I met with siblings Joey Ayres and Dorothy Ayres-Smith recently to talk about their dad, who was a top local minor league baseball player in the 1940s and 1950s. I’ll write about him soon, but at the end of our conversation, they mentioned that they had worked at Waialae Drive-In in the 1970s.
The Waialae Drive-In movie theater was near Kahala Mall, on the mauka side of Waialae Avenue. It opened in 1956 and closed in 1986, and held more than 300 cars. There’s a housing area and a storage facility on the site today.
“Royal Theatres built and ran the King, Queen, Palace, Royal, Waialae Drive-In and Royal Sunset Drive-In,” says theater historian Lowell Angell.
“They also operated the Sheridan, Roosevelt, King’s Alley Theatre and Marina Twins. Consolidated was a stockholder in Royal Theatres and later bought it out entirely.”
Ayres and Ayres-Smith were hired by their aunt and uncle Mazie and Albert Silva, who managed the Royal Theatres.
“My dad bought me a used car for $50 when I turned 15, but told me I had to pay for the gas myself,” Ayres says. “That’s why I began working at the drive-in. I think I made $1.75 an hour.”
Ayres says nearly the entire staff were teenagers like him, and because of that every night was a party. “We had a staff of eight or nine with up to 15 when there was a Disney movie playing.
“We made our own pizza, chili and popcorn with real Land o Lakes butter,” Ayres-Smith recalls.
“Auntie Charlotte ran the kitchen. She was a red-headed lady with a big B-52 hairdo. It was always the same height and same color for the nine years we worked there.”
The drive-in was next to a cemetery and rumored to have a ghost, a faceless woman who would appear in the women’s bathroom mirror.
“People asked us all the time, Did we see the faceless lady? We never saw her, we tell them,” Ayres-Smith says. “I cleaned the bathrooms and looked in the mirror, but she never appeared. I wore a rosary and got out as fast as I could.”
“I was working in the box office one night,” Ayres says, “and a couple of the kids who lived behind the drive-in were eating at the Jolly Roger restaurant next door. It was where Zippy’s is today.
“They came running through the graveyard, located next to the entrance, and said, ‘Joey, Joey, there’s a car in the Jolly Roger parking lot, and three guys just got into the trunk. I think they’re going to try to sneak in.’
“They described the car. A minute later it appeared at the box office with one teenager driving.
“Admission was $2.50 per adult. The guy drives up and I told him it was $10.”
“‘What?’ the guy says. ‘It’s only me.’
“I said, ‘It’s you plus three in the trunk.’ His face dropped. ‘How did you know that?’ I asked if he wanted to let them out now or out later. So he lets the guys out of the trunk and paid the 10 bucks.”
Ayres says that back then they showed two different movies, a cartoon, a newsreel and often a short film.
The main movie would start at dusk. Then the second feature, often an older movie, would play, and the first-run movie would repeat.
Back in the 1970s marijuana use was rampant, and the outdoor space of a drive-in was a perfect place to partake. Waialae capitalized on this by showing, as its most frequent co-feature, the Cheech and Chong movie “Up in Smoke.”
“When we had ‘Up In Smoke,’ it was crazy at intermission,” Ayres-Smith recalls. “We sold a lot of food because everybody had the munchies.”
“A family that lived behind the theater owned a Great Dane named Progress and a small pet deer,” Ayres says. “They were buddies.”
Progress was a big dog and scared moviegoers who weren’t expecting him to come right up to the car. “We’d hear people scream back in the lot and know they had just seen Progress.
“The deer would eat leftover food. The owner trimmed its horns so it couldn’t hurt anyone. Progress and the deer would frolic together in the lot.
“This could especially be a problem when ‘Up In Smoke’ was shown because people might not be sure if it was real or imagined,” Ayres chuckles.
One week the Disney movie “The Million Dollar Duck” was playing. It could lay golden eggs, the movie imagined.
“One of my jobs was to change the marquee every Wednesday,” Ayres recalls. “The movie would open on Thursday, so late every Wednesday night I would change the big yellow sign with red letters announcing the movies playing. The second feature that week was ‘Son of Flubber.’
“The next day my uncle called and insisted I get over there immediately. Somebody apparently had taken the F from ‘Flubber’ and changed it with the D from ‘Duck.’ He heard about it on the radio from Aku! The town was in an uproar. I got there as fast as I could and rectified it.”
“There was a man who lived in the back of the drive-in,” Ayres-Smith recalls, “in a silver Airstream trailer. We called him Mr. Silva. I don’t know where he came from, but he was friends with my uncle, who felt sorry for him. He had nowhere to go.
“He’d come out in a bathrobe, undershirt, shorts and slippers and help us clean up. I remember he often had clothes hanging on a clothesline. We gave him food, and he got to watch all the movies. It was a different world and different time.”
Ayres says many of the workers had met their spouses at the theater. “I met my first wife there. She was a Kalani senior and worked the snack bar. She asked me to her prom, and a few years later we married.”
By the mid-1980s drive-ins were in decline. Cable TV brought more channels into people’s homes, and sound systems in indoor theaters improved. VCRs allowed people to record for later viewing. Property taxes rose, increasing the cost of running a drive-in.
Waialae Drive-In closed in 1986 and became a golf driving range before being turned into a Public Storage and gated community with 50 homes.
There is one remnant of the drive-in still in the area. The street where the drive-in once stood retains the name Kiionioni Loop. In Hawaiian “kiionioni” means “moving picture.”
Bob Sigall, author of the “Companies We Keep” books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.
