Remembering The Old Posse-ettes Playground

By Lyman Hafen

The Starlight marquee carried the words “Closed for Season” through most of the year. But during certain periods those words would come down and some semi -current movie was listed on the board. My good mother-in-law never missed an opportunity to load our kids and all her other grand kids into the car and take them to the Starlight. At five bucks a car load there was no better way to show them a great time. I accompanied this festive group one summer night a few years ago. It brought back some deeply buried memories of that same place.

There was nearly three decades of distance between me and those memories. I had forgotten how long it takes to get dark when you’re a kid, how easy it is to get in trouble when you spill root beer on the car seat, how car door windows tend to break when you jerk speakers off them without properly unhooking them, how movies somehow don’t carry as much meaning when you’re wedged between six people on a seat designed for three. But the most important memory that surfaced that night was the long forgotten joy that filled a kid’s heart as the screen lit up with color and the sound flowed in through the window like a magical dream. And when it was over, how the car engines growled and the headlights flashed and you were so abruptly shaken out of the dream.

My kids got in on the tail end of all that. They’ll have their memories of the Starlight Drive-In. But the last few summers, as we drove out Sunset Boulevard, we noticed that the words “Closed for Season” have not come down. The summer passes and the marquee read the same …

“We’ve already seen that one, my kids joke. “We’ve seen it a million times.
And then … came the jolt of knowing that the drive-in was not just closed for the season, but closed forever. My kids and yours are the last generation, the last of the drive-in movie goers. Board by board the Starlight [came] down. We’re talking highest and best use--which is not the drive-in movie business anymore …

But it won’t be long before we routinely pass that transformed piece of real estate with barely a hint of what it once meant.
Published Fall 1991, St. George Magazine, used by permission, contributed by Peggy Hafen, mother. Condensed by Lola Esplin.