The secret life of a Portland drive-in
The small, low-slung building, sitting empty on Northwest Skyline Boulevard, isn’t much to look at these days. Honestly, it never was.
The Forest Park Drive-In is boxy and plain, an example of America’s car-centric convenience culture at its midcentury architectural nadir.
But that unprepossessing structure conjures a powerful yearning.
Every once in a while, someone driving past the building -- its faded sign heralding “freshly frozen SOFT CREAM” -- is struck by a wave of nostalgia. The passerby pulls the car into the lot, snaps a photo and puts the image on social media.
The comments on these posts flow as sweet and thick as the soft serve once sold at the place, but they also make clear it wasn’t just some ice-cream hut.
“Does anyone remember the zipline and giant A-frame swing in the woods behind the building?” one longtime Portlander recently wrote.
“An old guy up there, we called him OLD BEN, had toys for grown-ups,” recalled another. “A huge swing in the forest he had built, you could get about 10 hippies on it ... a zipline ... a monster titter totter ... fun in the forest…”
Old Ben actually wasn’t that old at the time. Benjamin Pachkofsky, a World War II veteran and Port of Portland electrician, was in his 40s during the place’s 1960s heyday.
Pachkofsky built the drive-in himself. He also handcrafted the amusements, creating his own makeshift little Disneyland on the rest of the isolated, forest-enshrouded property.
The Pachkofskyland remnants still on the site today offer only the barest clues to the buzzing scene that could be found there so many years ago -- and to the remarkable man who made it all happen.
“It was one of the best places ever for me,” says Shoshanah Sundstrom, a Portland native who as a preteen spent almost every day at the drive-in. “If I had the money, I’d buy it, because it’s so special to me and our family. Because he was so special.”
***
Benny Pachkofsky grew up in North Portland during the Great Depression. He worked various jobs to help his large immigrant family, fitted in school when he could. It didn’t matter that he was bright: college was never on the table.
That was all right. Who needed college? He knew everybody in his neighborhood, and everybody knew him. And he could fix and build almost anything.
Benny saw what was going on in the world, and so in 1940 he joined the National Guard. He rode his beloved Harley-Davidson motorcycle up to Tacoma for training at Fort Lewis.
Then Pearl Harbor happened. The U.S. was in the war at last. The Harley-Davidson went into storage. He and his girl married in Vancouver.
Benny hit the beaches at Normandy, and somehow he survived. Then things really got scary.
“At the end, as they advanced on Berlin, they faced old men and young boys,” his son Donald Pachkofsky says. “You’d be confronted by 12-year-old boys with guns, and you had to kill them.”
“That would screw anybody up,” he adds.
Benny returned home, happy to be back, but he was different now. He didn’t understand it.
At the time, not much was known about post-traumatic stress disorder. The term hadn’t been coined. Some people called it shellshock or combat fatigue. Most didn’t call it anything -- they didn’t want to talk about it. Vets typically received no treatment at all.
But not all of Benny’s wartime memories were bad. One day, somewhere in bombed-out Europe, he came upon an oasis from the fighting. The hidden spot featured a huge swing creaking in the breeze. Metal rods, attached to each side of the swing’s seat, spiraled up, up, endlessly up, until they disappeared into the towering trees above. He thought: How much fun must that be for a kid?
Or for an adult who missed the carefree innocence of childhood, before the horror of war?
***
The Forest Park Drive-In today has no running water. A chain-link fence surrounds the building to discourage vandals.
Scott Posey, 54, owns the place now. He can’t see a way to make it work as a business, but that’s fine with him.
He came to know Benny Pachkofsky, who died in 2014 at 95, during the older man’s later years, after Posey and his family moved into a house across the street. He noticed Benny out there on the property every day, picking weeds, poking around.
It was clear, Posey says, “that he took pride in keeping it clean and looking good.”
But there was more to it than that.
“People would stop now and then to reminisce, and he loved that,” Posey says. “He’d walk with them up behind the building, show them where the zipline had been.”
Posey, who grew up in Southwest Portland, introduced himself to the old man, and soon he was helping Benny keep the property shipshape.
“He was a very generous, sweet, older gentleman,” Posey recalls. “A real nice guy.”
