They’d lost a community fixture that had continually shown films since opening as Lee Drive-In in 1950 and assuming the name Hull’s Drive-In in 1957, when Mr. and Mrs. Sebert Hull purchased it. Without the theater, things just weren’t the same.
All those years, when Hull’s opened for the season, “it was sort of like a sign of spring,” said Peggy Payne, who sells tickets at the theater. “[When] there was nothing on the marquee … we thought, ‘We can’t have that.’”
Instead of letting the movie screen go permanently black and allowing the lawn to grow over with weeds, community members banded together.
They formed a nonprofit group called Hull’s Angels in 1999 and began collecting donations to save the drive-in from doom. It didn’t take long for the group to raise enough support to open the theater for the latter half of the 2000 season and for a full first season in 2001.