Buckner Boulevard Drive-In
3333 N. Buckner Boulevard,
Dallas,
TX
75228
3333 N. Buckner Boulevard,
Dallas,
TX
75228
2 people
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The Buckner Boulevard Drive-In is listed as operating in the 1950 edition of Film Daily Yearbook.
Contributed by
Billy Holcomb / Billy Smith / Don Lewis
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Recent comments (view all 18 comments)
Very cool, SiliconSam. Thanks for resizing it!
I’m glad you took a color picture of the old screen tower, so that the colors can be ascertained. It should help with roughly determining the colors of the circus clown murals at other area drive-in theatres, namely the Chalk Hill and the Jacksboro/Corral. You have a piece of Dallas history in your posession, Sam. Take care of it, and thanks again for sharing!
The Buckner Boulevard Drive-In was opened June 4, 1948. It had a capacity of 664 cars. Owners were W.G. Underwood and Claude Ezell. Boxoffice Magazine of June 12, 1948, said “Underwood, Ezell, and other associates own 25 outdoor theatres in the state and are building more.”
There’s a possibility the Buckner was designed by Dallas architect Jack Corgan, but I’ll have to do some digging to see if I can come up with any confirmation. He did design other drive-ins for Underwood and Ezell, apparently including the Shepherd in Houston.
Very good info, Joe.
By the way, the Belknap and the Circle in Beaumont were also operated by Underwood and Ezell. Also, while checking out an online back issue of Boxoffice, from 1965, I ran across the name another drive-in architect: Harvey A. Jordan, of Arlington, TX. His ad shows an illustration of a screen tower that looks very similar to the Buckner, Belknap, etc.
Good luck on your research, Joe. Looking forward to your results!
An item about Underwood and Ezell in the September 22, 1945, issue of Boxoffice (issuu misidentifies it as September 15, 1945) indicates that Jack Corgan designed all of the circuit’s early drive-ins, including the Circle in Waco, the Shepherd, and an unnamed theater on Military Drive in San Antonio. The item also says that plans were underway for drive-ins in Pharr, San Antonio, and at two locations in Houston.
The only clue I can find connecting Corgan with the Buckner is an item in the July 17, 1948, issue of Boxoffice, which is about a Dave Callahan whose company was about to open a drive-in in Little Rock called the Ascher, which was “…patterned after the Buckner Boulevard drive-in in Dallas.”
The next paragraph says “Callahan was in Dallas conferring…with architect Jack Corgan who designed the big airer.” It’s not perfectly clear from that wording whether Corgan designed the Ascher, the Buckner, or both, but that he designed both does seem likely.
Don Sanders’s book “The American Drive-In Movie Theatre” (previewable at Google Books) has a brief biography of Jack Corgan, and says that by the time he retired in 1980 he had designed over 75 drive-ins. He also designed many indoor theaters. So far, his Cinema Treasures list contains only fourteen.
An old movie theater ad from 1949 for the Buckner Boulevard Drive In.
Vintage B/W picture of the screen about halfway down this page:
http://www.americandrivein.com/states/tx.htm
A couple of nice color pics from 1979L
View link
Love the Clown on the screen building.
thanks for ads and Pictures,Don and S,sam.
The line of cars stacked up on Buckner waiting to get in to this theater when John Wayne movies played would often be past John West Road! Hatari!, McLintock, etc. were big crowd-pleasers back then. Several neighbor families would caravan out here, all of us kids in our PJ’s, and make an evening of it. We’d even play on the playground equipment in our PJ’s, our dads in their light slacks and madras sportshirts on those warm summer nights. Good memories of a good theater.