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The Ninth Row
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Janet La Borne's remembrance of a time when girls
rarely held the advantage to choose.
The Ninth Row
By Janet La Borne
Remembering Friday nights in the early-to-mid-1950s brings images and memories of groups of Woodrow high-school boys in their hot-rods and girls in their family cars, all headed for the drive-in theater of choice that week, usually the Lone Star Drive-In on Lawnview Avenue but sometimes the Samuell Drive-In on Samuell Boulevard, or occasionally the Buckner Drive-In on Buckner Boulevard. No one ever cared what movies were playing, or even watched the movies; the drive-in was a weekly social event. It offered an opportunity to "party" with old friends, and to meet and make new ones as well, away from the confines of the school.
It was imperative to enter the drive-in theater gate early, because tradition dictated that all the Wildcats park on the ninth row, only the ninth. It was exciting to watch the many cars pulling in and lining up next to each other in a row, boys together and girls together. Most of the girls would have been forbidden at home to wear shorts to the drive-in, but many of them would arrive wearing the fashion-approved long skirts and petticoats and then simply remove them to reveal the shorts that they had hidden underneath.
As soon as the darkness set in, the "dance" would begin. The girls would get out of their cars and walk up and down the ninth row to greet all the boys, expectant and hopeful that they would be invited into one or more of the boys' cars. This system was complicated in some aspects, and some of the girls would ask many questions of the boys before getting into their cars, deciding between the "good" and "bad" boys. Some of the boys would bring beer to pass around and to share, and the ones who considered themselves to be really "cool" would offer Thunderbird wine, considered a true delicacy by teenaged alcohol-experimenters. The "nice" girls would refuse to get into a car containing alcohol or inhabited by boys with "wild" reputations, but there were others who were more adventurous.
In the event that the groups in the chosen cars were not having a particularly good time or turned out to be incompatible, for whatever reason, the girls would move on to visit other boys in other cars. Perhaps this ritual was so popular with the girls because, for the first time, it gave them the power to choose their company from among the boys, a welcome change from the "girl-waits-for-boy-to-call" tradition. The practice also served as a challenge to the boys to employ more competitive and knowledgeable ingenuity in their attempts to attract girls.
For the girls, there was always the conflict of choice between the comfort, compatibility, respect, and social acceptability offered by the nice boys; and the mystique and perhaps excitement personified by the bad boys. It was a time for teenagers of a period of rebellion to come, incited in no small part by the rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll music we all loved, and danced and listened to, sometimes in secret. There was a new sense of impending freedom for all of us. Possibly our icon for the era was James Dean, who dared to live his short life as he wished, despite much negative criticism from the "establishment"; it is possible that we all wanted that, at least to some extent. We were restless and, in our own ways, beginning to demand change.
Unfortunately, our beloved Lone Star Drive-In and its wonderful history suffered a slow decline over the years, and by the 1970s it offered only "porn" films. In 1986 or 1987, the Lone Star burned down from a fire which originated in the living quarters of the screentower. Today, nothing remains of the drive-in, and the property is being used for school bus parking by the Dallas School District. The Buckner Drive-In was demolished prior to 1981 and divided into two lots, now with a storage facility on one half and apartments on the other. The fate of the Samuell Drive-In is unknown except that it too closed, along with all the many others in Dallas.
The days of the Dallas drive-in theaters are gone, but the wonderful memories will always remind me of old and new friends, our practicing to make choices which would be needed for adult socialization to come, and most of all - perpetual fun and much laughter.
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