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When Happy Days Reigned -- 2
Their fare was served by waitresses called carhops who brought their food on metal trays that were attached to their car windows.They were customers of the Cross Roads Drive-In, one of two such restaurants that ministered to the post-game, post-dance, post-movie, post-drag race and, during the summer, post-beach appetites of the generation of Santa Cruzans who maturated from 1947-1963.The other drive-in -- Spivey's Five-Spot -- was located across town at the corner of Ocean and Water Streets."Funny, but I don't ever remember being inside the Cross Roads or the Five-Spot, but I have lots of memories of just hanging out outside, hoping to see current crushes or meet up with other friends," recalls Marlene (Spezia) Courty, a 1954 graduate of Santa Cruz High School who lives in the Aptos area of Santa Cruz County.The last standing representative of the drive-in era in Santa Cruz County and possibly one of the few remaining Northern California structures built in the 1950s exclusively as a drive-in, the Cross Roads should not be razed, contends Bev (Caton) Pinelli of Corning, Calif., another SCHS '54 grad.Bev has asked the city to recognize the Cross Roads "for its historical significance because it was locally owned and a popular gathering place for teens for 15 years."Bev is married to Bob Pinelli, Class of '53. The Pinellis moved from the Santa Cruz County community of Soquel to Corning in 2001.Nick Pagnini, a top board surfer in the Class of '54 who lives in Santa Cruz County's Zayante area, seconds the Pinelli recommendation:"Many long-time Santa Cruzans believe the Cross Roads building should be registered as a local historical landmark," says Nick, who is married to Bev Sommer, Class of '55.Quips '54 classmate Barbara (McCombs) McFadden, a retired Oakland, Calif., attorney, "How we all remained slim despite those fourth meals of 'burgers, fries and shakes on Friday and Saturday nights after games, movies or dances is a metabolic mystery. The few remaining icons of that time should be preserved."Barbara married Charles McFadden, SCHS Class of '55, and each has written a letter to the City Council and to the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper requesting the Cross Roads be preserved for future generations.Bob Branstetter of Santa Rosa, Calif., recalls that "we would meet at the drive-ins before, during and, sometimes, after dates. We would find out what was happening and where to go. The drive-ins were bright, full of music, and active. I can't recall anyone ever getting into trouble there."Bob married high school sweetheart Ada bushnell, also a member of the SCHS Class of '54.Adds Jerry Fuerst of Kalamazoo, Mich., "The drive-ins of the '50s catered to the teenage American culture of the post-World War II era by serving as local gathering points. We not only met our friends there, we took our dates there after games and dances and before or after attending a movie."Jerry's first encounter with a drive-in of any type was the Cross Roads, for he was a German foreign exchange student in the SCHS Class of '54. He later returned to the U.S. and became a high school history teacher.The first member of the Class of '54 to request the City Council to preserve the Cross Roads, Bev Pinelli wants the city to restore the building's unique original facade and convert the interior to a museum celebrating the '50s, either as a stand-alone structure or incorporated in the design of the new natural history museum.Bev is well acquainted with drive-ins. She worked at the Five-Spot, which was razed and replaced by a two-story office building some years ago.Nancy (Cummings) Jellison of Santa Cruz, a former Cross Roads carhop in the Class of '54, emphasizes that the Cross Roads "is unique" in appearance."I can think of no other building in Santa Cruz that is so definitely '50s looking and can be identified as strictly '50s. Therefore, it's not just unusual. It's unique," says Nancy, who married Darrell Jellison, SCHS Class of '52.My parents, Leonard and Louise Klempnauer, who arrived in Santa Cruz in 1946 from Kansas City, Mo., opened the Cross Roads in 1947 in a ramshackle wooden building purportedly built in the 1920s that had lain dormant through most of the Great Depression and stood completely vacant the duration of World War II.They wanted to bring Kansas City-style barbecue to Santa Cruz, and my dad spent hours nurturing long slabs of pork ribs and hearty beef roasts, dousing them with his own special blend of barbecue sauce. When the ribs and roasts were