By this time, Benny was deep into his 80s and worried about what would happen to his little drive-in. So he sold it to Posey for a song, knowing its history meant something to his neighbor. He believed the younger man was up to the challenge of holding onto the past.
“He told me, ‘People are going to bug you,’” Posey says. “And he was right. I get people knocking on the door, sending me emails. All sorts of people want to get involved with this place.”
***
In 1959, more than a decade after he had returned from the war, Benny applied for and received a zoning change for the front of his Portland property. He started building the Forest Park Drive-In by hand -- and, behind it, the massive metal swing from his wartime memory.
He worked on the project every day. Neighbors became accustomed to seeing him out there in his coveralls, often with a cat sitting on his shoulder as he worked.
The swing took up most of his attention at first. It was a fascinating, ambitious contraption, something out of a steampunk fantasy.
“He said he was building it for me,” Donald remembers. “That’s not how it turned out.”
Benny kept building, tinkering. He set up a cable that would swoop a rider out of the treeline toward a thrilling crash. He put together a merry-go-round. He built a burbling fountain.
The idea of a drive-in that served ice cream and burgers came late in the process. Its purpose was to bring kids to the playground rides he had created, to fill in the scenes from his memory and his dreams.
The drive-in, after all, never made any business sense. The location, at Skyline Boulevard and Germantown Road, was way up in the hills, next to a winding, little-used road. Benny couldn’t possibly expect a consistent stream of customers.
But making money on the endeavor didn’t matter to him. He already was gainfully employed. He could pay his bills. The drive-in, like the swing, was for his son. It was also for himself.
“It was something to keep him going,” Donald says. “He needed it.”
Benny was 40 years old when he started construction on the building. He was divorced and living alone. He had girlfriends now and again, but none of them ever stuck for long. He didn’t see Donald very often. The boy lived a ways away. They had trouble keeping in touch by phone. Benny rarely answered his phone.
As a boy, Donald didn’t know what to make of his father’s emotional distance. He was angry about it for years. He had to grow up and serve in a war himself, in Vietnam, before he started to figure it out.
Benny may have finally sensed this. In his seventies and eighties, he began to open up to his son about the horrors he had faced in Europe.“He kept it in for so long,” Donald, now 76, says. “It’s sad, really.”
“I hope people realize,” he adds, “that a lot of World War II vets didn’t have it so good.”
***
Benny Pachkofsky was one of the Greatest Generation soldiers who didn’t have it so good. But he never gave up on himself or the world.
Yes, he had trouble forging a meaningful relationship with Donald -- or anyone else. He never married again, living alone for more than 60 years after his divorce. But he built a different kind of family, at least something resembling a family.
“We all called him Uncle Benny,” says Donna Haseleu.
In the 1960s, Haseleu and her husband rented one of the houses behind the drive-in. Benny had built that house, just as he’d built his own house next door, almost entirely by himself.
Haseleu’s two young daughters rarely strayed far from home during these years up on the hill -- because they had their landlord’s amusement park right out their front door.
And they had Benny.
“He was like the grandfather I never had,” says Sundstrom, 60, one of Haseleu’s daughters. “He was such a kind man. I loved spending time with him.”
Pachkofsky’s family by blood also started spending time with their Uncle Benny. His great-niece Marina Johansson and her friends would walk across the St. Johns Bridge and then hike more than a mile up narrow Germantown Road, along the cliff’s edge, to reach the drive-in.
“We were free-range kids,” Johansson says. “We didn’t tell our parents. Uncle Benny would give us chilidogs and help us play on the zipline.”
She liked the big swing, the one born from her great-uncle’s wartime experience, even more.
Her goal was to get the long wooden seat vertical to the ground. “That’s what we wanted to do,” she recalls. “And if you piled enough kids on there, you could do it.”
Children wouldn’t be allowed to do that now, she adds, but at the time, parents stood around laughing. Benny would push the swing, over and over, until the riders were hurtling high up into the trees.
The drive-in at first was a captivating secret for Benny’s nieces and nephews and a handful of local kids -- but inevitably word spread about this unique, out-of-the-way place offering soft-serve ice cream and airborne thrills.
