It’s Day 365 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. It took less than a half hour to drive from the Cumberland Drive-In Theatre southeast of Newville PA to Haar’s Drive-In Theatre in Dillsburg PA.

The first inkling of the drive-in was in October 1952 when the National Production Authority allocated Vance W. Haar sufficient copper to build his drive-in. At the time, he said would cover 10 acres, hold 500 cars (with a possible later expansion to 1000), cost $41,200, and open the following spring.

The next mention was a March 24, 1953 ad for the annual Clean Sweep Sale at Haar’s Auction House. It said, “Don’t miss the Grand Opening of Haar’s new drive-in theatre, Friday, May 1st”.

The Gettysburg Times of June 10 had a note that Haar’s would have its grand opening on June 18. Haar now said that the drive-in cost “about $100,000” to build. This time the projected date was accurate, as proven by a grand opening ad that day. Billboard magazine belatedly noted on August 8 that the “520-car capacity” drive-in was now open.

Vance Haar passed away in 1973, and one of his sons, Boyd Haar, died in 1986. In its annual roundups from 1991 through 1998, The Sentinel of Carlisle wrote that Haar’s was owned by George Haar, brother Elwood Haar and sister Claribel Lecrone.

In 1999, The Philadelphia Inquirer had a fun article pointing out that residents of the neighboring townhouses and apartments effectively have a free season pass to Haar’s. “And there’s that funny echo that sometimes sours the sound coming from 500 little car-mounted speakers – especially when the lot has empty spaces.” The article said Elwood ran the theater with siblings George and Claribel, and personally hand-peeled up to 1000 pounds of potatoes per week for his French fries. “You’ve got to love it to do this,” he said.

In 2003, Haar’s opener was postponed a few weeks because of problems with the septic system. A Sentinel article that spring said that Vickie Hardy, Vance’s granddaughter, was company president. According to Haar’s About Us page, the transition had taken place on March 1 that year.

In June 2009, the York Daily Record reported that there were rumors that Haar’s would close. Hardy said that the ownership group had committed to keeping the drive-in open for that year. “After that, the group plans to chat again, Hardy said.”

The Dillsburg Banner celebrated Haar’s 60th season in 2012. At that point, Elwood was still running the projector but the spokesperson was Hardy, “current owner of the drive-in with her husband, Doug, her sister, Connie Darbrow, her sister’s husband, Al, and her cousin, Sandra Haar.” Haar’s converted to digital projection that year, as I wrote that May.

In early 2016, the owners determined that the original screen could not be repaired, so they had it torn down. Soon after was a bit of excitement when the debris caught fire, but that didn’t stop a new screen from going up. “We are looking forward to many years of showing fabulous movies under the stars,” Hardy told Lancaster Online.

The embedded video of the day is from WPMT, Harrisburg’s News Leader, celebrating the new screen that went up in July 2016.

Miles Today / Total: 22 / 40160 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 200

Nearby Restaurant: Pakha’s Thai House was not the kind of restaurant I was expecting to find in Dillsburg. It’s thoroughly Thai from its cuisine to its decor. For dinner, I enjoyed the cinnamon chicken with a side of seafood soup. All of these spices should help keep me healthy for the new year.

Where I Virtually Stayed: If you want to stay in Dillsburg, you’re going to need to stay at the Rodeway Inn. It’s humble, it’s not that bad, and it’s quite inexpensive. My room had a couple of double beds and all the modern amenities. There was coffee at check-in, coffee in the morning, and plenty of cash left in my pocket for breakfast at Wolfe’s Diner.

Only in Dillsburg: Every* New Year’s Eve in Dillsburg, hundreds gather downtown to experience the world-famous Pickle Drop. At midnight, a six-foot-tall pickle drops from the local fire department’s ladder truck into a pickle barrel and fireworks go off. Prior to the drop, they have live entertainment, children’s activities, themed refreshments like pickle soup and fried pickles, and ice sculpting on the square. *-Except this year because of forecast single-digit temperatures outside and no heat in Dillsburg Elementary School where some of the events are held.

Next stop: 2018.

It’s Day 364 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. Thanks to some very twisty highways, it took well over an hour to drive the 45 miles from the Midway Drive-In Theater in Mifflintown PA to the Cumberland Drive-In Theatre southeast of Newville PA.