smoking in their wood-burning outdoor brick oven, the aroma wafted through the neighborhood.They named their business the Cross Roads because four streets come together at the location -- scenic West Cliff Drive, which starts at the Cross Roads and travels along the cliffs overlooking Monterey Bay and the Pacific Ocean; Pacific Avenue, the city's main street; Washington Street, which runs near the Santa Cruz High campus; and Center Street, which is between and virtually parallel to Pacific and Washington.Next door stood the local Southern Pacific Railroad Depot while Peerless Stages, a California intrastate bus line, used the SP Depot as its local terminal.In 1949/50, the Cross Roads temporarily moved catty-cornered across the intersection to occupy the front portion of the then-new Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 888 clubhouse while a new Cross Roads building -- the one that later housed the liquor store for almost 40 years -- was being built. (The VFW clubhouse has since been converted to a Days Inn motel.)The Cross Roads returned to its original site but in the new building in 1952.My folks added car service almost as an afterthought; in fact, the neon sign adorning the roof of the building and even their menus touted the restaurant as the Cross Roads Bar-B-Q -- with the words "Drive-In" and "Car Service" in smaller letters.But it was the car service, not my father's KC masterpieces, that attracted the teenagers who made their drive-in a year-round success.If you have seen the 1973 George Lucas movie, American Graffiti, or ever watched the long-running TV series, Happy Days, you have a fairly accurate picture of what the teenage drive-in culture of the 1950s was all about in Santa Cruz."No matter where we went for an evening or what we did in the '50s, we eventually ended up at the Cross Roads or the Five-Spot," says the Class of 1954's Emma (Burris) Turner of Santa Maria, Calif."They were the places to be and to be seen," explains classmate Ruth (Roinestad) Yoder of San Jose, Calif., who also worked at the Five-Spot.Adds Bob Branstetter, a retired Santa Rosa high school counselor:"Our formal school dances were held in somewhat dimly lighted facilities -- but not too dim back then. In order for the girls to really show off their gowns for everyone to see, we would go to the drive-ins after the dances. To get to the bathrooms, which were inside the buildings, our dates had to walk out in front of all the cars and into the bright lights of the buildings."More unnecessary trips to the restrooms were probably made after our four formal school dances than all Saturday nights combined the rest of the year."Both drive-in parking areas doubled as al fresco forums, and teens would skitter from vehicle to vehicle chattering about that night's football, basketball or baseball game, about that night's dance, about the latest movie at the Del Mar Theater, about the hot rodder who had won that night's impromptu-albeit-illegal drag race, about what surfer had caught the longest ride that day, and about who were now a couple or who had broken up or who was cheating on his or her steady.Lorraine (Folk) Voight of Santa Cruz, a cheerleader in the Class of '54, recalls that classmate Rose (Wall) Reynolds "started working at age 15 as a Five-Spot carhop. Everybody knew Rose and Rose knew everyone. She kept tabs on everyone's boyfriend or girlfriend." (Rose lives in Aptos.Santa Cruzan John Biondi, a retired stockbroker who worked at the Five-Spot, remembers taking a female classmate "who was someone else's girlfriend" to the Cross Roads "while her boyfriend hid in the trunk."The boyfriend, John explains, "wanted me to ask her if she really liked him. I asked. She answered 'yes'. He heard, and the rest is history. They later married, and they are still together today."The couple prefers to remain anonymous but she was the Class of '54 Homecoming Queen and the boyfriend, Class of '53, became a teacher at Soquel High in Santa Cruz County.Once the chitchat wrapped up at the Cross Roads, a game of musical cars often ensued, and passengers in one car might pile into a friend's wheels and hustle over to the Five-Spot. Even if they didn't switch vehicles, teens scurried across town to the other drive-in anyway because nobody wanted to miss out on that night's happenings.Marilyn (Singer) Dolezal, a model while attending college and now a horse breeder in Ronan, Mont., recalls that "as teenagers, Julie (Armanini) Engelking and I must have driven hundreds of miles cruising the drag between the Cross Roads and the Five-Spot." (Julie lives in Roseburg, Ore.)
