Credits roll at drive-in
Longtime moviegoers and employees share memories as Santee theater shows its final double feature

By Paul Sisson

San Diego Union-Tribune
January 2, 2024

Some watched from piles of blankets in parked hatchbacks, others sat on camp chairs, sipping warm drinks and munching everything from home cooking to concession stand popcorn as colorful images played across the twin screens at the Santee Drive-In on Sunday night.

The mood was all at once jubilant and a little bittersweet. They came prepared to celebrate the start of 2024 and the end of an East County institution, one that entertained generations during its 65-year run on North Woodside Avenue.

There to watch a double feature that started with “Wonka” and ended with “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” were longtime friends Melanie Ross and Kim Ruby, pen pals who found out they lived down the street from each other at age 8 and have been co-conspirators ever since.

The pair, and Ross’ husband, Mark Grover, sat at a folding table with subdued lighting and laden with homemade pasta Bolognese and Mexican hot chocolate.

Sitting there as the sky darkened, they recalled childhood memories coming to this particular place, jumbled up with family and friends, a one-night community built just for fun.

“I remember coming here in my pajamas with my parents as a kid and them putting the box with the speaker in the window,” Ross said.

“One time I remember we forgot to disconnect it when it was time to go home,” Ruby added, laughing. “We had to come back that week and give back the wire and the speaker.”

It was not, noted manager Beth Preller, a terribly uncommon occurrence, back before the Santee Drive-In started using its own low-power FM radio transmitter to put movie sound into cars using their built-in radios.
“You could hear it when it happened, it made a certain noise,” Preller said. “You’d go out and there’d be a hole.”

Having worked at the theater for 25 years, Preller said she witnessed everything from engagements to wedding vows go out over that audio system. There have even been a few funerals over the years.

The place, Preller said, always had certain sounds from screams or cheers as movie plots unfolded on screen night after night to a sort of background hum of enjoyment as friends settled in for an evening, laughing together under the stars.

“When there is a full moon you can see the silhouette of the hills, and that laughter — everybody is just so happy to be together,” she said. “That enjoyment, that’s why I’ve been here for more than 20 years.”

To say it is the end of an era is almost true. Now, only the South Bay Drive-In Theatre and Swap Meet on Coronado Avenue near Imperial Beach remains.

North Palisade Partners, a Los Angeles-based developer, plans to clear the 13-acre Santee site and build a nearly 300,000-square- foot, 50-foot-tall warehouse, which public records research performed in May indicated would be used for “warehousing and distribution, manufacturing” and other uses.

It is a fate to which many drive-ins have already succumbed.

As a Union-Tribune piece penned by journalist J. Harry Jones observed in 1986, the county was once home to more than 15 drive-ins, most of which started operating in the mid- to late 1950s, a time when about 1 million people — a third of today’s total — lived in the region.

It was a time when movies were much less accessible. Home Box Office, known today as HBO with its streaming sister Max, would not start selling subscriptions for direct-to-TV movie viewing until 1972, and video cassette players and movie rental stores were still around the corner. Today’s streaming convenience and 75-inch flat-panel displays were still science fiction.

But San Diego’s weather and growing economy pushed the local population ever upward, increasing the value and redevelopment pressure on large plots of easily converted land that started on the outskirts of metropolitan San Diego but were gradually engulfed by Southern California sprawl.

By 1986, as Jones chronicled, the Alvarado on El Cajon Boulevard, the Big Sky in Chula Vista, the Del Mar off Interstate 5, and the Pacific at Balboa and Mission Bay Drive had already closed.

Though most used their dozen or so paved acres to host swap meets that supplemented their ticket and concessions revenue, attrition continued. Lemon Grove’s Ace Drive-In at Broadway and Imperial closed in 1986. In 1999, El Cajon’s Aero Drive-In and Oceanside’s Valley Drive-In went dark, and 2003 brought an end to National City’s Harbor Drive-In.

The Santee Drive-In’s final screenings on New Year’s Eve do not spell the immediate end of the Santee Swap Meet on the same property. According to the organization’s website , the weekend bazaar will continue to operate there through June 30.

But those who think of this property as an outdoor movie theater or a place for folks to buy and sell, explained Teresa Palombo of Santee, aren’t quite getting it.

Sure, it was those things, but it has been so much more. Yes, she said, piling kids in the back of a pickup truck and getting hours of affordable entertainment was part of the reason why the enterprise endured for so long. And wandering around on a Sunday morning looking for used car parts at the swap meet was part of it, too. But, she said, this particular venue has been a place where friendships are made and maintained for many unbroken decades.

The drive-in’s role as an asset for community building, Palombo said, was crystal clear in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic canceled many high school graduation ceremonies. Instead, the drive-in’s parking lots hosted graduation ceremonies for many of the graduating classes in the Grossmont Union High School District, complete with awards handed through windows, cars filled with graduates parked in every other spot, and graduations speeches put up on the big screens and broadcast so everyone could hear.

“Everybody would honk their horns and scream for each student,” she said. “They were able to honor the special students, you know, the salutatorians and valedictorians.

“They were able to give their speeches, and everybody could see it and hear it. It was just really nice.”
Palombo added that she does not resent the fact that, after nearly seven decades, the family that owns the property is moving on.

“We appreciate what they did for all those years when our kids were growing up,” she said. “You know, it wouldn’t have been quite the same without the Santee Drive-In.

“It was a good run for sure.”