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.

It’s Day 361 of my virtual Drive-In-a-Day Odyssey. On another cold, sunny day, it took barely 20 minutes to drive the short distance from Becky’s Drive-In just east of Walnutport PA to Shankweiler’s Drive-In Theatre in Orefield PA.

Shankweiler’s is the oldest drive-in still in operation, and it was probably just the second drive-in theater to open, period. Kerry Segrave’s book Drive-In Theaters lists the opening date as April 15, 1934, echoed on the drive-in’s own excellent history page, but calls the date “questionable”. If it’s accurate, Shankweiler’s opening comes before the next known drive-in, a very short-lived enterprise in Galveston TX.

Its humble beginnings are a big reason why it’s hard to independently fix the date. Wilson Shankweiler was a movie buff who saw the original Camden NJ drive-in while on vacation in 1933. As Segrave writes, “Behind the hotel he owned in Orefield was a deserted (biplane) landing strip, which Shankweiler converted to a makeshift drive-in.” (The hotel building, still there, was converted to a funeral home in 2010.) “The first screen consisted of two poles and a sheet. A 16-mm projector sat on a table in the middle of the landing strip, while audio was provided by one large horn speaker down front.” Patrons could also walk in and sit on benches near the screen.

The company of drive-in inventor Richard Hollingshead later sued Shankweiler’s for patent infringement but lost. When locals instituted an amusement tax, the drive-in tried to dodge it by advertising free movies with a parking fee of 50 cents a car.

The first external reference to the drive-in that I could find in The Morning Call of nearby Allentown was on May 22, 1937 when an ad for Shankweiler’s restaurant added “Shankweilers’s Open Air Theatre Now Open” (for the season, I presume?) “Talkie Shows Every Sun., Wed. & Fri. Evenings”.

From there, Shankweiler’s evolved into a regular drive-in. It switched to in-car speakers in 1948. Hurricane Diane destroyed the projection booth and “Shadow Box Screen” in 1955, so the drive-in rebuilt with a CinemaScope screen and a typical concession / projection / restroom building.

According to Lehigh Valley Business, in 1958, Shankweiler rented the drive-in to Al Moffa, a close friend who had helped him build it. “The next year, Shankweiler sold it to Moffa’s manager, Bob Malkemis.” Electrician Paul Geissinger was working there as a projectionist in 1982 when the drive-in added AM radio sound to supplement the speakers.

Before he passed away in 1984, Malkemis sold Shankweiler’s to Geissinger and his wife to keep it going. (An article in The Christian Science Monitor said the purchase was in 1985.) In 1986, Geissinger built the first FM broadcast unit for use in a drive-in, as I once mentioned in an old article recap.

That Lehigh Valley Business article from August 2015 said that the Geissingers still owned Shankweiler’s, and it looks like that’s still true today. “I felt obligated to keep this place going,” Geissinger said. “I fell in love with the place.” It made the switch to digital conversion by 2013.

You’re not going to find many better drive-in profiles than the embedded YouTube video of the day from Retro Roadmap and Mod Betty. It shows what it’s like today and talks about its history, all in an entertaining package. Enjoy!

Shankweiler’s closed its season on Labor Day. I’m glad that such a historic place is still going strong.

Miles Today / Total: 11 / 39959 (rounded to the nearest mile)

Movie Showing / Total Active Nights: dark / 200

Nearby Restaurant: I don’t know whether Norma J’s Restaurant in Orefield came before or after the drive-in, so it’s definitely vintage. It’s not fancy, but it’s a fine example of Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. I had a huge omelette for a late breakfast, with enough coffee to make me forget the temperature outside.

Where I Virtually Stayed: The closest hotel to Shankweiler’s is about four miles away, a Holiday Inn Express in western Allentown. That works. There were cookies and coffee waiting at check-in. My comfortable room had all the modern amenities including a Keurig coffee maker. Breakfast was the usual high HIE standard including its addicting cinnamon rolls. All this and proximity too!

Only in Orefield: What, the world’s oldest surviving drive-in theater isn’t enough for you? Roadside America says you can also find a landlocked lighthouse in Orefield that really just a redecorated grain silo on a family farm.

Next stop: Sky-Vu Drive-In Theatre, Gratz PA.