The "drag" was Pacific Avenue, and drivers could cruise downtown Santa Cruz's main street in both directions in those days. The direction they took depended on which drive-in served as their first pit stop that evening.The ritual might recur a half-dozen times a night.In the summer, "the Cross Roads was THE crossroads for those cruising the drag from the beach to the Five-Spot and back," explains Pagnini, a retired businessman and a volunteer Zayante fireman.But the two drive-ins did more than gratify voracious teen appetites and nourish youthful chatter. They also served as teenage showplaces, according to retired businessman Don Samuelson of Ventura, Calif."After football or basketball or baseball games we'd meet at the Cross Roads to celebrate victory or agonize over defeat. But we also went to show off our cars," Don remembers.As proof, actor Tom Stears of Studio City, Calif., recalls that he "upgraded from a '36 Dodge coupe to a '40 four-door Ford sedan because I wanted to look cool."Adds Valerie (Sherbourne) Dillehay of Reno, Nev., "The first date I ever had with my boyfriend, we went to the Cross Roads in his new '36 Ford." (That boyfriend became husband Dr. Ron Dillehay, SCHS Class of '53 and a nationally prominent psychologist.)Most cars owned by teens in the mid-1950s predated WWII, Stears is quick to point out.Charlie Fritz, a retired banker and former Navy pilot who lives in Alamo, Calif., mentions a somewhat slightly different reason for going to the drive-in:"We went to the drive-ins to check out each other's cars all right, but the guys also went to check out the newest carhops."Even without wheels, enterprising teens could find a way to get car service.Retired RN Cookie (Barrientos) Ruschin of San Jose, Calif., recalls that she and '54 classmate Shirley Nunes would "go to the Five-Spot even if we couldn't get our folks' cars. We would walk there, sit on the parking blocks and order food from the nearest car. I wish my kids had had such friendly places as drive-ins to go to when they were teens."Shirley married high school sweetheart Chuck Filice, also Class of '54, who became a teacher. They live in Salinas, Calif. (Chuck, incidentally, is the older brother of John Filice, owner of the Lighthouse Liquors property when it was purchased by the city. As a kid, John worked as a dishwasher at the Cross Roads.)
When Happy Days Reigned -- 3
For the unattached, the drive-ins were the place to rendezvous with that out-of-town chick or hunk you had met earlier in the day at Cowell's Beach, Castle Beach or Cove Beach or at Santa Cruz's famed oceanfront Boardwalk.Locals didn't habituate the Main Beach; we left it to the tourists. But we most certainly did frequent the Boardwalk.Any night out didn't necessarily end at the Cross Roads or Five-Spot, however.Santa Cruzan Sharon (Steele) Bedell remembers that "after the action would wind down at the drive-ins, our dates would persuade us to drive out on West Cliff Drive to watch the submarine races off Lighthouse Point."Sharon watched most of the races with future husband Norm Bedell, SCHS Class of '53.The two drive-ins took on added importance as teen gathering places in the spring of 1953 when the main Santa Cruz High building was declared earthquake-unsafe. Just a few months earlier, the city recreation department had established Santa Cruz's first-ever teen center on campus -- officially the Cardinal Canteen but known to students as The Snafu.But after the 'quake declaration, the main building had to be vacated and all available space had to be used for classrooms. As a consequence, the Snafu was closed.A divided school board squabbled for years over whether to rehabilitate the main building or demolish it and construct a new school.Luckily for Santa Cruzans of today and tomorrow, the preservationists of THAT era prevailed, and the venerable main SCHS building is still being used today.It took five years, however. The next class to graduate from the main building was the Class of 1958.In addition to serving teenagers' social needs, the Cross Roads and Five-Spot also were among the few local establishments that offered youths year-round employment. The aforementioned Bev (Caton) Pinelli, Rose (Wall) Reynolds, Ruth (Roinestad) Yoder, Nancy (Cummings) Jellison and John Biondi were among at least ten members of the Class of 1954 alone who worked at the drive-ins. The others were Jean (White) Guidici, Gene Machado, Sylvia Antonelli and myself at the Cross Roads and Lou Silva at the Five-Spot.On summer weekend nights the Cross Roads was deluged with tourists as well as locals, and "cars often stacked up four and five rows deep," consuming most of the adjacent Southern Pacific Railroad parking area, says Jim Fitzpatrick of Las Vegas, Nev., recently retired chairman of one of the nation's leading collection agencies.Carhops often picked up 50 to 75 dollars in tips on Friday and Saturday nights in the summer -- a healthy sum when the minimum wage peaked at something like 75 cents an hour.Although most summer visitors came from the San Francisco Bay Area and the Silicon Valley (when it was known as Santa Clara County), a goodly portion