Jack’s Mid Missouri Memory: Goodbye to Another Icon, Eddie’s Drive-In

Goodbye to another Icon. People of my generation have had to say goodbye to way too many icons from our childhood, and some I know have bothered us more than others.

The demise of the 50 Highway Drive-in Theater happened long ago, but it still speaks to me, and those who attended it for so many years whenever we drive past the multi-plex indoor theater that sits on that spot at Main Street and 50-Highway now. We also miss The Uptown, Liberty and Fox Theaters in downtown Sedalia, that filled our Saturdays with cowboys and swashbucklers as kids in ways a mere television set never will.

The old Country Club Golf Course where some of us caddied as boys, is now just so many businesses and houses where a beautiful club house and immaculate greens once resided. I for one miss the old neighborhood stores that peppered the town before the larger stores came along, like Mr. Reeds, and Mr. Arnolds (Later Mary Jetts) on East 4th  with owners we grew up knowing, and thought of as friends. The small cafes like Pop’s at 5th and Engineer, the White Swan near Broadway on that samestreet perfectly located for us kids who attended Washington School, and could slip over there for a Coke (if we had the nickel) or play the pin ball machine.

As we grew older there was the Griddle on 5th street, and the Coffee Pot on Osage where we could get a coffee and flirt with the waitresses. I have written about all of these places in the past as one by one they disappeared from the landscape, and all of them hurt to let go of more than I thought they would.

Now there is the news that one of my favorite spots during my “Taking the Drag” days as a youth is going to be torn down. The generation after mine and my friends called it "Eddie's," but to those of us who were teens in the fifties and before will always call it “Garsts Drive-In." It was a pivot point for us as we drove around back then, just as the “Wheel-In” at 50 and 65 Highways was. It hurt to say goodbye to that one too, but not as much as it will to watch “Garsts” being demolished and hauled away.

I must also mention that there are also a lot of women like my wife Marlene, and her sister Joyce who will watch a part of there youthful memories being torn down and hauled away when Garsts is gone. They were Car Hops back then, the main reason for all the trips we made around the little drive-in back then. As I have said before when other past icons were either torn down or just fell, I know it is progress when something is replaced, and sentimentality is not enough reason to keep something, past its usefulness; but for something that holds so many memories for so many of us it seems as if it should be.