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Researching and writing about some of Muncie’s old theaters has mostly been fun! The part that sucked was when I realized that, at thirty-two, I’m too young to have seen movies at almost all of the places I’ve written about. I was complaining to my mom about the situation a few days ago when she reminded me that she’d taken us kids to the old Ski-Hi drive-in north of Muncie once when we were little. I don’t remember that occasion, but I do remember exploring the property a few years after it closed. Here are a few photos I took, along with some of the theater’s history.

Drive-in theaters date to the early twentieth century, but Richard M. Hollingshead, Jr. is generally credited with inventing the concept in 1933 when he established a drive-in theater in Camden County, New Jersey that was dubbed the Automobile Movie Theatre¹. Muncie’s first Drive-in, the Auto Park Theater, opened in 1946 at the northeast corner of Tillotson Avenue and State Road 32². A larger, more modern competitor called the Muncie Drive-In sprung up a year later and quickly put the Auto Park out of business.

The Ski-Hi was Muncie’s third drive-in and the area’s second successful one. Situated at the highly-trafficked intersection of State Road 3 and State Road 28 north of town, the theater opened on August 18, 1950, with a screening of Barricade. Advertisements for the Ski-Hi promised amenities like “In-a-Car” speakers, clean restrooms, a refreshment stand and patio, “moonglow” lighting, lighted walkways, and a “mammoth clear, vision screen³.” 

Owned by the same company as the Muncie Drive-In, the twenty-acre theater cost $100,000 ($1.2 million today) and featured a 64-foot-tall screen tower, one of the largest in the state, built by Brand Sheet Metal Works⁴. At some point, the Ski-Hi’s screen was widened, and the Ski-Hi proved enormously popular for decades and outlasted the Muncie Drive-In, which closed in 1987 after years of lagging attendance.

Theaters like the Muncie Drive-In declined for several reasons. Starting in the 1970s, multiplex cinemas began to offer a range of movie choices from the convenience of a single location. Additionally, widespread air conditioning led moviegoers to be less happy with hot cars, sophisticated home entertainment systems became available, and real estate values skyrocketed. That last point made many of the large plots of land necessary to operate a drive-in astronomically valuable for other purposes! Despite the headwinds and the loss of its twin, the summer of 1988 was one of the Ski-Hi’s most profitable seasons⁵.

1988’s gangbusters summer wasn’t enough to keep the deteriorating Ski-Hi open. It briefly closed after the 1988 season when R&L Transfer, a trucking company from Ohio, attempted to acquire its land to build a trucking terminal. Thankfully for moviegoers, the deal fell through due to zoning obstacles. The next year, the theater’s longtime owner sold it to Harry Burkart, a businessman who owned several screens in central Indiana. Burkart upgraded the projection booth reflector, repainted the screen tower, and added a radio sound system⁶. A second screen was added to the complex soon after.

Although my mom insists that I saw a movie at the Ski-Hi, I don’t remember it. I do remember passing the structure on the way to Fort Wayne or Albany as a kid in the 1990s. The Ski-Hi’s huge screen tower made an equally massive impression on me, even forty years after its heyday! Unfortunately, the Ski-Hi always seemed to be in a state of significant disrepair despite a litany of repairs and improvements. By the early 2000s, the rear of the screen tower had turned into a patchwork of corrugated aluminum, and the parts of its iconic logo that remained unmolested by new metal had faded nearly beyond the point of recognition.

In 2002, Harry Burkhart sold the Ski-Hi to Rick Marlow, a local businessman who purchased the property as an investment but leased it back so Burkart could continue to operate the theater⁷. Kerasotes acquired the property in 2004 and leased it to Alan Teicher, who owned Winchester’s Airline Twin Drive-In. Teicher made improvements like installing a utilitarian sign with red block letters to replace the faded original, but his lease ended in 2005. The Ski-Hi closed for good on September 24⁸.

You might notice that my photos suck. Here’s the story: I took them thirteen years ago when I was nineteen with a flip phone, a 2-megapixel Vivitar camera that cost $30, and only a nascent interest in local history and the built environment. One day, on a whim, my brother and I stopped at the shuttered Ski-Hi on our way home from a trip to Fort Wayne. Time seemed to have stopped since it looked similar to how it appeared during its last years in operation even in its damaged and abandoned state. The place was a sad sight to behold, but my crappy car fit right in!