The Cumberland has one of the nicest, most thorough Wikipedia pages that I’ve ever seen for a drive-in theater. You can go read that if you want the more recent play-by-play of its successful switch to digital conversion. Instead, I prefer to write about its origins, which were quite a drama.

The Valley Times-Star of Newville printed a front page story on March 26, 1952 about Donn Mowery, 28, whose indoor Newville Theatre had been totalled by a fire two weeks earlier. (Reportedly, the fire started when a floodlight touched an “inflammable” theatre curtain before a show. Fortunately, it occurred while the theater was mostly empty, so no one was injured.) Citing competition from the local Home Owners association’s subsequent decision to show movies in Memorial Hall, Mowery said that after the insurance appraisal was completed, he’d level the ruins and start building a drive-in theatre instead. The article also mentioned “remarks from L. O. Mowery (Levi, Donn’s father) to the borough council prior to the fire that the movie was losing money”, which was why the association didn’t expect the old indoor theater to be rebuilt.

In the April 2 issue, the Times-Star said that Mowery had purchased 12 acres from farmer Robert Mains, who had “rejected a number of offers in recent years for the site.” The planned drive-in would hold about 500 cars and open by July 4. Mowery later said there would be “seats for those who could not sit comfortably in their cars” if he could overcome material shortages. Still later, he said the drive-in would cost $80,000 to build, and construction began on May 21.

On July 9, Mowery announced that the drive-in, now named the Cumberland, would open on Friday, July 25, delayed because of rain. Two weeks later, he announced a postponement to August 1 due to flooding from a storm. With “several thousand dollars” of cost overruns and space for 550 cars and 60 chairs, that’s when it opened, showing Annie Get Your Gun. Perhaps because of its late start, the Cumberland stayed open through Nov. 29 that year.

An April 2003 article in The Sentinel of Carlisle PA interviewed Jay Mowery, Donn’s youngest son who ran the drive-in “along with his three brothers”. Jay said that his father was still “proprietor of the company” more than 50 years after its start. The article said that the family had leased out the drive-in in the early 1990s, then discovered they missed it. With family friend J. B. McNichol, they restored and revived the place.

Jay Mowery told The Sentinel in 2003 that he expected the Cumberland would one day be run by a third generation of Mowerys, but he didn’t seem eager to leave. “There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing,” he said. “You can’t really explain it. When the moon comes up behind the screen tower, that’s an experience that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Indeed, Jay was still there in April 2017 for an article in The Sentinel about the Cumberland’s 65th anniversary. It said that the original concession / projection / rest room building was still there too. Since it’s surrounded by preserved farms that can’t be developed, this drive-in should stay around for decades to come.

The embedded video of the day is from WPMT, Harrisburg’s News Leader, as an excited correspondent sees what a drive-in movie looks like when it’s projected during the day.

Miles Today / Total: 45 / 40138 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 200

Nearby Restaurant: The Cumberland is in the middle of so much protected farmland that, unless you count gas station convenience stores, the closest restaurants are in Carlisle. On a cold day with a closed (for the season) drive-in, I’m happy to see the word Diner. The Walnut Bottom Diner is open all day long, including breakfast all day, so it’s probably always worth a visit. I enjoyed some great biscuits and gravy with plenty of coffee to steel myself against the weather outside.

Where I Virtually Stayed: The closest hotels to the Cumberland are in Carlisle, and one of those is a Hampton Inn. For my penultimate odyssey night, I wanted my favorite chain. There were cookies and coffee waiting at check-in. My clean, comfortable room had all the modern amenities. Breakfast in the morning was the usual, high Hampton standard. I’m almost going to miss it when I’m sleeping in my own bed again next week.

Only in Newville: Once again Roadside America points to the most interesting sight, just a few miles west of the drive-in in Shippensburg. Tiny World is a city of four-feet high buildings made for and occupied by four-footed residents – cats. They were the work of retiree Ernest Helm. His reason for building Tiny World: “It was something to do.” Helm passed away in 2015, but Tiny World is still operating and looks especially nice when its buildings get colorful lights at Christmastime.

Next Last stop: Haar’s Drive-In Theatre, Dillsburg PA.