came from California's torrid interior valleys.My folks always knew when the temperatures were soaring into the high 90s and 100s in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys because a higher proportion of their customers came from Sacramento, Modesto, Fresno and Bakersfield to luxuriate in Santa Cruz's daily morning fog and cool evening breezes. Of course, that was before every home in California's central valley came with air conditioning.The Cross Roads also fed departing riders of the Suntan Special, the passenger train that journeyed from Oakland each summer Sunday toting hundreds of tourists from the San Francisco Bay Area.Upon arriving in Santa Cruz, the train dropped off its passengers along the main beach, but the visitors had to hike the two blocks to the Southern Pacific Depot to catch the ride home. It left about 5:30 p.m., and walk-ins swamped the Cross Roads about 30 minutes before departure.Of course any restaurant close to the beach could make it in the summer, thanks to the tourists. But during the school year, when Santa Cruz rolled up the sidewalks at 10 p.m., the local teen population kept the drive-in business thriving.Class of '54er Rose (Neri) Unger of Los Gatos, Calif., sums up the way most of us who grew up in the '50s still feel about drive-ins:"It is too bad they are all gone. It was fun to go there and see friends after a game or dance. The younger generation is missing out on a place to hang out and have some good, clean, safe fun. Happy Days should be here again!"Pharmacist Art Weybright, a classmate who lives in the Bonny Doon area of Santa Cruz, echoes Rose's thoughts:"We wish the youth of today could have experienced a teen society in which there was virtually no polarization and when almost everyone liked everyone else. We doubt if anyone could really 'understand' that period of time unless they lived it -- and we did." Art married Dee Cochrane, SCHS Class of '56.Paul Heaney of Lodi, Calif., doesn't want another group of former Santa Cruz High students who were frequent Cross Roads' customers to be forgotten by City Hall.Says Paul, who married Carole Scofield, SCHS Class of '56, "I've read excerpts from many of the letters to the editor supporting preservation of the Cross Roads, but one group of customers seems to be missing -- the veteran."At the beginning of the '50s, the Korean War vets -- the vets of America's "Forgotten War" -- used the drive-ins as meeting places."Back in the '50s," Paul continued, "every young man was liable for the draft up to age 26. Many of us fulfilled our military obligation right after high school. The Cross Roads and Spivey's Five-Spot served as gathering places after we were discharged and were becoming reacquainted with civilian life."It was like starting over in many cases because so many of our high school buddies had gone off to college, had married or had moved away because of a lack of decent jobs in Santa Cruz."Earlier in its career, the Cross Roads had served as a gathering spot for the younger returning vets of World War II, among them the local Italian-American fishermen.Santa Cruzan Mary (Ghio) Stagnaro, a retired stockbroker and a member of the Class of '54, remembers that members of the Bregante, Canepa, Carniglia, Ghio, Oliveiri and Stagnaro families would come into the Cross Roads to eat after completing their nightly catch of sardines and anchovies in Monterey Bay. Mary is married to Jack Stagnaro, Class of '48.The decade of the '50s comprised the heyday of the drive-in, and although the lifespan of this dollop of Americana was brief, we who were born during the Great Depression and whose childhoods spanned the duration of WWII spent some of the best nights of our young lives at the drive-in.My folks sold out in 1960, and the Cross Roads continued a few more years as Danny's Drive-In. But expanding television, which kept teens home at night, and the cheaper fare hawked by the burgeoning fast-food chains doomed the drive-in nationwide as a viable American institution.Although the drive-in restaurant business was killed off, the Cross Roads building managed to survive two major natural disasters in its 50-year lifetime:1] The Christmas Flood of 1955 that swamped downtown Santa Cruz (the overflowing San Lorenzo River petered out at the bottom of West Cliff Drive). 2] The Loma Prieta 'Quake of 1989 that vanquished most of downtown Santa Cruz's oldest buildings.But is the Cross Roads now destined to succumb to the wrecking ball of Santa Cruz's new 21st Century modernists that populate City Hall? A Cross Roads Museum memorializing the Happy Days of the '50s indeed seems to be a fitting legacy to bequeath to our grandchildren's grandchildren.As former Cross Roads carhop Nancy Jellison so succinctly puts it:"The Fifties were unique and will never be repeated. All of the local soda fountains, diners and drive-ins of that era are gone, and today we have nothing but fast food chains. The Cross Roads building deserves to be preserved for future generations. If the city tears it down, it's gone forever."
Link to Another Save the Cross Roads Web Site
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