Brief by Central Staff
Rural life – July 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
There are people who suggest that our part of the world is somewhat “behind the times,” and now there’s some evidence that they’re right, at least in one respect.
That would be drive-in movie theaters, which have been disappearing rapidly in the past couple of decades. Typically, they were built at the edge of town, and as the town grew, the land became too valuable to use for a drive-in.
Colorado had more than 60 drive-ins in 1958, and by 1972, metro Denver alone had 17.
Now there are only 12 in the entire state. Figure 4 million Coloradans, and that means one drive-in for every 333,000 residents. Central Colorado and the San Luis Valley might add up to 100,000 people, so if we were swimming in the mainstream law of averages, we wouldn’t have any drive-ins still operating.
But we’ve got two of the surviving dozen: the Comanche Drive-In west of Buena Vista, and the Star Drive-In in Monte Vista.
Most of the other survivors are in rural areas (Delta, Durango, Fort Morgan, Montrose, Springfield, Sterling), although two remain in the Denver metro area; two other Front Range Cities, Fort Collins and Pueblo, also have drive-ins.
We note that Salida once had one; it sat where Wal-Mart does now, and closed about 30 years ago. In honor of the family that owned it, it was the GROY, although on occasion local pranksters re-arranged the letters to spell ORGY — drive-ins, after all, had a certain reputation among teen-agers.
