carol802

My siblings & I would walk up Stella Link to the entrance & they would let us in for free. Amazing what we used to could do as children back then. We would walk to the back rows & turn the speakers up all the way. Alot depended on the direction of the wind but we are talking backyard, 2 lane road & wide back end of the drive-in.

I loved Playland park. That rollercoaster was great! And the pony rides at KiddieLand.

You are absolutely correct in your location and description. I hope we can lay that confusion to rest.

I'll confess, I was always jealous of those living in the houses across the back of the theater and wondered what you did to hear the sound clearly. I recall the speakers around the sitting area at the concession stand were not that loud. I hope the bouncing blue VW with the fogged up windows (often near the back) row did not distract you. My steady girl (now wife of 41 years) frequented the theather in the mid sixties. We actually did see parts of the movies sometimes...har har.

My first disappointed in life was at the South Main back in the fifties. They had a kiddie train in front of the theather entrance with a sign saying Disney characters could be seen inside the tunnel. Heck, I was only 5 or so and was expecting live characters. The pictures of Mickey Mouse painted on the inside of the tunnel wall did not impress me at all.

If anyone runs across good aerial photos of this south main area up through Playland, please post info.

You are exactly right. This was a guy who I had known since elementary school and he was a very kind, quiet & shy "bookish" kind of guy. It was very sad because it had been known (by the HL&P linemen) that he had been a roomate (don't remember how long,etc) of Corll's & back then if you were gay (never thought he was) you didn't stand a chance in that extreme macho environment. Not to mention a possible gay lover of a monster. He was just flat hounded out of the place. I think some of them had questioned themselves as to why they never thought that Corll was a monster when they had been working with him every day.

What is strange for me is that I hadn't thought of any of this IN YEARS until I found this website the other day and started scanning the post. As soon as I saw "Storage Story" it came rushing back like a flash flood.

Along with the posts about Don Mahoney & Jenna Clair, Kitirick, Cadet Don and so many other childhood POSITIVE memories.

I'm going to look for some of the books mentioned & I hope for my old friends sake he's NOT in them.

Peace to the victim's families.

Not necessarily. It's entirely possible that the guy quit because he got tired of all the unwanted attention and probable harassment he was getting just for being Corll's roommate. He was probably the victim of the harassment.

This is the first time I've heard that Corll had a roommate. By "roommate" I mean someone who once shared an apartment or rent house with Corll. And it didn't have to be a "gay" relationship either. It could have been something as simple and as innocent as someone renting a room in a house from a coworker. I did that on a couple of occasions when I was much younger.

I'm sure that at some point his name was mentioned in news stories, which wouldn't have gone over very well with some of his coworkers at HL&P because of the kind of guy Corll was revealed to be.

I went to Westbury 68-69 & 69-70 then got zoned to Madison my senior year 70-71. I thought it was the end of my world. Westbury was one of the greatest schools in HISD in every way and I had gone to Johnston Jr H with all the same kids. It was very tough on us "Transfers" but the Madison kids couldn't have been nicer to us & tried to include us in everything. It turned out to be a great life experience & the zoning did what it was designed to do. I went to school with black kids (Madison was about 1/2 black 1/2 white) for the first time. It was a heartbreaking start to an awsome year.

I found this great website today when I googled the South Main Drive-In. There seemed to be some confustion of it's location on an old string.

The South Main was located at Stella Link and South Main with the back bordered by Willowbend. There was a dirt road that cut off to make the front right entrance & exit to the left of the screen. I grew up on Woodhaven which was the last residential street off of Stella Link before Willowbend. Our house had a back driveway on Willowbend. We watched literally thousands of movies from 1958-1971 from our upstairs picture window that was in perfect alignment to the screen. It was awsome.

I worked at HL&P off of S. Shaver in 1974 with Dean Coryll's room mate. Dean Coryll had also been an HL&P employee. The room mate said he had never noticed anything strange going on. He soon quit due to harrassment. The boathouse that was in Houston was off Stella Link & Willowbend by the South Main Drive-in. This was blocks from my house. The spot on Bolivar was blocks from my family's beach house.

Houston had been known as the murder capital of the world for years before these monsters but it did help bring awareness that every missing kid was not a runaway and helped start the Runaway Hotline.