Almost 40 years after closing the curtains for one last time, residents and ex-employees recall the Redwood Drive-In theater not just as a good pastime but also as a lost community cornerstone. Right off the 101 Freeway in Rohnert Park on the Redwood Expressway, the Redwood Drive-In Theater was constructed in the muddy fields where the Walmart and Cattlemens Steakhouse now stand.
The grand opening was on September 5th, 1947. This was during an economic boom when returning soldiers came home, building lives with shiny cars in each driveway. The theater itself could hold 550 vehicles, and travelers would be drawn to the silver screen which acted as a billboard for the drive-in, with just a corner of the screen visible to the freeway as an enticing sneak peak of what was being shown.
Once viewers got into the theater and bought their concessions, they would park their vehicles in semicircular mounds that pointed the car up to the screen, which had a positional speaker for each car that could be mounted onto the window. “Imagine 550 speakers all playing the same thing at the same time, it was surreal – true surround sound,” Gordon Chaplain, an ex-manager of the Redwood Drive-In theater said, “It still gives me chills thinking about it.”…