Drive Honor Highway after dark this time of year and you will see it before you see anything else: a screen tower taller than the tree line, lit blue with three oversized cherries painted across it, glowing over a gravel lot a short drive from the Platte Lake shoreline. The Cherry Bowl Drive-In has been doing that every summer since 1953. What most people driving past do not know is that the business almost didn't make it to its 72nd season, and that the reason it did comes down to one specific decision by the woman who bought it.
In September 2024, two entertainment businesses that had anchored their respective towns for a combined stretch of more than a century both changed hands within weeks of each other. One is still running, with new traditions layered onto the old ones. The other is gone, and the ground it sat on is being absorbed into a car dealership.
Seventy-One Years, Two Owners, No Gaps
Before 2024, the Cherry Bowl had only ever had two owners. Jean and L.O. Griffin opened it on July 4, 1953, showing James Stewart in "The Greatest Show on Earth" as the first-night feature. When L.O. died in 1959, Jean kept running the place herself for decades, reportedly working the lot in high heels. Laura and Harry Clark bought it in the 1990s, and after Harry passed in 2012, Laura carried it forward the same way Jean had, alone at the helm of a business older than most of its customers.
That continuity is part of why the Cherry Bowl matters beyond nostalgia. According to Wikipedia's entry on the theater, it was one of just eight drive-ins still operating in Michigan as of 2024, and the only one left in the northern part of the state. Nationally, the format has shrunk from an estimated 5,000 drive-ins at its 1950s peak to roughly 300 still standing today. Every one of those closures started the same way: a "for sale" sign, and a question about who would buy it and why.
When Laura Clark decided to retire in early 2024, that sign went up, listed at $625,000. It made statewide news, not because of the price but because of the math: lose this one, and the region loses its last drive-in entirely.
What Mindi Jarman Actually Kept the Same
The buyer turned out to be Mindi Jarman, a Lansing-based preschool and kindergarten teacher who had left the classroom the year before after 15 years of teaching. She and her husband had kept a boat in Frankfort for years, and her own first drive-in memory was made at the Cherry Bowl. When she saw the listing, she has said she turned to him and knew immediately what she wanted to do.
What she has not done since taking over is strip the place down and rebuild it in her own image. The original vacuum-tube speaker posts are still there, with an FM radio option for anyone who prefers their car stereo. The 1953 popcorn popper is still in the kitchen. Harry Clark's roadside sculptures, a pink Volkswagen with a clown head, a cherry-spotted cow, a Chevy frozen mid-crash through a fence, are all still standing. The theater still holds to its long-standing rule against anything rated above PG-13, keeping the audience the same mix of families it has always drawn.
Held the line since 2024 | Added since 2024 |
|---|---|
Vacuum-tube speakers and FM audio option | PickleFest, launched in 2025 |
1953 popcorn popper | "PickleFest: The Sequel," July 24 to 25, 2026 |
PG-13-and-under double features only | New themed weekends, including this month's Creature Feature Takeover |
Retro roadside sculptures and mini-golf | A public push to stretch the season toward October |
Her own description of the goal, in her words, was her "strong desire to preserve things from the past."
What She Added, One Thing at a Time
The changes Jarman has made are additions, not renovations. In 2025, the drive-in ran its first PickleFest, a pickle-themed weekend of costume contests and vendor booths that returned in 2026 as "PickleFest: The Sequel" on July 24 and 25. This month brings a "Creature Feature Takeover" weekend, running Friday, September 19 and Saturday, September 20, built around a screening of the monster film "Squatch."
Behind those events sits a longer-term goal she stated early on: pushing the season further into fall, ideally toward October, rather than closing on the traditional Labor Day timeline. The 2026 season, the drive-in's 73rd consecutive one, opened May 15 and is still running showtimes in mid-September, which puts that goal within reach.
None of this required touching what already worked. It required deciding what could be layered on top of it.
The Other For-Sale Sign, in Traverse City
The same fall the Cherry Bowl changed hands, Lucky Jack's Family Entertainment Center in Traverse City did too. Between them, the two businesses carried more than 134 years of combined operating history. One buyer wanted to keep running a drive-in theater. The other wanted the land, and Lucky Jack's closed for good, with the site becoming the next expansion for a growing car dealership.
Nothing about that outcome reflects poorly on either business. It reflects something more useful for anyone who lives near either one: an old institution's survival has less to do with its age or its charm and everything to do with what the next owner actually wants it to be.
Why This Matters If You're Ten Minutes Away
Honor sits along the Platte River just upstream from Platte Lake, and the pattern showing up at the Cherry Bowl is the same one that shaped the newest piece of public land nearby. In May 2024, the Honor Area Restoration Project opened Platte River Park, a 52-acre stretch of forest and undeveloped riverfront that took more than a decade of community fundraising and planning to complete, dating back to a 2011 public meeting that first set the goal. It didn't replace anything. It added a protected space to a stretch of river and lake that residents had already spent decades restoring, including the well-documented recovery of Platte Lake's water quality from the algal blooms that once threatened it.
Both stories point to the same local trait. The places that last around Platte Lake tend to survive because someone treats them as worth adding to rather than starting over.
If you're on this side of Benzie County, the Cherry Bowl's current run of Friday and Saturday double features is worth checking before the season winds down, and the theater posts its weekly lineup on its own site rather than in advance, so it's worth a look before you plan a night out.
For everything else about life around Platte Lake and Little Platte Lake, from the shoreline to what a home here might actually look like when the time comes, the Jon Zickert Group knows this stretch of water the way longtime locals do. When you're ready to talk specifics, schedule a consultation and we'll walk through it together.
