Starlite Drive-In

rivest266 on February 20, 2024 at 4:57 pm

Last season: 1987.

rivest266 on February 20, 2024 at 9:03 am

opened on June 27th, 1950. Grand opening ad posted.

graymatters on April 21, 2021 at 12:42 pm

I’ve uploaded several Kodachrome images taken during the construction of Bay City’s Starlight Drive-In. This was the fourth Michigan drive-in built by my grandfather Al Johnson, and he shot these slides in June 1950. The drive-in opened later that month.

My dad (Doug Gray) and his dad (Robie Gray) worked on and superintended several of these projects for Johnson Construction Co. One image shows Doug, Al’s son-in-law, standing at the base of the screen tower as it was being built.

The next three slides show workers connecting the vertical trusses to each other with horizontal timbers, and attaching plywood to the outside of the completed tower frame. Perhaps some drive-in towers were built with prefabricated wooden trusses, but all of the drive-ins built by my grandfather for which we have slides of the tower construction were site-built out of timber.

It’s interesting to note in one of the images that a scaffold at least eleven levels high has been erected on the screen side of the tower, and no apparent safety lines are used by any of the workers.

Although Al’s slides don’t show any views of the finishing process, Ron Gross, administrator of the Michigan Drive-Ins.com Facebook page, says that asbestos panels typically made up the outermost layer on towers of this era.