Word: drive-in
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Shingledecker's death was easy to portray as a clear-cut case of cause and effect. On Oct. 10, he and three carloads of friends saw the movie The Program at a drive-in theater not far from his home in rural Stoneboro, Pennsylvania. Early in the film, its hero, a college quarterback, tries to prove grace under pressure by lying down in the middle of a busy highway flipping through a magazine as the trucks swerve to avoid him. He goes unscathed. Shingledecker did not seem especially moved by the film, his girlfriend reports. But the next weekend...
...college, working her way through Philander Smith, a black institution in Arkansas, as a cleaning woman. When she was home one weekend, her younger brother Chester, now a Methodist minister in Pine Bluff, realized that she had begun to change when she took her siblings to the drive-in to see a movie. "She went to a section not marked off for coloreds," says her brother. "The attendant told her to move, and they got in a heated argument. We started to cry. We weren't into the politics of life; we just wanted to see the movie. Finally...
...protagonist's visions offer glimpses of beautiful but ultimately unreal scenes. In "Emergency," angels appear to the hero in a meadow, "their huge faces streaked with pity." What he really sees is a drive-in movie screen. In "Work" two men strip an abandoned house for scrap wire; afterwards they go to the local bar, where the barmaid "poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring." This "angel" bartends in a grungy bar, but to the sobbing protagonist she is nurse and mother...
...result of that skill has been an American success story. Smith, a Forbes 400 millionaire with assets recently estimated at approximately $460 million, grew a family-run chain of drive-in movie theaters into a conglomerate that now includes the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishing house and a 60 percent interest in the Nieman Marcus Group...
Schuller's great distinction, perhaps, is not just that he was a pioneer of the drive-in church (and his sermons are still broadcast, via a wide-screen TV, to overflow parishioners in the parking lot outside), nor that he has managed to erect a glittering monument to his "Be-Happy Attitudes," but rather that he has gathered a huge nationwide following out of preaching what is in effect Californianism. For if you look at his books (Your Future Is Your Friend, Success Is Never Ending, Failure Is Never Final), and if you walk around his church, as airy...