More on the El Rancho Drive-in in Kent, Washington

By Jack Brummet, Green River Valley Ed.

click to enlarge

There were three drive-ins in Kent, but we mainly went to one, because it was cheap. The El Rancho was our high school choice to see spaghetti westerns, scary movies like I Saw What You Did And I Know Who You Are, and monster movies like The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Day The Earth Stood Still, or Billie Jack, Charles Bronson, and Clint Eastwood movies, or sometimes R-rated potboilers by Russ Meyers, like The Stewardesses, or the memorable Wife Swappers.

There were two other drive-ins in Kent: The Midway, on West Hill, which still exists, albeit as a swap meet location (the screen has long been dead), and the Valley Drive-in (which closed in the last two years). The El Rancho opened the year after I was born.

The fantastic marquee out front showed a gigantic cowboy on the range, cooking bacon in a cast iron skillet over a campfire. At $3.50 a carload, so you could see a movie for about seventy-five cents. Lining the street in front of the drive in were a row of stately Lombardy poplars. The El Rancho was torn down in 1975, but there among the concrete tilt-up warehouses and strip malls, a few of those poplars still exist, in between buildings and warehouses.

Drive-ins close every year at a quickening pace, but in this state (Washington) a few remain:

Samish Twin Drive-In Theatre
Bellingham

Auto Vue Theatre
Colville

Dayton Drive-in Theater
Dayton

Puget Park Drive-In
Everett

Your Drive In Theatre
Longview

Rodeo Tri Drive-In Theatre
Port Orchard

Blue Fox Drive-in Theater
Oak Harbor

River-Vue Drive-In
Pasco

Skyline Drive-In Theatre
Shelton (with an actual Indian totem pole at the entrance)

Wheel-In Motor Movie
Port Townsend

Vue Dale Drive In Theatre
Wenatchee

Country Drive In Theatre
Yakima

one of the two murals in front of the theatre

An aerial view of the El Rancho before it was demolished

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