, but I’ve had my head down working on my next book.

Years ago, when I wrote the first version of this book, I was rushing to meet deadlines to exhibit it at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I was hoping that someone in Europe would want to publish a translation, the way I hoped that the PowerBall ticket I bought this past Saturday would make me a millionaire. Like that ticket, my German excursion only gave me the fun of taking part in the game.

Even as I was writing that first edition, my approach was evolving. I started with simple, straightforward descriptions of each drive-in with brief notes. As I worked my way west, I told longer anecdotes of the people behind the drive-ins. I carried that idea forward in my second book, Drive-Ins of Colorado, where I tried harder to focus on the owners’ stories. Humans are more interesting than buildings, even screen towers.

Meanwhile, that first book was becoming a little embarrassing. Nobody complained, but I could see a few mistakes. The first whopper was an omission – Marshfield MO was home to the Skyline Drive-In, with an entrance right on US 66. It didn’t last very long and never appeared on any topo maps, but Boxoffice had mentioned Marshfield’s Skyline a couple of times, so I felt bad about its absence. Then I saw that in using an incorrect third-party maps of old Route 66, I had overlooked a bunch of St. Louis-area drive-ins that were close enough to an old Alt-66.

In addition to adding the drive-ins that I’d flat-out missed before, I widened the search to include any within three miles instead of the arbitrary two and a half. I started writing the expanded version without a hard deadline, which was good because the soft deadlines I marked for myself went whizzing by as I kept looking for another photo or a new detail. The result was a book that I’m proud of, 95% rewritten with more drive-ins, more photos, and better stories.

On the other hand, the new book’s only been out a few weeks, yet I’ve already found a few areas that could be improved. I’ve got a new way of covering that – a corrections and updates section on the official book page here on Carload. This will also be a nice way for me to link to some great online photos that I couldn’t add to the book itself.

Anyway, please go buy my book and tell your drive-in-loving friends about it. When my next book comes out, later this year, I’ll tell you more about that one too.