News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
Homemade cuspidor mounted chin-high in restroom in Advance, Mo, McDonald’s.
The manager gave his customers credit for the ability to handle two tasks at once, but he must not have trusted their aim. That level of confidence should give some comfort to the deer at the start of hunting season.
Reader Toni Eftink asked, “Wasn’t there a drive in right outside of Cape near Blomeyer? I think the screen is even still up…has a lot of vines covering it, but I drive past it on my way home to Leopold.”
Toni is a decade or two too young to have ever seen a movie at the Montgomery Drive-in Theater just south of the Diversion Channel on Hwy 25, but the old concrete screen is still there. She’s right, too, that it’s being devoured by creepy-looking vines like something out of one of the sci-fi movies shown ON that screen.
That’s the drive-in in the lower left portion of the picture. The screen is the bright, square object. The Diversion Channel is on the right. Click on any photo to make it larger.
I’m not sure I ever saw a full movie there. Wife Lila and I went there one night when we were dating, but the mosquitoes were so bad that we bailed early.
Used mobile homes and other structures have replaced the movie parking area, and thick brush has grown up around the screen. The screen is at the lower right part of the photo.
The roof of the projection / concession stand building has collapsed.
It looks like the building had been used for miscellaneous storage of parts by the mobile home folks along the highway.
Morris Montgomery, owner of the drive-in, said the original screen was made of redwood shipped in from Oregon. A Missourian story said a windstorm blew it down Sept. 22, 1965. Morris said the wooden screen was replaced with one made of concrete panels cast locally and supported by heavy steel I-beams.
The screen and its supports have held up well for being nearly half a century old.
Morris said the drive-in showed very few first-run movies. “The big movie theaters in Cape had contracts that embargoed those kinds of shows for at least 14 days.” TV and air conditioning took its toll, too.
Morris said they experimented with different ways to make the drive-in appealing to the cost-conscious.
They tried free Monday nights for awhile, counting on the $100-$150 in concession sales to carry the freight. That’s a lot of hamburgers at 25 cents each and hot dogs priced at 15 cents.
In 1958, you could bring in a whole carload for a buck. “Dad laughed about the night he saw a car coming in with just the driver, but the car’s rearend was dragging the ground. He stopped the car and said, ‘Get ’em out of the trunk. It’s a dollar a carload. I don’t care how many people you stuff in it.'”
I’m not sure when the last movie was shown. Morris said his mother and son tried to re-open the theater two nights a week – Friday and Saturday – in June 1980, but decided very quickly to close it for good.
While we’re talking about the Blomeyer area, the state just finished construction of a new roundabout at the intersection of Hwys 25 and 77. Some locals have said that the only problem is that it’s not big enough to accommodate the big grain trucks common to the area. The trucks have to drive up on the red brick area to make the turn.
The theater is located slightly to the north of this intersection.
I stopped in at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum in Altenburg this Wednesday afternoon to talk with museum director Carla Jordan about a possible project. I noticed folks like Lillian Fiehler buzzing around getting this year’s annual Christmas Display ready for the weekend.
Many of the trees are themed, like this one entitled Dressing for Christmas, which is decorated with gloves and hankies. This is a great place to get decorating ideas that are simple and not expensive.
I was admiring the red ornament that topped the tree Carolyn Schmidt was working on. “It came from Walmart,” she confided. They’re not afraid to mix the old and the new if the overall effect works.
“I’m glad there’s a label on this thing,” I told Carolyn when she introduced me to the Scherenschinitte – Scissor Cutting Tree. “If that wasn’t there to back you up, I’d think you were trying to trick me into running some kind of German cuss word.”
Autumn Hughey was doing a masterful job of coaxing beautiful colors out of chalk to draw a Nativity scene. “In case you were wondering, the donkey is brown because I didn’t have any gray chalk.” To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed, but that’s the answer in case YOU were wondering.
Carla said the display should be complete by this weekend. It will be up until January 15. If the first trees are any indication, it’s well worth the drive to Altenburg. To see another example of the quality of their exhibits, read my piece on the Vintage Hats of Perry County from this spring. There’s a map on the page, too.
The Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum’s website has more information.
If you go, tell them I sent you.
I’ve never been to the museum when I haven’t run into an interesting character. Wilmar Degenhardt, 85, looked at an aerial photo I shot in the 60s and exclaimed, “That’s the farm I grew up on until I was 18-1/2!” For the next hour, he lectured on the early German settlements and German history in general. He crammed in more information than you’d get in a college class. I was afraid he’d hand me a Blue Book and make me write an essay on what he had covered.
Here’s a sneak peek at the early stages of the Christmas display before all of the trees were up. Click on an image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the photo to move through the gallery.
I wrote that the roof of the Rialto Theater collapsed after a rainstorm back in June. A reader asked what was going to happen? Were they going to repair and reopen or just call in the bulldozers.
See the faint letters painted on the blacktop parking lot at the bottom of the photo. Compare this photo to one I shot from behind the theater five months earlier. There’s a lot of building gone.
I’m not surprised that the building was razed. When I shot interior photos of the building in February, everything behind the lobby had already been gutted to a shell.
The front of the building looks so much the same that I didn’t even bother to update the photo. Since what used to be the lobby is intact, I suspect that what used to be a movie theater will become regular office space.
I’ve done a number of stories about Cape’s theaters. Here are some links in case you missed them.
I’ve been in Cape for exactly a month. I have a couple of loose ends to tie up, then I’ll be packing everything up for the journey back to West Palm Beach. Once I get back there, I have to install everything onto a newer, spiffier computer. One of the two mirrored hard drives on my old machine died while I was on the trip, so Kid Matt convinced me to replace the whole machine instead of throwing money at an old box. I’m excited about a faster computer; I’m not excited about having to reinstall all the applications.
What all this means is that you may not be seeing as much stuff as usual over the next week or so. With Turkey Day coming up, I imagine you’ll be busy with family and holidays anyway. If you’re bored, go back and read some of the old stories. Folks add new comments to old posts almost every day.
I’ve given up chasing advertising, but I’m still kicking around some book options. I’ll let you know how that’s going when I know where it’s headed.