In 1978, My Local Drive-in Was Mecca
The Hillcrest Drive-In in my hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa, was exactly 2.6 miles from the house I grew up in. But to me, a small child in the late 70s, it might as well have felt as far away as the moon. My life, then, was so different from what my seven-year-old’s is today. It was a time of less immediacy and certainly less solvency, especially for our little family of two: me and my mom. Special occasions were special; they were cherished, infrequent events that, in hindsight, are the numbered pinpoints in the happy, pastoral, connect-the-dots of my childhood. My mom was a kid back then herself, having had me at just 18. She worked full time and put herself through college while I was in grade school. We lived in a tiny little house where our “home entertainment center” consisted of a 12” black and white TV (complete with foiled rabbit ear antennae and a clunking, hard-to-turn dial), and a turntable upon which The Beatle’s Abbey Road and Neil Young’s Harvest Moon were the weathered, scratchy …