Daylight Saving Time hates drive-ins

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Daylight Saving Time photo

© Depositphotos.com/Siarhei Hashnikau

I hate Daylight Saving Time – that’s a singular “Saving”, the correct way to write it. I don’t like tweaking all my clocks twice a year. I don’t like losing an hour of sleep in the spring. And I don’t like what it does to drive-ins.

DST was never kind to drive-ins. For much of the country, the only months warm enough to operate a drive-in coincide with DST, and the result is a one-hour delay in the start of each evening’s program. For me, the difference between driving home at 10:30 and driving home at 11:30 is the difference between weeknight and weekend-only visits. And I’m sure I’m not the only patron who sees it that way.

The US nationally standardized Uniform Time Act that took effect in 1967 wasn’t a Chicxulub-meteor extinction event for drive-ins, but it was at least a chilling breeze to drive-in owners. Suburban sprawl took a stronger role by changing edge-of-town sites into prime development land, then premium cable channels and the VCR pulled away a hefty chunk of the drive-in’s audience. Expanding indoor theaters battled drive-ins for the remaining movie-going crowd, and with DST, the drive-in was always at a disadvantage. If DST wasn’t a killer, it was at least a burden.

There’s no annual Sprawl day or VCR festival, so the start of DST is my best chance to rail against the forces that closed so many drive-ins. My only other reminder is when we get the hour back in November, and for that weekend, well that extra hour of sleep feels pretty good.

Drive-in doesn’t mean drive into marquee

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damaged 99W marqueeKPTV, Portland OR’s news leader, reported how a car drove into the marquee of the 99W Drive-In in Newberg. Not only does the report include some video of the theater as it looks today, but KPTV also included a bit of home movies from the 99W’s construction 50 years ago. You really should check out the video.

The 99W is still facing the expense of the transition to digital projection, and KPTV’s report makes it sound like they’ll try to raise money while operating with film for one more year. Now they’ve got to fix the sign too, but one would hope that somebody’s insurance will cover that.

KOIN, yet another news leader in Portland, added a short slide show of the incident. Normally, I’d also link to the drive-in’s page, but I’m not sure whether to choose the official company web site, which has some great recent and old photos in its gallery, or the Friends of the 99W Facebook page, which is where the tilted marquee photo was first posted. So I guess I’ll mention both.

Drag racing during intermission is a bad idea

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Sunset Drive-In in Ahmedabad

The Sunset Drive-In in Ahmedabad, photo by Chobist

According to The Times of India, a couple of drivers in Ahmedabad got into trouble Saturday night by racing their cars during the intermission at a drive-in. Not racing their motors, racing each other. The story doesn’t name the theater, but it was probably the Sunset Drive-In Cinema there. (That theater’s index page suggests that its “auditorium” looks amazingly like a classic 1958 Life magazine photo of a Utah drive-in. But I digress.)

According to Chobist, the Flickr contributor who took the photo that’s next to these words, the Sunset opened in 1973 and is “one of the most popular hang-outs in the city.” It claims to have the largest screen in Asia, and it holds over 600 cars, plus a covered “sitting facility” for the carless.

Back to the Times story. The security officer working at the theater said that the two drivers started racing during intermission. “Soon, other spectators gave way to the car drivers for safety as the drivers were determined to perform stunts.” Five minutes later, one of the cars overturned, one car rammed another (kind of fuzzy on whether those two events were related), and other theater patrons then beat up the two occupants of the ramming car before handing them over to police. Sounds like another night where the in-car entertainment was even better than the movie. Whew!