I love flea markets. They're a great place to just walk around if only to watch other people prowling through the junk in search of a hidden treasure. They're also a great place to exercise one of my many vices, that being collecting vintage things. If it's over fifty years old, I'll think long and hard about buying it. Well, actually, I buy it and then think long and hard about how I'm going to explain why I bought it. That's because my wife, Sharon, doesn't share my hobby.
"Jack, what in the world are we going to do with a rusty kid's toy airplane? I don't care if it's forty years old and you had one just like it when you were a kid, you aren't going to put it on the mantel. Besides, there's no room on the mantel. You already have three clocks there that don't work."
Well, that was all true. The clocks were really neat even if they didn't work and they didn't cost me much, well, except for the one with the nude woman leaning on the clock face. That one was a little pricey, but it is so cool. The toy plane was rusty and I did have one just like it when I was a kid. It's sitting on the top shelf on my side of the bedroom closet right now, right alongside the antique glass dish with a lid that looks like a chicken sitting on a nest like my grandmother had.
I really try to resist, I really do, but it's hopeless. I'm addicted, I know it, and I don't care. That's why I can't park my car in the garage. When I saw the 1960 Chevy Bel Air two-door advertised in the paper, I started to drool. My first car was a 1960 Chevy Bel Air two-door. This one was even the same color -- blue with a white top -- and it had an inline six with a three speed manual transmission with the shifter on the steering column.
The owner wanted a ridiculously low price for such a classic, a price I couldn't pass up. I bought it and then paid a tow truck to take it home. One of these days, I'm going to figure out why it doesn't run. In the meantime, I washed and waxed it, and I swept out the inside. Once in a while, I go sit in it and remember. I just wish Sharon would be a little more understanding.
One day at my local flea market, I found something I'd never seen there before. In fact, it had been almost twenty years since I'd seen one at all. I bought it and took it home, but I didn't show it to Sharon. She'd never have understood.
I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it either, but it just felt good to know I had a speaker like they had for each car in the drive-in movie theater where I used to take dates. It even had the wire that connected the speaker to the pole. Actually there were two wires, just like the two wires I used to hook up the speakers to the radio in my garage. I like to listen to music when I'm working out there.
When I got it home, I stashed it on the top shelf of the shelves where I keep my paint and varnish for woodworking projects and forgot about it. Then, along came Covid-19 and suddenly, I was working from home. What with no drive to and from the office and no long meetings to go to, I was pretty efficient and that left me some time to do whatever I wanted to do except go to flea markets. They were all closed.
The other thing it left me was Sharon with no place to go and nothing to do except stay home with me. About the first week of September, Sharon told me if she didn't get to do something soon, she'd probably be in jail for stabbing me with a steak knife.
Well, not wanting to get stabbed with a steak or any other kind of knife, I set my mind to figuring out something we could do. That's when I remembered my drive-in speaker.
It took two days to clear off the wall of my garage and the workbench that was in front of the Chevy. Sharon looked at me funny when I carried the TV from my den out to the garage, and when I carried the DVD player and the cables out there she asked me what I was doing. I just smiled and said I was going to spend my free time doing a little woodworking and thought I'd watch a movie or two while I was doing it. She seemed to accept that, probably because watching movies on TV what she was spending her time doing when she wasn't cleaning or cooking for us.
I sat the TV and DVD player on the workbench and tried it out. It worked just like it did in my den, so I knew my plan would probably work if I connected the remote speaker jack on the TV to my drive-in speaker. That's when I found the first snag. I had an old set of headphones I was going cut the cable off of. Then, I'd connect that cable to a telephone extension cable I saved from an old telephone we once had, and connect the other end to my speaker. The problem was my speaker cable only had two wires and the headphones had four.
The internet solved that problem by teaching me that two of the wires in my headphone cord were grounds and the other two were for the left and right stereo channels. That was simple enough, or it seemed like it was. All I had to do was connect the right and left wires together to one wire of my telephone extension cable and connect both ground wires to another wire of my telephone extension cable.
Now, experience has taught me that I'm no electrical expert. We won't go into that experience except to say there wasn't a fire because the circuit breaker tripped right after the wire insulation melted. It took almost six months before the smoke smell went away though.
Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to get an expert opinion, so I searched some more. What I found out is I could do what I thought, but I needed two resistors that I didn't have. The guy said I should use something called a 1k resistor so I went to Amazon to see if they had any.
Amazon did, but I had to buy a hundred to get the two I needed. While I waited the two days for them to get to me, I wired the speaker to my telephone extension cord and mounted the TV on the wall so I could still use my workbench.
When my resistors arrived, I finished the wiring, hung my speaker from the window of the Chevy and started a movie, then got inside the Chevy and closed the door. Everything worked just like the guy said it would. I had sound coming out of the speaker, not very good sound, but about what I remembered drive-in movie sound to be like, and the volume control even worked.
There was only one more problem. Sitting in the front seat, I had a perfect view -- of the front of the workbench. That's when I remembered that the parking spaces at the drive-in were higher in front than in back. I needed a way to raise up the front of the Chevy.
After a little more thought, I knew I could do that too, but it was going to be work. I had a set of car ramps I bought to raise up my riding mower so I could change the blades easier. The only problem was the Chevy didn't run so I couldn't drive it up the ramps.
I solved that problem by brute force, meaning I used the bumper jack of the Chevy to jack up one front wheel at a time, slide the ramp under it, and then let it back down. Once I had both front wheels on the ramps, I got back inside and looked through the windshield. It wasn't great, but it was OK.
I'd set the parking brakes, but just in case, I stuck a block of wood behind each rear tire. I was ready. All I needed was an appropriate movie, and I knew I had several. Drive-ins usually showed "B" movies, and I'd picked up several at flea markets for a couple bucks each. All I had to do now was wait until Sharon complained about not having anywhere to go and nothing to do.
That happened on Saturday morning when Sharon took a sip of her coffee and then sighed.
"Last year, I'd have gone to the mall and looked around for some fall tops. Now I'm stuck here with you and the TV. Will this thing never end?"
For a few seconds I stroked my chin like I was thinking, but inside, I was smiling.
"I suppose it'll end when it ends. Hey, I know what we can do. Let's go see a movie."
Sharon frowned.
"In case you hadn't noticed, every movie theater in town is closed. Has been for the last six months."
I grinned.
"Not the drive-In. It's still open."
Sharon was still frowning.
"I think being home all this time has warped your brain. There hasn't been a drive-in within a hundred miles in twenty years. They tore down the last one in town to make room for the mall."
I was having fun with this.
"Well, that's true, but there's a new drive-in that just opened and it's not very far from here. What say we go check it out tonight? Oh, their snack bar isn't open because of the restrictions so we'll have to take our own drinks and snacks, but we have soft drinks and popcorn."
Sharon still didn't believe me.
"If this drive-in is open, what's the movie?"
I grinned because I'd picked a movie I knew Sharon would like. See, she has this rather unique taste in some things and drive-in movies are one, or at least it used to be. I was hoping it still was.
