Flashback Friday: Wichita’s Danny Zukos, Fonzies hung out at this 1950s drive-in
Welcome to Flashback Friday, a feature that runs occasional Fridays on Kansas.com and Dining with Denise. It’s designed to take diners back in time to revisit restaurants that they once loved but that now live only in their memories — and in The Eagle’s archives.
This week’s featured restaurant was a 1950s drive-in where teens would often get in trouble with the cops.
Nearly every Saturday morning, I hop out of bed in time to be in my car by 9 a.m. and headed to the local estate sales, which by then are mostly selling items for 50% off.
I go for a couple of reasons: One is that I like to see inside Wichita houses, and as an amateur cultural archeologist — and professional nostalgic — I like to wander around looking at people’s stuff, trying to decide who they were. I also like stumbling across things just like my grandma once owned or that my family had when I was a kid.
But the main reason I go to estate sales is to hunt for artifacts from Wichita’s restaurant past. I wrote several weeks ago about the best Wichita restaurant relic I’ve ever spotted — the satin Lettuce jacket worn by a guest at a party I attended. That’s the kind of stuff I’m searching for: plates, cups, glasses, signs, menus, napkins, ashtrays that were once used in a long-gone Wichita eatery. My collection so far includes plates from Portobello Road, a spoon from the Allis Hotel, printed glassware from Bombay Bicycle Club and Pat O’Brien’s, and a straw hat from Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour.
In early September, I was on one such estate sale outing when I stopped at a house near Central and Edgemoor. I’d just about given up on this sale when I spotted a frame leaning against the wall of a TV room. As I got closer, I could tell that the homeowner had framed some old menus, and they were in fact from a Wichita restaurant that was unfamiliar to me.
The cover of the menu had a drawing of a man in traditional Scottish garb: a tartan kilt and cape, a big belt buckle and a Glengarry cap with a feather poking up. The words on the menu read “The Highlander Drive-In, Central and Edgemoor, Wichita, Kansas.”
You better believe I grabbed that frame, headed to the checkout counter and happily handed over the $2.50 they were asking. When I got home with it, I carefully took the frame apart and pulled out the menus to get a closer look. Printed inside were offerings like 25-cent hamburgers, 20-cent hot dogs, 40-cent beef sandwiches, 15-cent french fries and 25-cent malts and shakes.
Besides hearing about old Wichita restaurants from people who once loved them, my favorite way to discover them is by finding old artifacts like this. I went straight to the computer and started researching.
What I discovered was that The Highlander Drive-In was a short-lived hangout on the northwest corner of Central and Edgemoor that opened in 1952 and appears to have lasted only until about 1959 — at least, that’s when the last mentions of it appear in The Wichita Eagle and the Wichita Beacon.
This drive-in, though, made lots of news in a short amount of time and was loved so deeply by the youth of the late 1950s that for at least 15 consecutive years in the early 2000s, a bunch of them — by then, all in their late 60s — would get together for a reunion and car show, where they’d relive The Highlander’s glory days. The man whose estate sale I was visiting that day was one of them.
The drive-in, whose address was 527 N. Edgemoor, was opened in 1952 by Richard Everett Bell, whose house was near the drive-in, and Richard Walker, a former IRS agent who also owned a burger stand on North Broadway. (Shortly after The Highlander opened, Walker was charged in connection with the kidnapping and robbery of a local club owner, then died “following a brief illness” less than two months later at the age of 35.)
The Highlander, which was always advertising for car hops and curb hops, became a popular late-night hangout for local teens. But it also became notorious for the trouble those teens would get into.
This was the 1950s, when teens across the country would cruise the streets of their towns in souped-up cars then linger at local drive-ins. I wasn’t born yet, but I picture The Fonz and Chachi at Arnold’s Drive-In in “Happy Days” or Danny Zuko and the T-Birds at the Frosty Palace in “Grease.”
I definitely was envisioning those characters when I came across a Wichita Eagle article from January 1954. It reported that teens at the Highlander Drive-In who were celebrating a basketball victory “stripped the clothing from a Wichita youth and left him nude before the gaping eyes of drive-in patrons...”
Police called to the scene told the paper that “the unclad high school youth darted among automobiles in the eating place’s parking lot looking for seclusion. . . Questioning of witnesses proved difficult because the other boys on the scene vowed innocence and the girls ‘just didn’t look.’”
The following March, the drive-in was in the news again after neighbors reported teenagers “driving in a reckless manner, needlessly sounding their horns, and staging ‘funeral’ processions in which 20 to 30 autos would line up bumper-to-bumper and drive slowly around the streets, blowing their horns.” Neighbors also complained of vandalism, drag racing and petty thefts by huge “gangs” of teenagers.
Police who responded to the call said that they were insulted and abused by the teens when they attempted to reason with them and “ordered them to drive more sanely.” (The teens and the drive-in manager both insisted that the police were the ones doing the harassing.)
In August of 1955, ongoing complaints from the drive-in’s neighbors prompted police to crack down on young patrons. During one weekend, the police arrested 21 people and issued 37 traffic summonses. Police told the media that many of the violators “were from the Highlander crowd” and were picked up on charges of drunk driving, reckless driving, speeding and running red lights and stop signs.
Later that same week, two teens at the drive-in were arrested and booked into the city jail on charges of vagrancy after they refused to obey the orders of a policeman who instructed them to stop sitting on the curb and obstructing cars from parking.
The arrests came hours after The Eagle printed an anonymous letter from a local teenager who said the problems at the drive-in were happening because “the city did not provide them with a place to go at night or provide them a drag strip on which to race their cars.”
Often, when police arrested teens at The Highlander, their friends would follow the police to the station and crowd into the lobby. After the arrest of the two teens in August of 1955, about 20 boys and girls did just that. (It’s nothing The Pink Ladies or Pinky Tuscadero and The Pinkettes wouldn’t have done.)
The last mention of the Highlander was published in the Wichita Eagle in November of 1959: The drive-in’s manager told police that, over the course of three nights, several cars filled with teens had parked in the restaurant’s lot and passed an air rifle from car-to-car, shooting at the electric lights and neon sign, resulting in more than $200 worth of damage.
The generation of teens who would have patronized The Highlander grew up, then grew older, and many of them started getting together in the early 2000s for a car show followed by dinner, usually at an upscale hotel.
Most of those folks, though, would now be in their mid-80s to early 90s. I tried tracking down a few of the most active members of the reunion group only to discover that many of them had died over the past several years. The man who owned the home where I found the framed menus died in April of this year.
His memories and his menus are now safe with me.
This story was originally published October 10, 2025 at 5:09 AM.
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