Edwards Drive-In, Live Oak & Peck Road, Arcadia, 1948

Ah, yes, the wonderful double bills featuring The Boy With Green Hair and That Wonderful Urge.  Quite a combination, eh?  Wow.  The Boy With Green Hair, starring Dean Stockwell, was released in 1948, a little before my time.

The Edwards Drive-In Theater, located at 4469 East Live Oak Avenue, Arcadia, CA 91006 was a frequent venue for our family’s movie going.  Lots of Disney movies in those days.  We saw the Swiss Family Robinson here.  Loved the plush Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse. at Disneyland.  Odd that I would remember that.  Saw the 1955 Disney movie Lady and the Tramp.  So how could I have seen it if it was released in ’55?  Reissues.  It was reissued in ’62 and ’72.  I saw it sometime in ’67 or ’68.  

See here, but according to Cinema Treasures . . .

Architect S. Charles Lee designed a number of drive-ins during his career and some theaters for James Edwards, II.  

Architect S. Charles Lee designed a number of drive-ins during his career and some theatres for James Edwards II. Edwards Theatres opened this drive-in, designed by Lee, in 1948. Other Lee-designed theatres for Edwards were the Tumbleweed in El Monte, the original Temple in Temple City, and the Tujunga in Tujunga.

This 750-car site was taken over by Pacific Theatres in 1954 and until its closing and demolition in the late-1980’s it was always called Edwards Drive-In.

Here is a clip:

And this classic with Tyrone Power, my mom’s favorite, and Gene Tierney.

If my memory serves me there was an Altadena Dairy farm across the street at the northeast corner of that intersection.  Loved the smell of dairy-farm manure from across the street as I watched the 1968 classic, Herbie the Love Bug. 

Be sure to check out a few drive-in resources here and here.  

Old Hastings Ranch Drive-In

The Big Sky Drive-In Theater, 1981

O, the good ol’ double-billed movies playing at the Big Sky.  The drive-in must have been torn down in 1984, for the city began building the Gemco in April of 1985.  Lunchwagon Girls was released in 1981, and Cheerleaders, or The Cheerleaders, was originally released in 1973; it’s re-released here as a double-biller.  In 1977, I saw the movie The Other Side of Midnight here.  Before that, I saw in 1972 everybody’s favorite for that year, Deliverance.

I found this old advertisement for the Big Sky Drive-In.  The resolution is not great; though the print is small and blurred, it is readable.  One of the movies the outdoor theater featured was Under Ten Flags with Van Heflin and Charles Laughton.  Never saw it, but you can see it now for free at home.  That’s what disturbs me about technology–it has a way of keeping people indoors, such a contrast from my days of growing up in Duarte.

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On Wednesday, August 4, 2021, I posted this movie, Vanishing Point, 1971, starring Barry Newman, on Facebook.

Joe saw the post and wrote,

We saw that movie at the Big Sky, I believe.

to which I replied,

That’s right!!

I found this other photo of the Big Sky.  I don’t think it’s as good as the one above, but what I do like about it is that it captures the old Kinney’s Shoe store where many of us Duarteans used to shop for shoes.  Love it.  Even the smallest capture of those days is terrific.

What I don’t like are the folks who come to Duarte and try to position themselves as the official narrator of the town, overlay their disparate narratives onto or about Duarte, a niche they’ve carved out for themselves through mediocre work made worse by the fact that they like to sidle up to people with some officiating power, like council members, like local police officers, like school busybodies all in the hopes of garnering some special privilege that they will fashion themselves worthy of.

Thank you to the Claremont Colleges digital database. https://bit.ly/3iVWUwS

The photo below is a 1960 shot of the Big Sky Drive-In with my old Northview Jr. High School, opened in 1950, to its right.

Find a larger photo of this pic at TESSA. https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/ref/collection/photos/id/6874

So many memories of that school.  Will never forget Mr. Krum, the PE teacher.  Or Mr. Cooper, the Wood Shop teacher, in whose class I made a napkin holder, about which I would later spin a short story around in Dr. Hertz’s PCC short fiction class.  Or Mrs. Atherton, my Math teacher.  And of course, there was always Mr. Rodriguez, our Spanish teacher.  He was a decent man.  I will never forget how the Jackson 5 song, “ABC,” used to play in my head while walking to one of the bungalow classrooms on the west end of the campus, to Mrs. Atherton’s math class, I believe.

 

Crest Movie Theater, Monrovia

Thanks to Cinema Treasures for the above picture.

Well, perhaps my doubts and questions about whether this was the Crest (or Lyric) Theater, located at 205 East Foothill Blvd. in Monrovia, 91016, have been laid to rest. I found this site that the Monrovia City Library has assembled and on it is this very picture of the Crest. I thought that the Foothills had loomed larger than they do here in this picture, which seems to be cut out slightly.  I used to get dropped off at the theater with friends or my brothers and pay $.25 for a movie. It was in this theater back in the mid-’60s that I used to see some of the old war reels. They must have referenced the Vietnam War but could have been about military build-up in general. Those were great days . . . if, in fact, that is the old Crest Theater in Monrovia. Here are a few comments by some who knew the theater first-hand as a youth.

If the theater in the picture above is not the Crest theater on Foothill Boulevard in Monrovia, then it is probably the Crest Theater in Sacramento, California, not Monrovia, California.