Santa Cruz Sentinel

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Long before it dispensed booze by the bottle and beer by the six-pack, the building and its two predecessors served as a rendezvous for local youth. Mind you, few actually ever entered the building. Instead, they sat outside in their cars, wolfing down hamburgers and hot dogs and french fries sloshed in ketchup and guzzling milkshakes, ice cream sodas and the all-but-forgotten root-beer floats.

Their food was served by carhops who brought their fare on metal trays that hung from 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, the post-beach appetites of the generation of Santa Cruzans that maturated from 1947-1962. The other drive-in — Spivey’s Five-Spot — was at Ocean and Water streets.

The last standing representative of the 1950s drive-in era in Santa Cruz County, the Cross Roads should not be razed, said Bev (Caton) Pinelli of Corning.

"Instead," she said, "the Cross Roads should be recognized for its historical significance. It was locally owned and a popular gathering place for teen-agers for 15 years."

"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, active, and I can’t recall anyone getting into trouble there," Bob Branstetter of Santa Rosa said.

"Funny, 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," said Marlene (Spezia) Coury of Aptos.

Pinelli is urging the city to preserve Cross Roads, restore its 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 natural-history museum. Bev is well acquainted with drive-ins: She worked at the Five-Spot, which was replaced by a two-story office building some years ago.

My parents, Leonard and Louise Klempnauer, who arrived here in 1946 from Kansas City, Mo., opened the Cross Roads in 1947 in a ramshackle wooden building purportedly built in the 1920s on the same site. 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 outdoor brick oven, the aroma wafted through the neighborhood.

In 1950, the Cross Roads moved catty-corner across the intersection to occupy the front portion of the new VFW Post No. 888 clubhouse, while a new Cross Roads — the one that today houses the liquor store — was being built in 1951. The drive-in returned to its original site in 1952. (The VFW clubhouse is now a motel.)

My folks added car service almost as an afterthought; in fact, the neon sign adorning the roof of the building and their menus touted the restaurant as the Cross Roads Bar-B-Q — with Drive-In and Car Service in smaller letters.

But it was the car service, not my father’s KC masterpieces, that attracted the teen-agers who made the drive-in a year-round success.

"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," said Emma (Burris) Turner of Santa Maria.

Both drive-ins’ parking areas doubled as al fresco forums, and teens would skitter from vehicle to vehicle chattering about that evening’s game, dance or movie, 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, about who was now a couple and who had just broken up, or about who was cheating on his or her steady.

If you have seen the 1973 movie "American Graffiti," or ever watched the TV show "Happy Days," you have a fairly accurate picture of what the drive-in culture of the 1950s was all about.

Santa Cruzan John Biondi, who worked at the Five-Spot, recalls taking a classmate "who was someone else’s girlfriend to the Cross Roads while her boyfriend was hiding in the trunk. He wanted me to ask if she really liked him. I asked. She answered yes. They later married and are still together today." The couple prefers to remain anonymous, but the boyfriend, Class of ’53, later taught at Soquel High.

In the summer, "the Cross Roads was the crossroads for those cruising the drag from the beach to the Five-Spot and back," said Nick Pagnini of Zayante.

Marilyn (Singer) Dolezal of Ronan, Mont., recalled that "As teen-agers, 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 it in both directions then. The direction they took depended on which drive-in served as their first pit stop. The ritual might recur a half-dozen times a night.

Not only did drive-ins gratify voracious teen appetites and nourish youthful chatter, they also served as teen-age showplaces.

"After football or basketball games we’d meet at the Cross Roads to celebrate victory or agonize over defeat. But we also went to show off our cars," said Don Samuelson of Ventura.

Tom Stears of Valley Village recalled that he "upgraded from a ’36 Dodge coupe to a ’40 four-door Ford sedan because I wanted to look cool."

Adds Val (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 Ron, Class of ’53.

But even without wheels, enterprising teens could find a way to get car service.

San Josean Cookie (Barrientos) Ruschin recalled that she and a classmate would "go to the Five-Spot even if we couldn’t get our folks’ cars. We would walk, 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."

Any night out didn’t necessarily conclude at the Cross Roads or Five-Spot, however.

The two drive-ins took on added importance as teen gathering places in spring 1953, when the main Santa Cruz High building was declared earthquake-unsafe. The city recreation department had established Santa Cruz’s first-ever teen center – the Cardinal Canteen – on campus in 1952, but the main building had to be vacated and all available space used for classrooms. A divided school board squabbled over whether to rehabilitate the main building or demolish it and construct a new school.

Luckily, the preservationists prevailed. But it took awhile. The next class to graduate from the main building was 1958.

On summer weekend nights the Cross Roads was deluged with tourists and locals, and cars often stacked up four and five rows deep, consuming most of the adjacent Southern Pacific Railroad parking area. Carhops often picked up $50 to $75 in tips on Friday and Saturday nights, a healthy sum when the minimum wage peaked at something like 75 cents an hour. 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. On arriving in Santa Cruz, the train dropped off its passengers at the Main Beach, but they had to hike back to the 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.

The decade of the ’50s made up the heyday of the drive-in. 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 the place in 1960, and the Cross Roads continued a couple of more years as Danny’s Drive-In. But expanding television, which kept teens home at night, and the cheaper fare hawked by fast-food chains doomed the drive-in as a viable American institution.

The Cross Roads building has survived two major natural disasters: the Christmas flood of ’55, when the overflowing San Lorenzo River petered out at the bottom of West Cliff Drive, and the quake of ’89 that vanquished so much of downtown. But is it now destined to succumb to the wrecking ball of Santa Cruz’s new 21st-century modernists?

A Cross Roads museum memorializing the happy days of the ’50s would indeed be a fitting legacy to bequeath to our grandchildren’s grandchildren.

Capitola resident Len Klempnauer, president of the Santa Cruz High School Class of 1954, worked for the Santa Cruze Sentinel from 1961-1975. He runs a private Web site for 111 members of the Class of ’54 and can be e-mailed at: Klempnauer@iwon.com.

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