Stars & Stripes Drive-In Theatre

Stars & Stripes Drive-In Theatre grew out of a West Texas family business. In 1948 R.A. "Skeet" and Sarah Noret opened the Sky-Vue Drive-In on the outskirts of Lamesa. Their grandson Ryan Smith grew up on its stories: that a then-unknown Buddy Holly once played on top of the projection room, and that his great-grandfather Albert Noret invented the Chihuahua Sandwich there, homemade chili meat and pimento cheese with cabbage and onions between two tostada shells.

In the summer of 2002 Smith, in his early twenties and just finished with his first year of law school at SMU, was in Lamesa learning the family businesses from his grandfather. Texas Co-op Power tells how he watched M. Night Shyamalan's Signs from his car at the Sky-Vue, eating a Chihuahua Sandwich, and decided the experience had to be preserved and shared. He never went back to law school. Just over a year later, with investments from his family, he opened the first Stars & Stripes in Lubbock.

Cinema Treasures dates the Lubbock drive-in to 2003. It opened with two screens, one 45 feet high by 90 feet wide and the other 35 by 70, and room for 1,000 cars, and it added a third screen in 2006. The Chihuahua Sandwich is on its menu. A second Stars & Stripes, nearly identical to the first, opened in 2015 in New Braunfels, south of Austin, with three screens and year-round shows.

The company arrived late in the drive-in era. Texas Co-op Power reported in 2019 that some 400 drive-ins once operated in Texas and fewer than 20 were still open, two of them Stars & Stripes. Hollywood's switch to digital projection in the 2000s, with projectors costing upward of $70,000, had closed many family-run theaters. The Sky-Vue itself was kept going by Sam Kirkland, who grew up working there from 1957 and bought it in the late 1970s, until a fire destroyed its snack bar in 2015.