“We’d meet people there from all over,” Johansson recalls. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, we heard about it, so we came up from Idaho.’”
Haseleu, 80, remembers meeting a couple from “London -- in England. They’d heard about this huge swing and had to see it.”
For a few halcyon years, the drive-in and the woods surrounding it would be packed with children and adults on summer weekends. They would eat and laugh, and scream joyously as they rode the swing and the cable line. Benny was always there, often standing off to the side by himself, watching.
***
No one who knew Benny and Margie Pachkofsky during their early years together would have predicted they’d end up in a rancorous divorce. They had seemed so perfect for one another.
“I can tell from talking to my mom, and to my dad, that they were each other’s true love,” Donald Pachkofsky says.
Benny had married Margie, a young, divorced mom from the neighborhood, in 1944. Two years later, Donald was born.
But after the war, the marriage quickly fell apart -- and it got worse from there. In 1949, Benny spent a couple months in the county jail after his wife accused him of hitting her 7-year-old daughter, his stepdaughter, with a board. Benny denied the allegation.
Haseleu says Benny on occasion talked to her about his son, and that he also talked somewhat elliptically about what had happened to his marriage years before. She came away believing that Benny’s ex-wife had made up a story, landing him in jail, because he’d sought custody of Donald -- something almost unheard-of at that time, a divorcing father trying to take on full-time care of a child.
“He really loved his son,” she says. “The divorce was a bitter thing. Very bitter.”
It was more than bitter. The divorce became the dividing line in Benny’s life, when everything definitively changed.
The rides he built on his property, the drive-in, “it was about what happened prior in his life,” Sundstrom says. “He was trying to make up for what he no longer had.”
Sundstrom and her mother don’t believe Benny could have ever hurt his stepdaughter.
“He was the most decent man I’ve ever known,” Haseleu says.
Benny’s son also believes his father was a good and decent man -- and that he was suffering.
“He was a nice guy,” Donald says. “He needed help.”
***
By the dawn of the 1970s, Benny Pachkofsky’s labor of love wasn’t as much fun as it used to be.
A few neighbors didn’t like the noise coming from the property, and for good reason. It had begun to stretch deep into the night.
“It kind of became a hot spot for all the wrong reasons,” Posey says. “I think he used the word ‘hoodlums.’ They’d congregate, drink beer, break the [drive-in’s] windows.”
Benny reluctantly closed the business and boarded it up. A few years later, even more reluctantly, he disassembled the cable line and the swing and the other rides.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
There was something about that little building, perched atop an isolated hill in the forest. It had a kind of romance to it, an aura.
“He’d get people calling him, writing him letters, wanting to rent it,” Posey says. “He’d never respond.”
He retired from the Port of Portland in 1981. He spent his golden years puttering around his house and trying to keep the unused drive-in building from moldering.
When Posey took over the Forest Park Drive-In, he discovered the old cash register and fountain machine in the back, and a sign that advertised a “GIANT BURGER” for 50 cents.
“I still find relics over there,” he says.
He cherishes his memories of the quiet old man in coveralls, and their time together keeping the property clean.
A few years ago, Posey, who runs a pressure-washing business, started putting a lighted Christmas tree in the drive-in every December. In this semi-remote spot, often fogged in during the winter, the tree looks like a beacon -- a beckoning from the past.
Up go the photos on social media during the holidays. Posey sometimes sees the posts but rarely responds to the comments sharing memories and asking who owns it and why doesn’t it reopen.
Posey says he would love to see the drive-in operating again one day, selling soft-serve ice cream and giant burgers. The location makes more sense today. Development has filled in the nearby neighborhoods; Germantown Road now gets a fair amount of traffic.
But he said he won’t sell or lease the building unless it’s the “right fit.”
“I don’t want a 7-Eleven,” he says. “I don’t want a ‘bikini barista’ -- they’ve approached me a hundred times.”
It’s not just that he can’t stand the thought of a soulless franchise store across the street from his home. He doesn’t really expect the right fit to ever happen.
“I’m more about preserving what’s there,” he says. “I have a real attachment to the building and to him. It would be hard for me to let go.”
-- Douglas Perry; published in The Oregonian in 2022. Winner of the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association "better newspaper" contest.
