1959 Dillsburg, Pennsylvania

Craig Beitzel

Born October 16, 1952

Dillsburg, Pennsylvania

Interviewed on February 1, 2025

by Daniel Coria

What is the first movie you remember seeing?
We didn’t have a movie theater in my town. It was a small town in Pennsylvania, but we had a very popular drive-in movie place where you pull in, you park, buy a post, and then you take the speaker off the post and hang it on the side of your window. Not exactly surround-sound. I am sure the first movie I saw as a kid was a Disney movie like Fantasia or something like that, and then later on as I got older, I went all the time with my friends. My family owned an SUV, which at the time was the best car to have for drive-ins because all you had to do was park the car facing away from the screen, and open the trunk. We were able to lay out all of the snacks amongst ourselves and bring out the blankets to make it more comfortable to sit on. My mom was a stickler for making sure her car wasn’t dirty, so I remember making my friends take off their shoes before they got into the trunk and being a little embarrassed. The back of the car was able to fit all of us, and it was so much fun.

How old were you?
I was probably seven, or a little bit younger. I’m sure I watched a movie before that, but Fantasia was the first movie I actually have recollection of.

What do you remember about the movie? What stood out to you?
What I remember more than anything was not so much the movie, but the animation, characters, and the color because this was shortly after you began to have color TV and color in movies. Everything before that was black and white so I remember the fantastic streaming of the colorful stuff. Disney movies are always great, so as a kid I enjoyed it a lot. Other than that, the experience of going to the movie theater with family and friends was what really stood out to me. It was such a great way to spend time with the people I loved and still, to this day, I love going to the movies.

Were there lots of concessions back then and were there lots of candy?
At the drive-ins, you could bring anything you wanted to bring, but also in the very center of the great big park so to speak, there was a big building that had concessions, and they had everything from candy, popcorn, and soda to hot dogs and hamburgers. They had everything. It was pretty cool. My favorite was the hamburger. I actually preferred it more than some of the local burger spots, and my mom especially loved the popcorn. I got to go see a lot of them for free because a gentleman that lived about two blocks from me lived right beside a friend of mine. That man was the guy who ran the projector, so we would go with him to the drive-in a lot and just go in for free to watch a couple of movies and by the end of the night he would bring us home. It’s all pretty different from what you mentioned earlier, like the whole Alamo movie theater stuff [Alamo is a chain movie theater originally from Texas] where you go in and have a meal and have drinks. I mean some people at the drive-ins also had meals there, but it’s a little different when you’re in your own car instead of a movie theater. My daughter actually worked at the Alamo theater in Austin for a while so that was pretty cool.

Do you remember the name of the theater?
My drive-in was Haars Drive-In theater in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. In my town the whole thing with the drive-in was, in the summer months, I’d say at least once per month, they would do what was called a Dusk to Dawn show. Sometimes it would just be two or three dollars for a carload of people, so you could stuff six people in a car. I guess they were trying to make money on the food, but there would be five movies. When it was almost dark, the first movie started, and the last movie was ending as the sun was coming up. And they called it Dusk to Dawn movie night. It was sort of a challenge trying to stay awake, so eventually most people would leave before morning came, but my friends and I toughed it out and had a blast. I’m not so sure ticket sales would be very high if there was a Dusk to Dawn show today though. At this age I wouldn’t put myself through that again.

Do you have a funny story at a movie theater?
[Speaking about the Exorcist] I remember going to that movie in Lancaster, and on my way in, there was a guy leaving the movie early and he just looked at me and said, “you’re not stoned are you,” because you can’t go in there if you’re stoned. That movie left me so scared. Everyone going into the theater didn’t fully know what to expect, but at least it was a shared experience that at least left us all shaken up. My family watched it again a couple years ago and turns out it wasn’t as scary as I once thought. I guess it was partly because it was one of the first movies of its kind, and the pitch-black theater probably made it much scarier than it was.

Craig is my friend’s family friend