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This beloved drive-in theater has run for decades. But keeping it open is now harder

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

There isn't a lot of nightlife in Montrose, Colo., population 20,000. But there is the Star Drive-In Movie Theatre. It's a beloved institution. Two shows every night, all summer long - the Star is likely the country's oldest continuously operating drive-in that's still run by its founding family. Colorado Public Radio's Stina Sieg says, that run is now in jeopardy.

STINA SIEG, BYLINE: The show won't start till dusk, but Pamela Friend has been working nonstop for hours in a little red-and-white concession stand, cutting potatoes for fries, hauling in buckets of ice, pouring change into the empty registers and, of course, popping lots and lots of corn. When Friend says she was born at the Star Drive-In theater, she's barely joking.

PAMELA FRIEND: My parents put me in a cradle in the back room. They opened it in '50, and I was born in '52. When I was 5, I started running tickets out to the ticket office and stocking candy and popping corn and doing little things that I could do. So I've been here forever.

SIEG: And took it over from her parents when she was still a teenager.

FRIEND: But just keep going like the Energizer bunny.

SIEG: Tonight's first show, "Deadpool & Wolverine" - 7-year-old Bridger Covington says, what makes the drive-in better is...

BRIDGER COVINGTON: That it's outside - you get fresher air than inside.

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Yeah. Yeah.

SIEG: That's his 2-year-old brother jumping up and down next to their older sister. Their mom, Maxine, says, if she brought them all to an indoor theater, they'd be running up and down the aisles.

MAXINE COVINGTON: Which gives me a lot of anxiety (laughter) - so it's a lot easier to throw them in the bed of the truck and shut the tailgate and just tell them to hang out and play within this area.

SIEG: Surrounded by acres of other families, many in camp chairs - at least one group has an inflatable bed - watching the screen run local ads as the sun sets. Samantha Peel was among the first to arrive.

SAMANTHA PEEL: It's bigger than a movie theater. It's huge. It's - you're in the night sky. It just feels so much more real.

JASON: I just kind of think of it as - it's a - basically, a slice of lost Americana.

SIEG: She and her husband, Jason, were excited to nab a cherry spot in their new convertible. This is where Samantha saw "Bambi" as a little kid and where, after prom, she watched movies until nearly dawn.

PEEL: You feel like it's still home. This makes it feel like you're still home.

SIEG: A home that's had its share of challenges, Pamela Friend says.

FRIEND: Screen blowing down from a tornado in '74 - twister came through and took the screen down. Burned out - caught a pop - old popper caught a fire and burned out this end of the building.

SIEG: Then there was streaming and COVID and having to spend $100,000 to convert to a digital projection system. But that was all nothing compared to a few years ago, when Friend lost both her daughter and her husband within months of each other. Coming back here was both comforting and painful.

FRIEND: I cried a lot at first.

SIEG: Her daughter April was going to take over before her death. She keeps it going for the community.

FRIEND: It's - it is fun to see people step up and say, I've never been to a drive-in, and that occurs every night. And on that number, I got to go set up the projection room. If I don't, there won't be anything playing tonight.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SIEG: Friend, who's 72 now, says running the drive-in is a struggle sometimes.

FRIEND: But that's me. I don't give up easy.

SIEG: For NPR News, I'm Stina Sieg in Montrose, Colo.

(SOUNDBITE OF MADONNA SONG, "LIKE A PRAYER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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