MARTINSVILLE — The sun is still up when the gates open.
Cars roll steady down the gravel road, past the little sign pleading for everyone to turn the lights out. No need for that yet.
A few people got here early, and their kids are already chasing each other in their Minecraft pajamas on the lawn. If they keep this up — and they will — they aren’t gonna make it to the second movie.
The sun slowly sinks lower, and more and more cars begin to fill in the evenly spaced grassy knolls. Fords, Chevys, Jeeps — the same now as it ever was. The odd Hondas and Subarus and Minecraft pajamas — those are new.
“Good crowd for a chilly night,” Centerbrook owner Tyler Tharpe says, taking a break from working concession.
It’s sort of an understatement. When the Centerbrook Drive-In opened in 1950, it was one of more than 4,000 drive-ins in the country. Back then, it had three other competitors in Morgan County alone, and Indiana had more than a hundred around the state.
Seventy-five years later and Centerbrook has no competitors. They’re all gone, as are most of the rest of Indiana’s drive-ins — only 20 are left in the state. Amazingly, those 20 have elevated Indiana to the fourth-largest drive-in state in the country. Those 4,000 massive movie screens have dwindled down to just over 300 in less than a century.
So, yeah, it’s a good crowd at Centerbrook tonight.
And who are the people in this crowd? There’s the young couple in the concession house on a date — a movie is always a good choice for the first or second — and they’re smiling at each other when the man spills their bucket of popcorn all over the floor.
He sighs, she laughs, and sympathetically watches him as he grabs a broom and sweeps up the mess — a gentleman.
On the other side of the room is a doting mother, standing next to her little boy, trying to feed him popcorn. He’s wearing shorts and a little blue coat — classic spring weather attire — and, lacking the necessary change, sits pretending to play an arcade racing game called “Hydro Thunder.”
“Try popcorn?” she asks him, eventually getting him to sit still long enough to take a piece. “Do you like it?” she asks, but he’s already back to his game of pretend.
The boy isn’t old enough to understand that he’s lucky to be here in a place like this. But he’s happy, and that means for the 75th year in a row, Centerbrook did its job.
American summer
Centerbrook opened on May 2, 1950. It was a Tuesday.
Named for its location between the little towns of Centerton and Brooklyn, Centerbrook was a family business operated by Clyde Weddle, his son Clyde Weddle, Jr., and Robert H. Brown. The property had room for 500 cars, all gathered to watch the 60-by-60-foot wooden screen at the front on a cool, 62 degree night.
The first picture shown at Centerbrook was the now largely forgotten musical comedy, “Red, Hot and Blue,” starring Betty Hutton and directed by John Farrow. It’s a movie about an actress who gets mixed up with murderous gangsters, and adults could watch it for the low price of 50 cents a ticket ($6.75 in today’s dollars).
Kids, of course, got in for free.
A lot’s changed in 75 years. The big wooden screen is now a big metal screen — a tornado brought down the original back in the 60s. The rusty speakers lining the lawn haven’t worked in years, and cars now listen to the movies through a short-range FM radio signal — 94.3, to be exact. The price of admission is $10 for adults, and kids no longer get in for free, but it’s still a much better deal than you’ll get at most traditional movie theaters.
The business itself has changed hands many times. Tharpe, the current owner, was the projectionist at Centerbrook from 2001 until he bought the business from Bob and Stacia Zloty in 2008.
Tharpe grew up north of Fort Wayne, where he worked projectionist jobs. He moved to California after graduating from college and did the same thing until moving back to Indiana in 2001.
As drive-ins continued to decline throughout the country, Tharpe oversaw Centerbrook through its 60th anniversary in 2010, and then the 70th in 2020.
While the COVID-19 pandemic was a killer for many small businesses, Centerbrook actually thrived.
“(The drive-in) was the only place to go!” Tharpe said. “You could social distance from the comfort of your car.”
Tharpe believes a lot of factors have contributed to Centerbrook’s survival over the years. One is location — it’s just a few minutes from both Martinsville and Mooresville, giving the drive-in a large population base to draw from.
Another factor is less tangible, but crucial nevertheless.
“The energy here…it just feels like summer all the time,” Tharpe said. “I couldn’t imagine summer without it.”
Tharpe knows what he’s talking about. It’s a chilly night but people are nevertheless sitting out on blankets and towels like it’s a warm summer day. The air smells like corn dogs and butter, and people are walking around drinking ice cold Coca-Cola out of jumbo-sized cups just like they’ve done for 75 years.
Outside, it is April. Here at the drive-in, it is always summer.
75 more
Everyone here tonight is making a memory.
Spilling the popcorn, chasing each other on the lawn, putting a dollar on the line at the claw machine and coming away with nothing only to put another one right back in — it has all happened before, it will all happen again.
At The Correspondent’s request, Tharpe asked Centerbrook’s Facebook followers to share their favorite memories at the drive-in and the replies were replete with all these little moments that make up all our lives.
“The first thing that comes to mind was being one of two in the trunk of a car,” one commenter wrote. “Not sure that we didn’t have the money to pay for the tickets, but it was the ‘adventure’ of it…60 years ago. LOL…we’ve grown up.”
“My family used to go when I was a kid,” another replied. “Us kids would wear our pajamas so that we would be ready for bed when we got home. My husband and I took our kids, and now we bring our granddaughter.”
“My junior year of high school, my now husband and I started dating and are still married 35 years later,” a third said. “We still spend weekends there.”
After 75 years, we are still hiding in trunks, running in our pajamas and falling in love at the drive-in. The prevailing wisdom is that this can’t last — like newspapers, vinyl records and letters in the mail, the data doesn’t look good for drive-in movies.
But if the kids shopping at old record stores and the newspaper in your hand are any indication, the data can’t predict everything. The Centerbrook Drive-In has been going strong for 75 years — put another dollar in the claw machine and see if it can’t go for 75 more.
