Sky-Vue Drive-In

R.A. "Skeet" Noret and his wife, Sarah, opened the Sky-Vue Drive-In on the outskirts of Lamesa in 1948. Cinema Treasures lists room for 583 cars and seating for 320 walk-in patrons, plus a playground with swings and a merry-go-round. The snack bar, also open to the public, produced the Chihuahua Sandwich: homemade chili meat and pimento cheese with shredded cabbage and diced onions between two tostada shells, served with a jalapeño. Texas Co-op Power credits its invention to Albert Noret, the great-grandfather of Ryan Smith; Cinema Treasures credits Skeet and Sarah. Smith grew up hearing family stories, among them that a then-unknown Buddy Holly once played on top of the projection room.

Sam Kirkland started working for the Norets at the Sky-Vue in 1957 and stayed into the 1960s, when, he told Texas Co-op Power, the theater was "the pride and joy of the town." By the late 1970s he found it closed and overgrown with weeds. He cleaned it up, helped the Norets reopen, and within a year bought it. He and his wife kept it running until 2015 and kept the original playground toys in repair, so that parents could tell their children they had played on the same ones.

The Sky-Vue also started a new chain. In the summer of 2002 Smith, a grandson of Skeet and Sarah Noret, home from his first year of law school at SMU, watched Signs there from his car and decided drive-ins had to be preserved. He left law school and opened the first Stars & Stripes Drive-In in Lubbock a little over a year later.

A fire destroyed the Sky-Vue's concession building on November 27, 2015, and the drive-in never reopened. Cinema Treasures reports that the screen came down in July 2024. The Chihuahua Sandwich outlived it, on the menus at Midland's Big Sky Drive-In, where Kirkland is a part owner, and at the Stars & Stripes in Lubbock.