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Drama over the drive-in

The owner of the Ruskin Drive-In Theatre fights to save it after receiving a hefty tax bill.

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published November 18, 2005

	[Times photo: Chris Zuppa]
	Noah Haywood, 6, and his sisters, Katie Haywood, 9, and Kalie Haywood, 10, watch "Chicken Little" at the Ruskin Drive-In Family Theatre. The theater is one of the few nightly drive-ins remaining in the state of Florida.
	[Times photo: Chris Zuppa] Jessica Taber, 12, of Summerfield watches as popcorn is prepared at the concession stand at the Ruskin Drive-In Family Theatre.

RUSKIN - At the Ruskin Drive-In Theatre, the night smells of popcorn and bug spray.

It's 6 p.m., and the velvety expanse of grass is empty. Only the refreshment stand is lit. Inside, Ted Freiwald is cooking burgers for patrons who will start arriving in an hour.

Tonight, he has something to tell them.

When the lot is full of pickups and hatchbacks, when families have spread out their blankets and lawn chairs and lit their citronella candles, Freiwald will reach for the loudspeaker.

"Welcome to the last family drive-in in the USA, where it's always 1955 and we go by 1955 rules," he'll say.

Then he'll tell them about the tax bill, how it more than quadrupled from last year to this year. He'll tell them that he doesn't want to raise their ticket prices.

That he doesn't know how else to pay it.

For now, though, he's concentrating on burgers. He works a spatula under a patty, flips it over.

Ted Freiwald was 15 in 1948, when the first drive-in opened in West Palm Beach. You could get a job as an usher; you could carry a flashlight with an orange cone on it and tell people where to park. So he did.

Freiwald remembers going from car to car with a little wheeled cart. He would offer people a complimentary windshield cleaning and hope they'd buy some popcorn or shaved ice.

The way he tells it, he was so small and skinny that people used to pick him up and hold him over the cars so that he could reach the windshield.

"Then they'd buy your popcorn, because you look so pathetic."

At 72, Freiwald is still small, a dapper man with watery blue eyes and a pencil mustache in the style of some old-time cinema hero, Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks.

If every now and then his stories leap into unlikelihood, he says it's because of all the movies he's seen over the years. Pieces of them end up in his stories, and it's up to his wife, Karen, to call him back into reality.

He worked at the drive-in until he was drafted into the Korean War. When he came back, he says, the business was still there for him.

"It was waiting on me."

By 1977 he had enough to buy a theater of his own.

He chose the Ruskin Drive-In. Its simplicity appealed to him.

"It has one screen," he said. "It has grass all over, like drive-ins did when they started. It's just a nice little country drive-in."

In the 1980s, drive-ins across the country started a slow decline. But Freiwald babied his theater. He mowed the grass and kept the screen painted bright white.

In 1994, a woman named Karen Murawski started working at the refreshment stand.

In 1998, Ted married her. They set up house in a trailer behind the screen.

In 2001 Hurricane Gabrielle destroyed the screen, and the two of them built a new one together, up on ladders, hammering plywood.

They could go on like that forever, he thought.

The tax bill came on a Saturday. Karen Freiwald opened it outside, at the mailbox.

"I saw the number," she said. "I didn't think it was right."

She handed it to Ted.

"I had a heart attack," he said.

In a single year, the assessed value of their 5.3 acres had nearly quintupled, from $174,217 to $814,425.

Their county property tax bill for last year had been just over $4,000.

This year's bill came to a little more than $18,500.

That's 21/2 months of income, Freiwald said - or 4,200 tickets.

It couldn't possibly be right. But the Property Appraiser's Office told them that there had been no mistake.

Rob Turner, the county's property appraiser, acknowledged last week in an interview that it was "relatively unusual" for an assessment to increase so much from one year to another.

But in this case, he said, property sales are shooting up all over Ruskin. The Freiwalds' property was assessed at $3.50 per square foot, Turner said, while nearby property is selling for as much as $11.

In past years, property values in that part of Ruskin had been held down unnaturally, Turner said.

"Quite honestly, we've been watching the commercial activity and sales in that immediate area, and there was a number of things that were of concern to us," he said. Businesses were closing. A Kmart disappeared, then a Burger King.

But more recently, developers arrived and real estate prices began to boom. "That indicated to us that there's no longer a stigma associated with that particular area," Turner said.

When the Freiwalds called Turner's office, they were told that their only recourse was to appeal the assessment. They would have to prove that their property isn't really worth what Turner's office says it is.

The Freiwalds filled out an application. Their appeal will be heard on Tuesday.

Tampa lawyer Rob Kelley, who has handled property tax cases for two decades, said that the Freiwalds have a few other options. One option: They could try to get the county to classify the theater as a historical site, which would force the property appraiser to reassess the land on the basis of its current use, rather than as commercial property on the open market.

But that's a lengthy process, Kelley said. "It's not a simple matter of going down and filling out a form," he said.

The Freiwalds don't know about either of these options. Instead, they chose a different path.

Every week, Karen Freiwald e-mails the theater's movie listings out to about a thousand people.

Now, she and Ted composed a different message.

HELP SAVE YOUR DRIVE-IN THEATRE, they wrote.

At 7 p.m., a line of cars is waiting at the theater's gate. Karen flicks the light on in the ticket booth, raises the guardrail, and waves the first car inside.

Within half an hour, the lot is full and the refreshment stand is bustling. Karen and Ted and their staff are slicing pizzas, filling paper cups full of soda.

The room is dim and warm, lit only by a single fluorescent bulb, the lit menu board, and the dappled glow of the popcorn machine. It's cozy, like being in someone's kitchen.

A lot of the patrons know the Freiwalds.

"Hey, Ted," they say.

"How are you, girl," they say to Karen.

Most of them got the e-mail Karen sent out. If they didn't, there are copies of it taped to the two soda machines.

"Your drive-in needs your help," Ted wrote. "Take a few minutes and contact your county representatives. If you want your theater to stay, tell them so."

His patrons took him up on it, sending e-mails to their county commissioners and to the Property Appraiser's Office.

"We can't afford to lose this piece of Hillsborough County," wrote one moviegoer, signing himself "Richard Denney in the Van Parking Section."

"As a community we have lost so much of our identity to recent development, and now we face the prospect of losing a local treasure," Anita Jimenez wrote.

"If we lose the Ruskin Drive-In, our whole community will have lost something special and irreplaceable," Marcia and Rusty Pontenberg wrote.

Property Appraiser Rob Turner said he'd received "a number" of e-mails. But he said his office can't take public opinion into account as it re-evaluates the Freiwalds' property.

"We have to follow what we believe is the most professional valuation process so everyone knows no one is getting special treatment," he said.

"We're just trying to get the right information," he said, "so I can look him and every other property owner in the eye and say that no one is getting a behind-closed-doors special deal because we got a bunch of e-mails."

At the drive-in, Ted takes pizzas out of the oven and puts more pizzas in.

He could raise his ticket prices to pay the new tax bill. But he won't, he says. The people who come here can't always afford to pay the $9 that indoor theaters charge.

If he has to, he says, he'll take out loans to keep the theater going.

"Little towns like Ruskin, they supported us greatly," Freiwald says. "They've supported me all my life. Everything I've got, one way or another, came from these theaters, these people in these small towns.

"I'm not going to take their theater away from them."

It's nearly 7:30. Out in the darkness, on the grass, families are looking toward the big screen. It glows faintly in the moonlight.

Ted Freiwald slides a last pizza into the oven and walks from the snack counter to the projection booth to start the movie.

- S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at 661-2442 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 17, 2005, 08:14:05]