The small, low-slung building, sitting empty on Northwest Skyline Boulevard, isn’t much to look at these days. Honestly, it never was.
The Forest Park Drive-In is boxy and plain, an example of America’s car-centric convenience culture at its midcentury architectural nadir.
But that unprepossessing structure conjures a powerful yearning.
Every once in a while, someone driving past the building -- its faded sign heralding “freshly frozen SOFT CREAM” -- is struck by a wave of nostalgia. The passerby pulls the car into the lot, snaps a photo and puts the image on social media.
The comments on these posts flow as sweet and thick as the soft serve once sold at the place, but they also make clear it wasn’t just some ice-cream hut.
“Does anyone remember the zipline and giant A-frame swing in the woods behind the building?” one longtime Portlander recently wrote.
“An old guy up there, we called him OLD BEN, had toys for grown-ups,” recalled another. “A huge swing in the forest he had built, you could get about 10 hippies on it ... a zipline ... a monster titter totter ... fun in the forest…”
Old Ben actually wasn’t that old at the time. Benjamin Pachkofsky, a World War II veteran and Port of Portland electrician, was in his 40s during the place’s 1960s heyday.
Pachkofsky built the drive-in himself. He also handcrafted the amusements, creating his own makeshift little Disneyland on the rest of the isolated, forest-enshrouded property.
The Pachkofskyland remnants still on the site today offer only the barest clues to the buzzing scene that could be found there so many years ago -- and to the remarkable man who made it all happen.
“It was one of the best places ever for me,” says Shoshanah Sundstrom, a Portland native who as a preteen spent almost every day at the drive-in. “If I had the money, I’d buy it, because it’s so special to me and our family. Because he was so special.”
***
Benny Pachkofsky grew up in North Portland during the Great Depression. He worked various jobs to help his large immigrant family, fitted in school when he could. It didn’t matter that he was bright: college was never on the table.
That was all right. Who needed college? He knew everybody in his neighborhood, and everybody knew him. And he could fix and build almost anything.
Benny saw what was going on in the world, and so in 1940 he joined the National Guard. He rode his beloved Harley-Davidson motorcycle up to Tacoma for training at Fort Lewis.
Then Pearl Harbor happened. The U.S. was in the war at last. The Harley-Davidson went into storage. He and his girl married in Vancouver.
Benny hit the beaches at Normandy, and somehow he survived. Then things really got scary.
“At the end, as they advanced on Berlin, they faced old men and young boys,” his son Donald Pachkofsky says. “You’d be confronted by 12-year-old boys with guns, and you had to kill them.”
“That would screw anybody up,” he adds.
Benny returned home, happy to be back, but he was different now. He didn’t understand it.
At the time, not much was known about post-traumatic stress disorder. The term hadn’t been coined. Some people called it shellshock or combat fatigue. Most didn’t call it anything -- they didn’t want to talk about it. Vets typically received no treatment at all.
But not all of Benny’s wartime memories were bad. One day, somewhere in bombed-out Europe, he came upon an oasis from the fighting. The hidden spot featured a huge swing creaking in the breeze. Metal rods, attached to each side of the swing’s seat, spiraled up, up, endlessly up, until they disappeared into the towering trees above. He thought: How much fun must that be for a kid?
Or for an adult who missed the carefree innocence of childhood, before the horror of war?
***
The Forest Park Drive-In today has no running water. A chain-link fence surrounds the building to discourage vandals.
Scott Posey, 54, owns the place now. He can’t see a way to make it work as a business, but that’s fine with him.
He came to know Benny Pachkofsky, who died in 2014 at 95, during the older man’s later years, after Posey and his family moved into a house across the street. He noticed Benny out there on the property every day, picking weeds, poking around.
It was clear, Posey says, “that he took pride in keeping it clean and looking good.”
But there was more to it than that.
“People would stop now and then to reminisce, and he loved that,” Posey says. “He’d walk with them up behind the building, show them where the zipline had been.”
Posey, who grew up in Southwest Portland, introduced himself to the old man, and soon he was helping Benny keep the property shipshape.
“He was a very generous, sweet, older gentleman,” Posey recalls. “A real nice guy.”
