El Rancho Swap Meet

On Saturday and Sunday the lot of the El Rancho Drive-In, at 555 El Rancho Drive in Sparks, fills with the rows of the El Rancho Swap Meet. Selling runs from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Admission is fifty cents on Saturday and a dollar on Sunday. The market is open year round, though the operator warns that winter hours may vary with the weather. That operator, West Wind Drive-In & Public Markets, lists bargains, fresh produce, clothing, and antiques among the goods. Its map of the grounds marks food stalls, snack bars, beer gardens, and entertainment zones among the vendor areas. Across its markets, West Wind names its taquerias and corn stands as the visitor favorites, serving breakfast burritos, street tacos, pizza, hot dogs, churros, roasted corn, beer, and margaritas. Local bands and performers play in designated areas while people shop the booths.

The produce comes up the rows with the junk. In 2019 Brian Bahouth of the Sierra Nevada Ally photographed the Gosca produce and snack food stand, hung with sugar cane. Vendor Samuel Bravo worked behind its tables of candied sweet potatoes, bags of beans, and slices of dried mango spiced with tajín. A neighboring produce vendor held up a whopper of a jicama, and rings lay in trays at Valentino’s stand. Bahouth’s inventory of the place ran to a used waffle iron, a statue of Jesus, go-go boots, a used dish rack, and a four-foot-tall statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. For the vendors who show up week after week, year after year, he wrote, the market is “a transformative and critically important place where young lives are defined and loneliness is temporarily muted.”

A gold clock for five dollars

In July 2005 Gabriel Doss of the Reno News & Review went looking for what he called buried treasure. He found a gold clock with gaudy plastic spikes, propped between used irons and toaster ovens on worn-out blankets. The vendor was a girl of perhaps 10. She conferred with her older brother and said, “Eight dollars.” Before Doss could answer, she offered, “Take it for five.” She went under a tarp, where her parents sat, to make change for his twenty.

A tall, lanky man with a Mexican accent called out over his rusted power tools and ratchet sockets: “I see you looking. Make me an offer.” Farther on stood a mid-‘80s Ford Bronco in decent shape, priced at $1,000.

The market then drew about 3,000 people each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Two hundred vendors loaded up every weekend to sell there, and the paper counted it the largest traditional flea market in the area. Much of the merchandise was new: shirts, CDs, stereo equipment. The paper also noted that the swap meet doubled as a kind of farmers’ market. It placed the El Rancho in an old American habit of flea markets held on the idle lots of drive-in movie theaters.

Four screens and a barn-red tower

The lot is idle only by daylight. Four screens of steel and wood, varying in size, stand over the market rows. The Reno Gazette Journal reported in 2018 that they had never been replaced since they went up, though three were added through the years. The picture streams from one of the four windows of the original barn-red projection tower. An aged marquee at the entrance tells passersby what is playing.

West Wind suggests that market visitors stay past dark and catch a show. The drive-in runs first-run films as double features, and families come with air mattresses, lawn chairs, and blankets. The Gazette Journal gave the drive-in’s season as closing only between mid-December and March, depending on the weather. It called the El Rancho one of two drive-ins still operating in Nevada; the News & Review, in 2023, called it Northern Nevada’s only remaining one.

Diego Maldonado, the general manager, began at the drive-in at 19, working the churro cart as a summer job. “I’d never even seen a drive-in before I walked in here,” he told the Gazette Journal. “I thought that they were extinct.” By 2018 he oversaw about a dozen employees and lived with his wife and child in a house on the property.

Tony Pecetti’s accordion

The drive-in was the work of Tony Pecetti, whom the Gazette Journal called a bigger-than-life accordionist and entertainment entrepreneur. In the 1920s he and a band of friends played from a pit under the stage of the Reno Majestic Theater to accompany silent films, improvising when a film came without a score. As a teenager he strapped his squeeze box on his back and rode a motorcycle out to rural dances. Sometimes he and his bandmates played at executive mansions or at the state prison. In the 1930s he opened what the paper calls Reno’s first ballroom, “Tony’s El Patio Spanish Ballroom,” where folks were invited to “Swing and Sweat with Tony Pecetti.” The ballroom had closed by the time he opened the El Rancho.

The Gazette Journal gives the opening as Aug. 19, 1950. The Sparks Museum & Cultural Center puts it in August 1950, on property between Reno and Sparks. The first picture was “My Foolish Heart,” in black and white, under the tagline “YES! I lied... I loved... I lost... but I’m not ashamed.” An advertisement that day, as the museum quotes it, promised “the most modern drive-in theater in Nevada, Largest Screen, Perfect Vision, newest RCA Projection, Latest RCA in-the-car speakers.” There was one screen, set in a corner of the lot, with nearly a dozen rows of car spaces arched around it.

The News & Review gives a different year, 1952. Neal Cobb, a Reno historian, told that paper, “It was a big hit immediately.” An aerial photograph held by the Sparks museum shows the theater with a flooded gravel pit beyond it, later Teglia’s Paradise Park.

Every Sunday under Pecetti was “buck night,” when every car got in for a dollar. His niece, Jeannie Potere, sold hot dogs and “Bambino pizzas” at the snack bar at 17. Pecetti would come into the snack shack when he had “caught a few more,” teenagers hidden in their friends’ trunks. “It was literally in the middle of nowhere, you might say it was out in the boonies,” she said at 86. “That’s where all the young kids used to go and neck.” A former cashier, Shirlee Malone, told the Gazette Journal in 1993 that Pecetti sometimes got up and played accordion between features. The cashiers kept the take in a box, she said, and one night a gust of wind sent the bills flying out the window.

Last Tango and the years after

Little changed through the 1960s, by the Gazette Journal’s account, until Pecetti died in 1969. In 1973 Syufy Enterprises, run by the brothers Ray and Joe Syufy of San Rafael, California, bought the drive-in. The Sparks Tribune, relaying the company’s own account, gives a different year: it says West Wind opened its first theater in 1952 and its Sparks location in 1971. The Syufy firm later sold many of its walk-in theaters to Cinemark and kept the drive-in chain.

Also in 1973, the manager told the Reno Evening Gazette, “The drive-in has done a good business in the past with X- and R-rated films.” Then Gail Dickson and 13 other residents off El Rancho Drive and Oddie Boulevard complained to authorities about a nude scene of Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris.” Dickson said children were watching from Paradise Park and the surrounding streets. The El Rancho had to stop showing X-rated films, and some of those showings moved to the Midway Drive-In on South Virginia Street.

The Midway, Reno’s first drive-in, had opened as the Motor-In in 1946 and taken its new name in 1948. It closed in 1982, leaving the El Rancho without competition. West Wind says its public markets began in the 1980s alongside its drive-ins, as places where people could gather during the day and into the evening. In 1993 the El Rancho was scheduled to be torn down and replaced with a flea market and an indoor theater complex. The screens were never taken down.

By 2018 the weekend flea market was helping to pay the bills on what the Gazette Journal called the prime property, and the manager’s house stood beside the screens. “My backyard is the drive-in,” Maldonado said. “To be honest, I don’t hear it anymore.”