Samuel “Wes” Wesley Neal, the longtime owner of the Boulevard Drive-In Theatre, has died at the age of 96.
Family announced his death on the theater’s Facebook on Thursday. His obituary said he passed away on September 18.
Neal started working at the drive-in on Merriam Lane in Kansas City, Kansas, in the early 1950s as a "ramp boy" doing maintenance and directing cars with a flashlight for just $3 a night.
Neal told KCUR in 2017 that he fell in love with the drive-in. It was a shift from working on the farm where he grew up in the Missouri Bootheel in the southeasternmost corner of the state.
“Anything was exciting away from home back then, because I never got away from home,” Neal said. “We had to work all the time.”
Neal’s younger sister, Joy Brown, said her family leased an 80-acre farm in southeast Missouri in 1936 but it still needed to be cleared of trees so they could grow crops like cotton.
Neal started doing chores on the farm at 9 years old and was helping cut down the property's trees by the time he was 12. He worked on his family's farm until he moved to Kansas City when he was 21, according to Brown.
Brown said her brother enjoyed science in school and found a job at a pharmaceutical company that eventually became Bayer Corporation. Neal told KCUR he loved being busy.
"I had all this energy, I couldn't go to sleep at night. I'd get up and go run around the block 10 times just to get tired enough to go to sleep," Neal said in 2017.
Looking for a way to release that energy, Neal picked up another job at the Boulevard Drive-In. He worked those two jobs for over 30 years, eventually buying the theater in 1993, according to his obituary.
When Brown was 16, she said Neal took her into his family in Kansas City and offered her a home and a job at the drive-in. She said he was “just good that way.”
The drive-in’s announcement of Neal’s death on Facebook has received hundreds of comments from people sharing memories and paying respects.
“He was seen as just a good, decent person,” Brown said. “I think people respect that, because those are harder to find now than they once were.”
Brown said the movies were just a perk of working at the theater, but not Neal’s love. He enjoyed Western films, and said he only saw one movie all the way through at the drive-in — the Jackie Robinson autobiographical film ‘42’.
Brown said Neal was a “people person” who connected with the drive-in’s attendees.
“He liked to talk to them. He liked for them to feel comfortable,” Brown said. “He liked for them to know he was around if they needed him.”
Brown said he would often ride around the grounds in a golf cart, something many people on Facebook said they also remembered. When she visited with family, Brown said her brother would drive them to a nearby levee around Turkey Creek to look at the railroad.
Even if nothing was happening at the drive-in, she said they’d always go there to walk around and grab food out of the snack bar.
Neal ran the drive-in and kept it afloat even when home televisions came on the scene and other theaters’ attendance dwindled. He created the “Swap and Shop” soon after leasing the theater in 1975 and began offering movies in 4K resolution in 2012.
In 2008, Neal hired his grandson, Brian and his wife, Clarissa, to start learning how to manage the drive-in, according to his obituary. When he drew back from management, his grandson installed cameras showing different angles of the property in Neal’s apartment so he could still feel part of the activities.
Just months before his 90th birthday, Neal told KCUR that he was as retired as he'd ever be. An obituary for Neal said his interests were the “drive-in, family, friends, current news, coconut pie, and his pet cats.”
When his wife, Maizie, died in 2015, he moved into a house overlooking the drive-in. Brown said he clung to the place and she called it his “farm.”
“He did not want to stay on the family farm in the Bootheel, but he made his own farm there,” Brown said.
A visitation for Neal will be held on October 1 at 12:30 p.m. at Chapel Hill - Butler Funeral Home. A funeral service will follow at 2:00 p.m.