By this time, Benny was deep into his 80s and worried about what would happen to his little drive-in. So he sold it to Posey for a song, knowing its history meant something to his neighbor. He believed the younger man was up to the challenge of holding onto the past.
“He told me, ‘People are going to bug you,’” Posey says. “And he was right. I get people knocking on the door, sending me emails. All sorts of people want to get involved with this place.”
***
In 1959, more than a decade after he had returned from the war, Benny applied for and received a zoning change for the front of his Portland property. He started building the Forest Park Drive-In by hand -- and, behind it, the massive metal swing from his wartime memory.
He worked on the project every day. Neighbors became accustomed to seeing him out there in his coveralls, often with a cat sitting on his shoulder as he worked.
The swing took up most of his attention at first. It was a fascinating, ambitious contraption, something out of a steampunk fantasy.
“He said he was building it for me,” Donald remembers. “That’s not how it turned out.”
Benny kept building, tinkering. He set up a cable that would swoop a rider out of the treeline toward a thrilling crash. He put together a merry-go-round. He built a burbling fountain.
The idea of a drive-in that served ice cream and burgers came late in the process. Its purpose was to bring kids to the playground rides he had created, to fill in the scenes from his memory and his dreams.
The drive-in, after all, never made any business sense. The location, at Skyline Boulevard and Germantown Road, was way up in the hills, next to a winding, little-used road. Benny couldn’t possibly expect a consistent stream of customers.
But making money on the endeavor didn’t matter to him. He already was gainfully employed. He could pay his bills. The drive-in, like the swing, was for his son. It was also for himself.
“It was something to keep him going,” Donald says. “He needed it.”
Benny was 40 years old when he started construction on the building. He was divorced and living alone. He had girlfriends now and again, but none of them ever stuck for long. He didn’t see Donald very often. The boy lived a ways away. They had trouble keeping in touch by phone. Benny rarely answered his phone.
As a boy, Donald didn’t know what to make of his father’s emotional distance. He was angry about it for years. He had to grow up and serve in a war himself, in Vietnam, before he started to figure it out.
Benny may have finally sensed this. In his seventies and eighties, he began to open up to his son about the horrors he had faced in Europe.“He kept it in for so long,” Donald, now 76, says. “It’s sad, really.”
“I hope people realize,” he adds, “that a lot of World War II vets didn’t have it so good.”
***
Benny Pachkofsky was one of the Greatest Generation soldiers who didn’t have it so good. But he never gave up on himself or the world.
Yes, he had trouble forging a meaningful relationship with Donald -- or anyone else. He never married again, living alone for more than 60 years after his divorce. But he built a different kind of family, at least something resembling a family.
“We all called him Uncle Benny,” says Donna Haseleu.
In the 1960s, Haseleu and her husband rented one of the houses behind the drive-in. Benny had built that house, just as he’d built his own house next door, almost entirely by himself.
Haseleu’s two young daughters rarely strayed far from home during these years up on the hill -- because they had their landlord’s amusement park right out their front door.
And they had Benny.
“He was like the grandfather I never had,” says Sundstrom, 60, one of Haseleu’s daughters. “He was such a kind man. I loved spending time with him.”
Pachkofsky’s family by blood also started spending time with their Uncle Benny. His great-niece Marina Johansson and her friends would walk across the St. Johns Bridge and then hike more than a mile up narrow Germantown Road, along the cliff’s edge, to reach the drive-in.
“We were free-range kids,” Johansson says. “We didn’t tell our parents. Uncle Benny would give us chilidogs and help us play on the zipline.”
She liked the big swing, the one born from her great-uncle’s wartime experience, even more.
Her goal was to get the long wooden seat vertical to the ground. “That’s what we wanted to do,” she recalls. “And if you piled enough kids on there, you could do it.”
Children wouldn’t be allowed to do that now, she adds, but at the time, parents stood around laughing. Benny would push the swing, over and over, until the riders were hurtling high up into the trees.
The drive-in at first was a captivating secret for Benny’s nieces and nephews and a handful of local kids -- but inevitably word spread about this unique, out-of-the-way place offering soft-serve ice cream and airborne thrills.
