December 30, 2002

• There are many wonderful things from the past that I really miss, like  drive-in movies and Hudson Hornets.  Today I would like to address the decline of the amusement park.  Now they all seem to be theme parks, slick soul -less fun factories designed to  offer a completely sterile, plastic experience in return for loads of dough.  Hell, I probably wouldn’t even pass the dress code to get into Disneyland, not that I would want to.  This blog is about one of my fondest memories, Willow Mills Park. 

  
  

  It was a small park, only a few acres.  The roller coaster was modest, not real high and none of this upside-down stuff you get now.  But it was made of wood and it creaked and swayed in a most satisfactory manner.  I’ll never forget that “clank, clank, clank” as the car slowly went up the incline for the first drop–zoom!  Wow!

  
  

  Much more sedate was the carousel.  It was a dandy–the horses were hand carved (and they weren’t all horse, there were unicorns and sea lions and dragons), and some of them went up and down.  Music was provided by an honest-to-God mechanical band which tootled and drummed and just generally made a wonderful sound.  What’s more, there were tantalizing artifacts of still another, earlier day–the carousel used to have one of the brass ring things–you know, grab the brass ring and win a free ride–that had gone by the wayside before I ever started going to the park, but the big wooden box shaped like a clown’s head was still in evidence (you threw the brass rings into the clown’s mouth).

  
  

  The park also had a shooting gallery–a real one, with real rifles that fired .22 shorts.  (I don’t know if you can even get .22 shorts any more, it is a real puny cartridge, but still lethal at close range.)  I am sure the liability insurance trolls would never allow something like that to go on today, but it was great.  I loved hearing the sharp crack of the rifles, and the smell of cordite in the air.  Oh well–given that our society is infested with violent nut cases (many of whom hold high elective office), maybe it is just as well that shooting galleries have gone the way of the passenger pigeon.

  
  

  My favorite ride was this affair  that looked sort of like a windmill with no vanes. Small airplanes were suspended from the top by cables, four or five of them spaced evenly.  At rest, they hung  closae to the building a few inches above the deck, located at about the heigth of the second floor on a normal building.  You’d get into the planes. the electric motor powering the porps would rev up and they would start moving.  As their speed and centrifical force increased the planes would swing out over the lake that the park was sited next to.

  
  

  My second-favorite ride was the speedboat, a wonderful teak and brass Chris-Craft model, which they probably stopped making 40 years ago.  As it zoomed around the lake, it threw up sprays and left wakes that were, to eight-year-old eyes, of Biblical proportions.

  
  

  But my very most favorite thing was the penny arcade.  There was one machine which vibrated your feet for 2 cents–very refreshing and invigorating.  There was an indoor shooting gallery thing with a rilfe that fired beams of light at a photocell on a mechanical bear–hit the cell, the bear would roar and wave its arms.  They had Skee-ball, too, and some other ways of winning tickets, which you would redeem for prizes.  Getting anything decent required about seventy gazillion tickets as I recall.  Then there were the vending machines–put two cents in and get a post-card sized ;icture of a jet plane or a sports car or a scantily clad lady.  I bet those cards are worth some bucks now. 

  
  

  Hershey Park used to be great, until they screwed it up, themed it to death, and  ran the name into Hersheypark.  Stupid.  And they don’t even let you tour the chocolate factory any more, thanks again to the foul minions of the insurance industry and the greed of our litigious society.

  • 11:08 pm
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