Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 4, 1994 TAG: 9409060079
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-16 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By DONNA ALVIS-BANKS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
"Will the Starlite be open next season?"
"I tell them just to watch the obituaries," Beasley said. "If I ain't in there, we'll be open next year."
Since 1953, Beasley and his wife, Dot, have operated the Starlite Drive-In on Roanoke Street and Starlight Drive. After 41 years, the theater has become a favorite fixture in a town transformed from friendly corner drugstores and neighborhood grocers to fast-food joints and discount department stores.
"The first night we opened the Starlite, it was spitting snow," Richard Beasley recalled. "We started late in the season. I said we should be closing, not opening.
"It caught on the next year, though."
Call it karma or kismet or divine will, nothing short of fate brought Richard and Dot Beasley together.
They met at the Glen Theatre, a walk-in theater built by Richard, his father and his brother on Radford Street in Christiansburg, now home to the Food Time convenience store.
"Richard was taking up tickets," Dot Beasley said. "I was a nurse at New Altamons Hospital, and I used to go to the theater after working the evening shift."
"I should have been gone that night she came in," Richard Beasley said, shaking his head.
Now 71, Richard Beasley's still collecting movie tickets.
He's still flirting with Dot, too.
"I've been married all my life," he said, teasing his 64-year-old wife.
A year after they married in 1952, the Beasleys sold the Glen Theatre and built the Starlite.
"It was my idea," Richard Beasley explained. "I had a lazy streak. I thought how great it would be not to work in the wintertime."
At the time, drive-in theaters were the rage. Local hot spots included the Hiway on U.S. 11 between Radford and Christiansburg, the Autodrome in the Fairlawn section of Pulaski County and the Midway on U.S. 460 between Blacksburg and Christiansburg.
Now only the Starlite is left.
Richard Beasley said he designed the outdoor theater, laid it out, planned the snack bar and did the plumbing and electrical work himself. He bought used equipment from a defunct drive-in theater in North Carolina.
Dot Beasley quit her job as a nurse and started making hot dogs.
Saying regular customers like her hot dogs would be an understatement.
"I've been coming here 30 years, and I've eaten a million hot dogs," said Sharon Flinchum of Christiansburg. "I generally eat four each time. Forget the movie - sometimes I just come for the hot dogs."
The Beasleys say the homemade chili is what keeps folks coming back.
"We've got a secret recipe," Richard Beasley said. "It's called `hit-and-miss.' We just kept adding things until it tasted right.
"We may give out that recipe - make it public - when we retire."
"Retire? What's that word?" his wife asked.
Although Richard and Dot Beasley continue to work at the Starlite, they turned the business over to their daughter, Peggy, in 1985.
Peggy Beasley, 33, has spent her entire life at the drive-in theater.
"When I was a little kid, I used to sit upstairs in the projection booth," she said. "I started in the snack bar when I was 12, making popcorn. By the time I was 16, I was handling the front counter."
All the Beasleys live on the grounds of the Starlite. Richard and Dot live in the same white frame house they built there just after the drive-in opened. It, too, speaks of another era.
A Clover Creamery milk box still occupies a space on the front porch underneath an aluminum awning.
When the Starlite opened for business, admission was $1 per car. The Beasleys can't remember how many years passed before they raised the price to 50 cents a head.
Today, the cost is $2 for adults and $1 for kids. Dogs and cats get in free.
At a recent showing of "Lassie," Laura O'Connor tested the pet policy. "We were wondering if they were charging admission for dogs, but they weren't," she said.
"This is why we moved to a small town, for things like the Starlite," said O'Connor, who hails from the bustling Tidewater area of Virginia.
For folks who grew up in the New River Valley, the Starlite is more than a pleasant remembrance. It's a quintessential part of small-town life.
"I've been coming to the Starlite since I was a little girl," said 49-year-old Carol Gunter of Christiansburg. "My parents used to bring me, and then later on I had a lot of dates here."
"This is where you're supposed to neck," she added.
"My mom and dad went to a drive-in on their first date," said Robbie Colley of Tazewell.
Colley, the 22-year-old starting punter for Virginia Tech's football team, never had been to a drive-in theater until his friend Sheri Elliott of Christiansburg suggested a date to see ``Lassie'' at the Starlite.
The Beasleys say they love to see crowds show up for movies like "Lassie."
"The crowds are always better when the movie is rated G or PG," Peggy Beasley said.
The family has learned to measure the popularity of a movie by the number of cars stretching down Roanoke Street. Some weekends, the line is backed up for more than a mile.
```E.T.' was big. They were lined up for that one,'' Richard Beasley said. "And `Ernest' lined 'em up all the way back to the stoplight. We always did good on Elvis, too.
```Jaws' - that was the only movie I ever remember playing that sold out on a rainy night. It was pouring.''
But the Beasleys agree that their best all-time draw was "Thunder Road," starring Robert Mitchum, which played in the late '50s before most homes had TVs.
Ironically, the Beasleys say they aren't fervent film buffs.
"We've played a lot of movies, but we haven't seen many," Richard Beasley admitted.
Maybe that's because operating a drive-in theater for more than 40 years leaves little time for diversion.
After the crowds go home, there's plenty to do. Richard Beasley still mows the 5-acre tract, and he and his daughter do all the trash collection.
"That's the worst part of operating the business," Peggy Beasley said. "[The customers] leave you anything."
Dot Beasley, too, has some unpleasant tasks when it comes to the family business.
"We used to call her the warden," Peggy Beasley joked, noting that her mother is usually the one who has to deal with troublemakers - including one or two "hoodlums" who used to hang out there.
"You can talk to grown men now who remember when Dot ran them off from the drive-in," Richard Beasley said.
Then, too, there's the phone. It never stops ringing at the Beasley house.
Peggy Beasley remembers the night a caller woke her mother from a sound sleep to ask what was playing at the Starlite.
``She told him `Jake and the Fat Man' was playing and even told him it was rated R,'' she said. ``We cackled about that one.''
Of course, some folks don't care what movie is showing. They come to the Starlite for other reasons.
"I like to come see all the people," said 16-year-old Rachel Castleberry of Giles County as she and her family sat on the hood of a blue Ford, playing rummy while waiting for the movie.
"The whole family is here," she said, pointing to her mother, father and 19-year-old sister, Corrie.
"It would be terrible if it closed," she said. "Will it be open next year?"
by CNB