Now surely we have some memories of the Pioneer Drive-in. My strongest memory was actually a couple of years after graduation. I remember going to watch the Woodstock movie almost every night it played there.
When I was little I remember my folks taking us to see The Shaggy Dog. It must have been a Friday or Saturday night because the place was totally full. I know we went there many times when I was little. A dollar a carload. Pretty cheap entertainment for parents with a buch of kids.
For years, it seems like we went every couple of weeks in the summer. Five kids got 2 movies for a dollar. What could be better? Once, my father ran over one of the speaker poles and broke it off at the ground. I asked if he was going to tell anybody, and he said that he knew the owner of the Pioneer Drive In and would call him up. A couple of days later, worried that he might be arrested, I asked if he had called; and he said no but that he would. The next time I asked he said that he was just getting ready to call. Somewhere along the line, I realized that the owner of the drive in was not a family acquaintance, and that the sooner the incident was forgotten, the better.
My mom took us to the Pioneer one night in the summer. My older brother sat in the front seat and at one point in the movie, wouldn't stop talking. It being summer, all the windows were down. My mom, exasperated, finally lost it and tossed all the ice and water at the bottom of her Coke cup at him. He ducked, it went out the window, and hit the guy next to us, his window also down. Boy was he mad.
When we first moved to Tempe (3rd grade), we lived on 48th Street down near Baseline. 48th was a dirt road back then with lots of hay trucks going up and down it. To see a movie, it was closer for us to go west on Baseline to the Silver Dollar, on Baseline and Central.
Whatever happened to the Japanese Flower Gardens? And there were these steel lids from 5 gallon paint cans nailed to telephone poles at intersections all over the valley, put up by some old guy (probably a Scot). They had these cryptic markings on them, some system the guy had devised to tell you where you were . . . . . . . these days he'd be a software engineer.
