 Video image courtesy Tisha Parti |   Photos courtesy Craig Morton |
Video image courtesy Tisha Parti | Photos courtesy Craig Morton |
March 28, 1997 article from Orange Counter Register on the demolition of the Orange drive-in:
Drive-in making way for driving
HISTORY: Another county landmark, one where Rev. Schuller got his start, falls. Coming soon: a freeway off-ramp.
By ANN PEPPER
The Orange County Register
ORANGE -- The automobile giveth and the automobile taketh away.
Orange County's first drive-in theater -- the Orange Drive-In on State College Boulevard -- is being knocked down to make way for a new freeway off-ramp.
Most noticeable, perhaps, is the loss of the old landmark screen marked by a big orange, glimpsed in the peripheral vision of thousands of Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway motorists each day.
The demolition, begun last week, is part of a project to rebuild the freeway and the Chapman Avenue interchange, and add an off-ramp onto State College and the drive-in property, said Jim Beil, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation. Freeway construction is set to begin in November.
Skyrocketing land values and changing tastes have closed all but one of the county's drive-ins. But it was big news when this one opened June 18, 1941, just eight years after the nation's first drive-in debuted in Camden, N.J.
Now the place is mostly known for its weekend swap meet. No movies have graced its screens for about five years. The bill of fare had changed by that time from films such as "Citizen Kane" to those with titles such as "El Rey de los Taxistas."
The swap meet will go on in about one-third of its current space, said John Mershimeer, head of the demolition crew. And the snack bar, whose roof was the pulpit where the Rev. Robert Schuller began his ministry 42 years ago, also will stand awhile longer.
"Dr. Schuller was just talking about that today at the Easter breakfast he held for his staff," Claudia Holloway, who handles public relations for Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, said Thursday. "He held his first worship service here from the snack bar's roof on March 27, 1955."
The drive-in hosted at least one other famous beginning. Bruce Ogilvie of Irvine, eventually president and chief executive officer of Wherehouse Entertainment -- California's largest specialty-music chain -- began his career by selling records at the swap meet as a teen-ager.