It’s Day 362 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. On an even colder, partly sunny day, my virtual odometer rolled over 40,000 during the hour and a half it took to drive from the historic Shankweiler’s Drive-In Theatre in Orefield PA to the Sky-Vu Drive-In Theatre in Gratz PA.

Norman Gasbarro’s Lykens Valley blog has a great history of the Sky-Vu. “In 1949, the land on which the theatre now stands, was sold by Allen Lincoln Shade and Etta May [Hartman] Shade to Eston C. Artz and Stanford E. Carl. Eston and Stanford established a partnership to create the Sky-Vu Drive-In Theatre in 1950.” The 1949-50 Theatre Catalog listed it as under construction.

The first newspaper reference I could find was its first ad in the Elizabethville Echo on July 13, 1950. It doesn’t quite say so, but it appears to be a grand opening ad: “SKY VU Drive-In Theatre welcomes you to one of America’s most unique outside theatres.” The ad described the Sky Vu’s benefits in copy that wasn’t repeated in the ads that followed. The Echo was a weekly, so the Grand Opening might have been a few days earlier, but some time in July 1950 looks pretty solid.

Contemporary theater reference books listed the Sky Vu’s capacity at around 230 cars. The 1951-59 International Motion Picture Almanacs said it was owned by G. Wolfe, and the 1961-66 editions said the owner was E. Hotz. I can’t find anything else about either of those people.

When ownership information resumed after a decade off, the IMPA’s 1978 edition listed “Trautman” as the owner. That matches another section of the Lykens Valley blog’s story. Around 1969, Marvin Troutman, son of Marvin and Ada Troutman, bought the Sky-Vu and the nearby Halifax Drive-In. “Shortly afterward,” he and his wife Doris formed Martro Theatres, Inc. According to the blog, they began running X-rated movies at both drive-ins, although the Sky-Vu’s newspaper listings from May 1975 had family fare.

At some point, the Sky-Vu must have closed, because the United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association wrote that it reopened in 1994. Several reports all say that the Sky Vu closed (again) in the summer of 2014.  A commenter at Cinema Treasures suggested that Carmike Cinemas’ purchase of Digiplex that May led to the closure. But Digiplex was founded in 2010, so someone else must have been running the drive-in before then.

Tim Neal told the Pottsville Republican Herald that Marvin Troutman still owned the place in 2016, as Neal announced that he and his wife Renate had begun a three-year lease to reopen the drive-in. Troutman’s daughter, Gina Troutman DiSanto, also included a digital projector with the lease.

“We’re very fortunate she was willing to take on the risk and we’ve been so blessed to have people helping us out along the way,” Neal said. “This has been a turn-key operation.” From what I can tell, everything’s been going fine ever since.

The embedded video of the day is from WHTM, Harrisburg’s News Leader. It does a fine job of showing what the place is like, and I’m really happy that it recognized the public-minded soul who donated a great-looking pinball machine to the concession stand.

The Sky-Vu closed its season on at the end of October. I’m glad that its latest lease on life is still rolling along.

Miles Today / Total: 75 / 40034 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 200

Nearby Restaurant: If you want to eat in Gratz, you’ll want to eat at Kissinger’s Family Restaurant. I stuck with the Pennsylvania Dutch food for its German roots. Kissinger’s knows how to make a real Bavarian pretzel, and I followed that with a veal schnitzel served with spaetzle. Add some cheesecake with peanut butter icing for dessert, and I was full for the rest of the day.

Where I Virtually Stayed: There simply aren’t any hotels anywhere around the Sky-Vu. Google suggested that the closest are 23 miles away in Pine Grove, so that’s where I went. To save $50 over the Hampton Inn price, I stayed at the Comfort Inn there. My older room had a full set of modern amenities, and breakfast included the Comfort Inn waffle machine to go along with the continental standards. It all worked.

Only in Gratz: Gratz is the birthplace of Carl Scheib, a major-league baseball pitcher with a most unusual career. When he debuted with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1943 at the age of 16, he was the youngest person ever to ever in the majors, but he didn’t win a game until 1947. Scheib’s hitting was so good and his pitching so lackluster that, according to Baseball Reference, he was much more valuable at the plate than on the mound. Last year, Lawrence Knorr released a new biography of Scheib, still the youngest player in American League history.

Next stop: Midway Drive-In Theater, Mifflintown PA.