The Palo Alto Drive-In

Kids running the bases these days at Greer Park have no knowledge that their ballfield was once a theatre — in fact, the old Palo Alto Drive-In.  And they wouldn’t be simply surprised to learn that the Drive-In once stood there, they'd also be befuddled by the concept entirely.  For those of a certain age, the drive-in theatre stirs up memories of halcyon days of teenage revelry, backseat love affairs, and Hollywood’s epic years.  While for the generations that followed, the whole concept of watching a movie in your car is a little hard to imagine.

The first person to imagine such a thing was the sales manager at Camden, New Jersey’s Whiz Auto Products, Richard M. Hollingshead, Jr.  After hearing his rather hefty mother complain one too many times about the slightness of movie theatre seats, Hollingshead began experimenting with projecting movies in his backyard. 

With a bedsheet nailed to two trees in his backyard, this lover of both movies and cars used a 1928 Kodak projector and a radio to entertain a few guests.  Playing with the concept, Hollingshead propped up neighborhood cars on cinderblocks until he had sketched out a design for the perfect car ramp.  It’s hard to imagine a simpler idea, but on May 16th, 1933, he received Patent #1,909,537 for his design of a ramp to allow passengers parked in cars to see over the heads — or rather roofs, as it were — of those in front. 

In 1941, improved technology allowed large speakers blasting the soundtrack to be replaced by small movable speakers attached to posts next to each car. The drive-in movie was ready for the big time.  After the war, the concept took off and by 1958 there were more than 4,000 drive-ins nationwide.

Palo Alto joined the bandwagon when the Peninsula Drive-In Theatre opened off old Bayshore Highway in 1947.  An ad in the Palo Alto Times beckoned viewers to “see the stars — under the stars” while promoting the grand opening week’s double feature which included teenage Shirley Temple’s “Kiss and Tell” and a feature-length Disney cartoon, “Make Mine Music.” 

The Peninsula Drive-In (later renamed the Palo Alto Drive-In) consisted of a 70-foot screen — said to be the largest in the western states at the time — a snack bar, central projection house, and semi-circular ramp with the capacity to hold 750 cars.  And the requisite small speakers could be hung inside the car (an announcement after the show urgently reminded viewers to put the speakers back in the receptacle before driving off.).  Indeed, at just 60 cents per adult, 14 cents per child, and “no charge for your car,” the Drive-In was one of Palo Alto’s most economical nights out.

Drive-ins primarily appealed to two rather different segments of American society.  They were perfect for parents who could bring little ones along in the backseat (often already in PJs) and enjoy a movie without paying for a sitter.  For teens, the drive-in offered a bit of much-desired privacy — especially if you parked way in the back.  A Nat King Cole song of the era proclaimed that at the drive-in “you’ll see more kisses in the car than on the screen,” and often kissing was just the beginning of the festivities.  By the mid-50s the adults had caught on, and drive-ins were condemned as “passion pits” by disapproving clergy.  In Palo Alto, as in other drive-ins, employees were known to patrol the lot, shining flashlights into cars when no heads were visible.

Indeed, in some ways drive-in theatres were never really about the movies.  After all, your front windshield probably wasn’t the best showcase for the world’s cinematic masterpieces.  The movies tended to be big and brash — Hollywood at its most gargantuan.  Palo Alto Drive-In fliers of the day advertise such long forgotten B-movies as “Wildfire” (“with thundering hoofs and thundering guns!”), “Summer Holiday,” (“a big Technicolor Musical!”) and “Stampede (“Roaring out of the Lusty West!”).  One flier goes on to boast that “a cast of 50,000” took three years to make the “Prince of Foxes,” and a pictures of Tyrone Power proclaiming, “I will use a woman’s lips as I use a sword…to conquer.”  Not exactly “Citizen Kane.”

Ironically, even as the movies got bigger and bigger, it was a smaller screen that would help bring down the drive-in.  After reaching peak numbers in the late 1950s, close to 700 drive-ins would close over the next fifteen years, including Palo Alto’s.  And as daylight savings time, color television, the VCR, and Cable TV all came into their own, drive-ins began to close up shop in the 1970s.  By 1987, there were fewer than 1,000 in operation nationwide and only about 400 today.

While many drive-in owners cashed out by selling their land for housing or office parks, Palo Alto’s drive-in became city parkland.  After closing, neighborhood activists rallied the city to purchase the land and combine it with bordering Amarillo Park to form a larger park.  Over the course of the next twenty years Palo Alto would construct the extended Greer Park in a series of phases — adding softball fields, basketball courts, and eventually a skate park located at its southern edge.

Today a visit to Greer Park provides no hint that these grounds once hosted a storied slice of Americana.  In Palo Alto — as in much of America — the drive-in movie must live on primarily in the minds of those who were there.