I'm seeing a Pink Elephant. No, I don't have the DTs (delirium tremens) just the JCs (a memory disorder named after Jolly Cholly's).

Area Baby Boomers' favorite haunt, a drive-in hamburger shack, pizza joint, mini-amusement park and miniature golf range on Route 1 in North Attleboro is back in the news. David Cannata is asking the town planning board for a special permit to convert the old Jolly Cholly's site to a sports center with ball courts and an ice rink.

For purely selfish reasons, I'd say the sooner the last vestiges of Cholly's are swept away, the better (professionally, of course, I'd have to say do your due diligence, planning board). The signs that have been left to rust and crumble since the place closed a couple decades ago are an insult to memories, not to mention that they give the children of Baby Boomers one more reason to doubt our sanity:

What could ever have been special about that place, they must wonder when looking at the acres of weeds. How could that desert of cracking asphalt ever have been the hive to which teens from North Attleboro, Attleboro, Mansfield, Plainville, Wrentham, Pawtucket, Central Falls and beyond made a beeline on Friday and Saturday nights in the '60s?

I'll leave it to younger writers to try to explain or at least describe the Jolly Cholly's mystique. Goodness knows I've taken my crack at it a few times in my years of plowing the local nostalgia field. And goodness knows, there should be no shortage of sources. By my reckoning, about anyone age 45 to 70 who grew up in the Attleboros and vicinity is more than likely to have memories of the place. By some accounts, Cholly's was the biggest teen hangout drive-in restaurant in the Northeast, and maybe even on the East Coast, so it would be a stretch to say it had local competitors. But there was a minor league of other hangouts in the area. Here are some notes on a few of them:

The Pink Elephant in Seekonk. I love that name. It was a hamburger shack on Route 44, just south of Arcade Avenue, and could squeeze maybe 30 cars into the parking lot, maybe a 10th of what JC's could handle. It shut around 1970. The food was less than memorable - to me, anyway; I suspect that there was one item on the menu that regulars swore was the best in the world. But you could always count on some eye-catching hot rods to be parked there.

Bobby's, on Bank Street, Attleboro. You could, I suppose, call this Jolly Cholly's No. 1 victim. From the 1940s into the 1960s, this ice cream shop - which grew to include a restaurant, tea room and bakery - was the top hangout in Attleboro and drew plenty of teens from North and Mansfield as well. Apart from other teen hangouts of memory, Bobby's was not dependent on "car culture," the old Attleboro High School being a short walk away. But as Cholly's clientele grew, Bobby's shrunk.

The Big Joy at the intersection of routes 1, 1A and 123, where a D'Angelo's sandwich shop is now located. I lived too far away to ever patronize the place, which featured shakes, burgers and the like, but many of my contemporaries in South Attleboro more or less lived there after school.

Carroll's. On Route 1, where the Ponderosa Steakhouse is now. It was a nondescript hamburger joint, one of the first "fast-food" restaurants in Attleboro. Management tried hard to keep it from becoming a hangout, but didn't always succeed, since it unintentionally filled the void left when the aforementioned Big Joy shut. The parking lot was too inviting a place to show off your car and, on too many occasions, set up a race.

Artie Johnson's in Norwood. That's a ways out of Sun Chronicle country, but this drive-in restaurant was famous for its onion rings, its ambience - it had all the markings of a beachside clamshack but was right on Route 1 - and for the traffic light out front that had a widespread reputation as the starting line for drag races.

I fear drawing the ire of fans of Furtado's A&W Rootbeer stand in Attleboro, Rattey's Car Hop on Route 1 and several other favorite teen watering holes of the Baby Boom generation, but I classify them more as places to go than as hangouts. They simply didn't have room for the milling around in the parking lot for boys and girls to meet up, and for boys to do the bragging about cars that led to so many races.

They say today's teens will never have such places. Four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline certainly weighs against it.

MARK FLANAGAN (mflanagan@thesunchronicle.com) is Opinion page editor of The Sun Chronicle. E-mails about other local hangouts would be particularly welcome. Flanagan also maintains a blog called the "Cyber Hangout and Memory Gymnasium" which can be found at thesunchronicle.com.