Airway Drive-In
10634 St Charles Rock Road,
St. Ann,
MO
63074
10634 St Charles Rock Road,
St. Ann,
MO
63074
2 people
favorited this theater
The Airway Drive-In in St. Louis County had a capacity for 800 cars, and was operated by General Cinema. It had a cool 1950’s cheerleader on the sign. They saved the sign and cheerleader when they decided to tear down the theater in the late-1980’s or early-1990’s to put up an otherwise completely generic and uninteresting strip mall.
Contributed by
Kevin Schneider
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Recent comments (view all 14 comments)
Too bad the cheerleader photos do not work anymore.
Air-Way Drive-in parked 800 cars and was owned in 1956 by Clarence Kaimann.
This page shows a small photo of the old sign:
View link
The sign depicted a majorette (not a cheerleader). Her baton twirled but I don’t think she ever threw it and caught it. From the neon tubing, it appears that her legs also moved. Here is a nice photo from 2007:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eggsngrits/415967991/
Found this on drive-ins.com. It’s a newspaper listing from August 1982 with all Wehrenberg Drive-Ins at that time. The poster’s name is Tim Haye. Does he post on here? If so, I wonder if he could post this on this site…and maybe other newspaper clippings he’s scanned.
Anyway, here’s the link: http://www.drive-ins.com/pictures/motairw015.jpg
@Kyle: You know I’m doing back flips, somersaults, belly flops and dancing like my 5 year old kid after a few too many candy bars! Pure awesomeness!
@Chris: I know what you mean…I’ve been sneaking peaks at it all day long!!! That was the peak of the Wehrenberg drive-in dynasty, which was right after Arthur Theaters went bankrupt. However, about four years later, only two of those drive-ins (North Twin and 66) would still be open…
Can’t help but include this: The date of that newspaper ad was August 11, 1982…which was a Wednesday (source: http://www.timeanddate.com). It was also the year I graduated high school…and that date was about two weeks before I started my first semester of college at UMSL…where do the good times go?
More pics (and fond recollections) of the Airway here: St. Louis Flashback Movie & Drive-In Theatres
I used to live in St. Ann. The girl was definitely a majorette! The drive-in looked really cool—I remember it still being open when we first moved there—you could see movies as you drove by (no audio, of course!). I’m very glad they saved the sign, but the shopping center was indeed unremarkable in itself.