“We’d meet people there from all over,” Johansson recalls. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, we heard about it, so we came up from Idaho.’”
Haseleu, 80, remembers meeting a couple from “London -- in England. They’d heard about this huge swing and had to see it.”
For a few halcyon years, the drive-in and the woods surrounding it would be packed with children and adults on summer weekends. They would eat and laugh, and scream joyously as they rode the swing and the cable line. Benny was always there, often standing off to the side by himself, watching.
***
No one who knew Benny and Margie Pachkofsky during their early years together would have predicted they’d end up in a rancorous divorce. They had seemed so perfect for one another.
“I can tell from talking to my mom, and to my dad, that they were each other’s true love,” Donald Pachkofsky says.
Benny had married Margie, a young, divorced mom from the neighborhood, in 1944. Two years later, Donald was born.
But after the war, the marriage quickly fell apart -- and it got worse from there. In 1949, Benny spent a couple months in the county jail after his wife accused him of hitting her 7-year-old daughter, his stepdaughter, with a board. Benny denied the allegation.
Haseleu says Benny on occasion talked to her about his son, and that he also talked somewhat elliptically about what had happened to his marriage years before. She came away believing that Benny’s ex-wife had made up a story, landing him in jail, because he’d sought custody of Donald -- something almost unheard-of at that time, a divorcing father trying to take on full-time care of a child.
“He really loved his son,” she says. “The divorce was a bitter thing. Very bitter.”
It was more than bitter. The divorce became the dividing line in Benny’s life, when everything definitively changed.
The rides he built on his property, the drive-in, “it was about what happened prior in his life,” Sundstrom says. “He was trying to make up for what he no longer had.”
Sundstrom and her mother don’t believe Benny could have ever hurt his stepdaughter.
“He was the most decent man I’ve ever known,” Haseleu says.
Benny’s son also believes his father was a good and decent man -- and that he was suffering.
“He was a nice guy,” Donald says. “He needed help.”
***
By the dawn of the 1970s, Benny Pachkofsky’s labor of love wasn’t as much fun as it used to be.
A few neighbors didn’t like the noise coming from the property, and for good reason. It had begun to stretch deep into the night.
“It kind of became a hot spot for all the wrong reasons,” Posey says. “I think he used the word ‘hoodlums.’ They’d congregate, drink beer, break the [drive-in’s] windows.”
Benny reluctantly closed the business and boarded it up. A few years later, even more reluctantly, he disassembled the cable line and the swing and the other rides.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
There was something about that little building, perched atop an isolated hill in the forest. It had a kind of romance to it, an aura.
“He’d get people calling him, writing him letters, wanting to rent it,” Posey says. “He’d never respond.”
He retired from the Port of Portland in 1981. He spent his golden years puttering around his house and trying to keep the unused drive-in building from moldering.
When Posey took over the Forest Park Drive-In, he discovered the old cash register and fountain machine in the back, and a sign that advertised a “GIANT BURGER” for 50 cents.
“I still find relics over there,” he says.
He cherishes his memories of the quiet old man in coveralls, and their time together keeping the property clean.
A few years ago, Posey, who runs a pressure-washing business, started putting a lighted Christmas tree in the drive-in every December. In this semi-remote spot, often fogged in during the winter, the tree looks like a beacon -- a beckoning from the past.
Up go the photos on social media during the holidays. Posey sometimes sees the posts but rarely responds to the comments sharing memories and asking who owns it and why doesn’t it reopen.
Posey says he would love to see the drive-in operating again one day, selling soft-serve ice cream and giant burgers. The location makes more sense today. Development has filled in the nearby neighborhoods; Germantown Road now gets a fair amount of traffic.
But he said he won’t sell or lease the building unless it’s the “right fit.”
“I don’t want a 7-Eleven,” he says. “I don’t want a ‘bikini barista’ -- they’ve approached me a hundred times.”
It’s not just that he can’t stand the thought of a soulless franchise store across the street from his home. He doesn’t really expect the right fit to ever happen.
“I’m more about preserving what’s there,” he says. “I have a real attachment to the building and to him. It would be hard for me to let go.”
-- Douglas Perry; published in The Oregonian in 2022. Winner of the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association "better newspaper" contest.
