The TeePee Drive-In began operation in 1950, as a joint venture between Jimmy Zartaludes, the owner of the Criterion Theater, and an amusement company in Oklahoma City. The theater was said to have a 400-car capacity, a state-of-the-art sound system to drive the speakers at each parking spot.
I started going to the TeePee as soon as I obtained my driver’s license in 1966. Until I started driving, I watched movies at the Criterion, but once I had my own wheels, I opted for the Tee Pee.
I usually watched action/drama movies but enjoyed sci-fi the most. I remember the concession stand very well. They had the best corn dogs around, and everything seemed to taste better when I was sitting in the comfort of my car, usually with a few of my buddies.
I remember one evening we tried to sneak a few friends in the trunk. (That was before the “carload price.”) Jerry Zartaludes was taking tickets when suddenly, a friend of mine in the trunk sneezed with the force of a stick of dynamite. The jig was up! We had to cough up a few more shekels to get in. For the record, I never tried that again.
One of the downsides of an outdoor theater was the mosquitoes. During the summer, since the drive-in was close to a creek, the pesky little critters could be quite obnoxious. I always kept a can of OFF! in my glove box. Another annoyance was the occasional, inconsiderate driver who would enter the drive-in and park with his headlights on.
The movies being shown were, for the most part, movies you could take children to. Many times, in the summer months, you would find the children playing in an area in front of the screen and families would sit out in front of their cars. Pickup trucks and station wagons were routinely backed into the parking spots, so several people could have unobstructed views of the screen.
A fond colloquialism for the drive-in, back in the day, was the “passion-pit.” This moniker was quite apropos. On many a cool evening, you would see cars in the back rows with the windows all steamed up. Once I started dating, I did not pay much attention to what was on the screen, although I tried to keep up enough, so if queried by a girlfriend’s parent, I could tell them what the movie was about.
Once, as related by Zartaludes daughter Mary, Jimmy was in the concession stand when a tornado passed overhead. It did not destroy the concession stand, but Jimmy watched the screen being lifted up, slightly, in the air and then coming back down. The drive-in survived the wrath of nature, but could not survive changing times and in 1999 closed its doors.
The TeePee went through several owners and operators. In 2012, Russ Glen, AKA Russell Brannan, purported theater entrepreneur, leased-to-purchase the drive-in from the owners, Marsha and James Baccus of Owasso. In a plot out of “The Music Man,” Glen/Brannan announced he would bring a 3-D digital projector, a 40-foot-tall neon sign, and eventually a second screen. Glen set up a Facebook page and the TeePee Drive-In Theater Association, a supposed non-profit to take donations. He was quoted as saying, “I am doing everything by the book.”
Glen/Brannan never showed up at the site again. It turns out the companies he listed were not on file in Florida as he stated. Furthermore, he had a trail of theaters he leased or subleased and walked away from. After a “snag” in completing the lease, Glen/Brennan was out of the picture, leaving many people who had volunteered laboriously to clean the place up and one who had put $2,000 into the association’s bank account, stunned. Fortunately, Glen/Brannan was not a signer on the account and the volunteer got his money back.
The TeePee sat vacant for the next several years until early March of 2021, when Joni Rogers-Kante’s Kante Group purchased the property and began clearing it, though for what purpose is not entirely clear. Unofficial reports say that the drive-in may be operational as soon as the summer of 2021.
