Drive-In Nights: When the Movies Moved Outdoors
On a warm 1950s Friday, the evening's entertainment might begin with packing the family into the car and heading for a field at the edge of town. The drive-in movie theatre was one of the decade's signature pleasures.
An invention from New Jersey
The first patented drive-in theatre was opened in Camden, New Jersey, in June 1933 by Richard Hollingshead, who had experimented with a projector on his car hood and a screen nailed between trees. His slogan promised that the whole family could enjoy the movies together — no babysitter required — but through the 1930s and the war years, drive-ins grew slowly.
The 1950s boom
After the war, everything aligned: cars were plentiful, suburbs were spreading, land at the edge of town was cheap, and young families wanted an evening out that included the children. By the late 1950s the United States had more than 4,000 drive-ins. The recipe became standard:
- A huge outdoor screen, visible from hundreds of angled parking spaces
- A small speaker on a pole beside each car, hung on the window for sound
- A carhop or a walk-up stand for popcorn and drinks between features
- A double bill, cartoons for the children, and an intermission reel counting down the minutes to the snack bar
Teenagers, of course, claimed the back rows, and the drive-in became as much a social institution as a cinema.
The long twilight
Television, daylight saving time (which pushed summer start times later), rising land values and the video cassette era slowly thinned the drive-ins from the 1970s onward. Only a few hundred remain in the United States today — beloved, and kept alive largely by nostalgia.
Our Drive-In Nights word search hides SCREEN, POPCORN, CARHOP, HEADLIGHTS and STARLIGHT in the grid. Some words are easier to find than a good parking spot ever was.
