Honoring silver screen’s outdoor era
Sixty years ago this week the first light shined on the big screen at the Motor In theater on East Trent Avenue.
A beacon to young lovers and families huddled in sedans built in an era when size was king, the theater was one of the first to bring the drive-in movie experience to the Spokane area.
“There’s quite a few memories here,” Darin Justus said Wednesday.
Next to the Justus Bag company his family has run for three generations, upward of 750 cars would file in to the theater lot on summer nights until the last credits rolled across the screen in 1986.
The only evidence of those memories today is a crusty sign, ripe with pigeon dung and taken out of commission last year when the city began enforcing its sign ordinance. Wednesday, that steel and fiberglass piece of Valley history came under the protective care of the Spokane Valley Heritage Museum, which hopes to place it in a new exhibit on the era of outdoor cinema.
The Justus family donated the sign to the museum after a visit from curator Jayne Singleton. She said she was eager to add it to the museum collection that already includes a sign from the East Sprague Drive-In and other movie-related relics.
If all goes as planned, museum patrons can look for the exhibit in late August, she said.
A chemical plant owner in New Jersey originally thought to take the movie-house experience outside. He shined a film projector on a bedsheet in his backyard, then in 1933 went on to build the first drive-in. Their popularity surged after World War II, peaking around 5,000 theaters nationwide in the late 1950s.
A Spokane phone book from 1966 lists seven drive-ins in Spokane County, including theaters in Deer Park and Cheney.
Twenty years earlier, the Motor In and the Auto Vue Theater on Division Street were the first, opening on the same Saturday night.
“For the surprise of your life – movies! Shown from your own car out in the open! Come as you are, smoke when you like, bring the kiddies,” touts an ad for the Motor In in the Spokane Chronicle the day before.
The first crowd took in “Doll Face,” the tale of an eye-catching burlesque dancer’s scheme to break onto Broadway that starred Vivian Blaine and Perry Como.
“There was quite a mixture of different age groups that would go to drive-in theaters,” said Doug Justus.
He used to bring his kids in the family station wagon to play on the theater’s playground equipment, watch the movie or just curl up in the back and take a nap.
The theater closed after two decades of declining sales at theaters across the country. Land values rose. Cable TV and VCRs started drawing moviegoers back inside, and drive-ins quietly disappeared from Spokane. The closest drive-in still in operation is in Colville.
But for those who still reminisce about nights under the stars on the screen as well as the stars in the sky, the museum hopes to preserve at least part of that experience with the Motor In sign. “Where it’s going to go is the right place,” Doug Justus said.