San Angelo TX Drive-In History – Read It Twice

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Drive-in screen nearly destroyed by flames

The Jet Drive-In screen burning in Nov. 1968. This is a detail of a larger, better photo in the San Angelo Standard-Times

Here’s a story for you. Yesterday I was continuing some research on a drive-in project that’s been consuming a lot of my time, and I ran into a photo of the marquee of the Twin Vue Drive-In. It was in an ad from a sign company and didn’t indicate where this drive-in was located. So I figured that name was unusual enough that I could pinpoint where that sign once stood.

I was wrong. Even though the “Twin” part of the name suggests a drive-in that started after the biggest boom times, there were still maybe a half dozen different Twin Vues in one or two words, with or without hyphen. And one of the references to one of those Twin Vues was this page, an April 2009 article by Rick Smith for the San Angelo (TX) Standard-Times, in which he efficiently summarized the nine drive-ins that had once operated there. Number Nine was a Twin Vue, of course.

This morning, my drive-in news sweep gave me a jaw-dropping coincidence. In yesterday’s Standard-Times, Alana Edgin also, completely separately, summarized the history of the nine drive-ins that had been active in San Angelo. The report’s style and a few of the details are different, and since Edgin later thanked me for pointing out Smith’s article, it was probably original, parallel work. But if you’d watched that scene in a movie, you’d never have believed it.

There are a few interesting photos in yesterday’s story, including one of the horrific demise of the Jet Drive-In, and the remarks in both articles are well worth reading. So now you should go read both of them!

Video: Cascade Officially Closes

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This is so sad. I wrote that the Cascade Drive-In in West Chicago IL was in danger of closing because of its landowner’s desire to sell its space. Now drive-in owner Jeff Kohlberg has officially pulled the plug.

As the Daily Herald reported, Kohlberg wrote “Not often that you see a thriving business close. But it’s out of our hands.”

We can celebrate the decades of fun and entertainment that the Cascade gave countless drive-in patrons even as we know that everything changes. Here’s hoping that another new drive-in sprouts to take the Cascade’s place.

West Chicago’s Cascade On Shaky Ground

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The Cascade Drive-in of West Chicago IL is in danger of being unable to open for the 2019 season because of its landowner’s renewed efforts to sell the parcel that includes the drive-in. That’s according to a story in the Daily Herald of suburban Chicago this week.

Like too many other drive-ins, the Cascade doesn’t own the land it’s on. It dodged a bullet in 2016 when West Chicago denied the landowner’s request to redevelop the site as a truck terminal facility. “The Cascade is one of the busiest movie theaters in the country,” owner Jeff Kohlberg told the Daily Herald that year. “It’s not like it’s a dilapidated drive-in.”

Despite the Cascade’s success, its active life may be over. In this week’s story, the Daily Herald wrote, “The Kuhn family owns the drive-in site and adjacent parcels totaling 53 acres, including a hot dog stand and the former headquarters of Harry Kuhn Construction. Stephen Kuhn said he has hired a new real estate broker to sell the site to a developer, ideally all in one piece.”

Kohlberg said he’s reached out to his landlord, offering to continue the previous terms of his lease, operating until an actual sale then vacating within so many days. But nobody has replied, leaving the Cascade’s owner uncertain whether to begin getting ready for his traditional opener in early April.

“I’m still holding out hope,” Kohlberg said. “If we don’t open in April, it looks like it’ll never open up at all.”