It would have been sadder if my brother and I remembered seeing a movie there, but we poked around the grounds for a while. I uploaded my images to Facebook after I got home and, social media sites still new to the general public in those days, I didn’t know how badly Facebook compressed uploaded photos. When the laptop I’d saved the originals to clunked out, I paid no heed towards saving the camera files. They were on Facebook, after all- I could always look at them there!

I’ll never be so stupid again! I forgot I’d taken photos of the Ski-Hi until a month ago when I wrote about the Auto Park. I went to Facebook, found the pictures, downloaded them, and opened them in Photoshop. My composition and framing were rough, but the biggest problem was that the image resolution was only 453×604 at 72 ppi! That’s tiny! Before I uploaded them here, I enhanced them through Adobe’s Camera Raw plugin, which doubled their resolution using AI after I tricked it into loading jpegs. It helped, but this paragraph is just a jargony way of saying that I know my images of the Ski-Hi look awful. There are lots of better photos of the theater floating around, but mine are still part of the record.

I didn’t enter the theater’s concession stand, but a door at the base of the screen tower was open and I peeked inside. Letters and numbers from the theater’s marquee were scattered around the floor while strips of old film hung from the walls. I held one into the light and saw the familiar concession circus from the theater’s intermission reels. You can see that very segment at the beginning of the YouTube clip below. The frame I saw featured candy bars walking on a tightrope. I kind of wish I’d snagged it!

A year after I visited, Michael Chalfant bought the abandoned Ski-Hi for $65,000 with the intention of developing the property. By then, everything from the apartment below the screen to the concession stand had been looted and ransacked. Despite the challenges and his original intent, Chalfant had no plans to demolish the structure. Instead, he hoped that a nonprofit organization could step in to revitalize the Ski-Hi⁹.

It was too late. I noticed holes in the screen tower when I was there in 2009, and the deserted theater only continued to deteriorate. By 2016, swaths of the tower’s skeleton were exposed to the elements after several large panels of corrugated aluminum blew off in the wind. It was a dangerous situation exacerbated by the Ski-Hi’s location next to two state highways, and county officials ordered the theater demolished in 2016¹⁰. Despite a Change.org petition and several offers to rehabilitate the structure, two excavators and a backhoe pushed the four-story screen tower down on March 18th. The Ski-Hi was no more.

Losing the Ski-Hi was a blow to those of us who view drive-in movie theaters as more than a nostalgic anachronism. Unfortunately, it’s our fault that it closed- although they were heroic, the eleventh-hour attempts at saving the theater forgot that it was shuttered due to a lack of support from consumers like us when it was still in business. That’s a hard pill to swallow.

Although the Ski-Hi was lost, there’s still hope for drive-in theaters. I was astounded to learn that twenty were still open across Indiana as recently as last year, including some as close as Alan Teicher’s old Airline Twin in Winchester¹¹, now known as the Hummel. Many drive-ins that managed to hold on through the industry’s turbulence have seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when indoor cinemas faced capacity restrictions. Although many of us lament the destruction of the old Ski-Hi, we have a chance to make amends through seeing movies at the ones that still show movies in neighboring communities like the Hummel, the GQT Huntington Twin, the Tibbs, and the Skyline. I hope we do en masse!

Sources Cited
1 Arbuckle, A.Q. (n.d.) The first drive-ins. Mashable. Web. Retrieved May 28, 2023.
2 Greene, D. (1946, July 25). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 6.
3 New $100,000 Drive-In Theater Opens North of City. The Muncie Star. p. 15.
4 Ski-Hi Drive-In (1950, August 18). The Muncie Star. p. 11.
5 Roysdon, K. (1989, April 13). There’s more news on theater scene. The Muncie Evening Press. Pp. 19-24.
6 Roysdon, K. (1989, May 4). Muncie’s only drive-in theater has new owner and new opening date. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 31.
7 McBride, M. (2002, July 9). Ski-Hi Drive-In to reopen Friday. The Muncie Star Press. p. 5C.
8 McBride, M. (2005, August 31). Dollar movies to return to Muncie. The Muncie Star Press. p. 3.
9 Roysdon, K. (2013, July 7). New Life For Drive-In Theater? The Muncie Star Press. Pp. B1-B2.
10 Roysdon, K. (2016, January 28). County moves ahead on drive-in demolition plans. The Muncie Star Press. Pp. 1A-2A.
11 Bongiovanni, D. (2022, June 15). 20 drive-in theaters in Indiana where you can see new and retro movies. The Indianapolis Star. Web. Retrieved June 3, 2023.