Man posts marriage proposal on drive-in marquee

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The Saratoga Springs (NY) Saratogian reports that a man in Malta NY proposed to his girlfriend using the marquee of the Malta Drive-In. Isn’t that sweet?

Chris Caro and Brandy Courneya had been “inseparable” for about a year, and on the evening of Dec. 22, he concocted an excuse for them to drive by the drive-in, which is owned by his brothers. Brandy, a night-shift worker, was a little sleepy and didn’t recognize at first why Chris stopped. When he gestured to the sign, she saw the words, “Brandy I love you / Will you marry me”. She said yes, and the two plan to marry this fall.

Tom Caro, one of the drive-in owners, said the marquee was also used by friends 20 years ago to congratulate Tom on his marriage. For more great photos and more details on the story, go read the full article in the Saratogian.

Iowa resident thinking of building drive-in

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It’s all very preliminary, and it leaves me wondering how little it takes to get on the morning news shows there, but somebody is talking about building a drive-in in Blue Grass IA. Maybe.

According to KWQC, the Quad Cities’ news leader, Randy Lorenz and his wife own nine acres of land on the west side of town, and in 2008, they tried to get the Reel-To-Reel drive-in built there. Except that the land between his property and the road was unavailable, so that stopped that pretty quick.

This year, all Lorenz has to do is to get through planning and zoning and engineering, and then start construction in the spring, with a tentative opening set for mid-summer. With a new name, which he hasn’t decided on. I hope it happens, but for now it looks like just a bucket of ideas.

To find out more about it, you might start with this page that was probably generated by a computer trying to translate the video report. It’s a decent transcription for a computer, but would be pretty bad if it turned out that a high school student was doing it for extra credit. Or you can play this link to the video of the newscast itself, or click the fragile, embedded version above if it’s still in this post. You’ll have to sit through about a minute and a half of welcomes and weather reports to watch the drive-in story.

San Antonio’s Mission may reopen, sort of

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I’m excited about the news this week. According to the San Antonio (TX) Express-News, the city may start showing movies again at the site of the old Mission Drive-In. The plans are part of a tax increment reinvestment zone that’s already going to include a library with a facade that looks like a drive-in screen. (You can read all about the library here. Click the link to see the artist’s conception. And click that Express-News link for a great photo that matches how I remember the Mission.)

You could say that the Mission is the reason I started Carload.com so many years ago. In those ancient times before Carload came to be, I lived in Houston, which had no drive-ins. To get my occasional drive-in fix, I’d drive out to a nearby town that had one. Before each trip, I looked around with the rudimentary internet and long-distance, pay-per-minute phone calls to find a movie worth seeing. As it turned out, the Mission won my business every time.

The Mission’s atmosphere was like no other drive-in. Within sight of a real 18th-century Spanish mission bell tower, all the cars packed in together in fairly close quarters. The crowd was a mixture of Hispanics and folks like me who don’t know 10 words of Spanish. Everyone was happy to be there in the cool evening, mixing together at the concession stand. Before the movie and during intermission, car doors were flung open and a rich mixture of Tejano music overwhelmed the drive-in’s speakers. Then the movie started, the music stopped, and we all shared a fun movie experience.

Toward the end of my stay in Texas, I began planning a web site to help drive-in patrons like me know what’s available and what’s showing. Then I moved to Colorado and started Carload to celebrate the dozen drive-ins that were still alive in the state. (Five have closed since then, and the digital projection conversion may claim more this off-season.)

If you’re going to keep a drive-in closed, perhaps the best use of the site is for a community library, especially if you keep the old marquee. I know that I said that I wouldn’t include any more stories about movies in the park that are supposed to be like drive-ins, but I hadn’t considered a situation like this. From now on, outdoor movie stories are eligible for mention here only if they take place at old drive-in theater sites. Are there any others like that I don’t know about?