At some point in the evening at Sylvan Beach ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger asked if I had worked out the theme of her T-shirts. She was wearing her Indiana Beach shirt, one that she got her first visit sometime in the mid-2000s. It listed all the roller coasters the park had then: Cornball Express and Hoosier Hurricane and LoCoSuMo (Lost Coaster etc, condensed to fit the shirt) and Tig'rr Coaster and Galaxi ... and oh yes, yes. I had it. Recall that Friday, at Canada's Wonderland, I had noticed the Vortex roller coaster there showed where it used to use the logo design of the Kings Island Vortex, and she was wearing her Kings Island Vortex shirt. I also knew what she planned to wear the next day, when we rode centennial roller coaster Jack Rabbit at Seabreeze Park. She had hurried before our trip to get her T-shirt of centennial roller coaster Jackrabbit, of Kennywood Park, washed. She had done the amusement park enthusiast geek trick of wearing the ``wrong'' coaster-name T-shirts, as fully as possible.
Another wonderful little moment not connected to riding things came about as we walked down another aisle of mostly unattended midway games. There was an elderly woman at the roll-a-bowling-ball game, whatever that's called, and she wondered about how many times we'd been to the park. She was delighted to learn it was our first trip. She'd been working at the park for several years now, a thing she does to have something joyful do to in retirement, and she talked a good deal about her love of the place. And of the people coming around, often year after year. I confess I don't know if we'll ever get back to Sylvan Beach but I can imagine it. (My best idea is if we were to go to eastern New York parks, plus the carousel nexus in Binghamton.)
She told us about how the park was exactly as it was when she was young, and we loved to hear that. That the park is full of vintage rides still in wonderful shape is happy but to know that, like, even the location of them has historical weight to them somehow makes it better. (We would later learn she was at least slightly misstating things: the Galaxi coaster they have was installed in 1993. It's possible that it was replacing an earlier Galaxi, or other coaster, in the location, though. The Roller Coaster Database does not list one, but they're not guaranteed to be complete even for the large and famous parks.)
So this was just a lovely, wonderfully-timed pause in the day, just soaking in a longtime park-goer and worker's love of a charming, cherished little place. bunnyhugger mentioned how she had the retirement fantasy of working at some little laid-back park like this and, yes, that would be such a wonderful spot to end up.
This part of the essay is turning towards the non-ride thing we did, so let me continue on that. There were a good number of midway games but the one that caught us and that we had to play was Fascination. There are not many Fascination parlors left in the world and yet, somehow, we've been to many of them: Wildwood, New Jersey; Indiana Beach; Knoebels; Darien Lake; and now Sylvan Beach. We stayed to play four rounds and only left because we weren't sure we would have time for more, with the sad news of the park closing at 9 pm and all.
They had other similar games too, though. Remember the Twenty-One games on display at the Indiana Beach historical center? Sylvan Beach had those, mostly in working order; bunnyhugger played a couple rounds and won enough tickets to not really be tradable in on anything. I did too, doing worse than she did. There were similar tic-tac-toe coin-op games but none of them, so far as we could tell, were working. Skee-Ball machines too, with the classic old configuration that doesn't have those 100-point targets in the upper left and right corners. (MWS, our pinball best-friend, who has Opinions about Skee-Ball, despises those as ruining the skill of the game.) Again, we got some tickets, not enough to redeem. We'd stick with the tickets as our souvenirs.
Another souvenir? Card fortunes. Carello's Arcade, with the ancient carousel, had a Zoltar machine, of the kind that turns you into Tom Hanks. We did not observe this phenomenon ourselves. But there was something more amazing, in another building that turned out to have more games and attractions. Sylvan Beach had a ``Cleveland Grandma'' prediction machine, from the late 20s or early 30s. This model has the fortune-telling grandmother pass her hand over a set of fortune-telling cards, before depositing one into the tray. We got to wondering things like how Sylvan Beach still has a supply of cards --- like, who's printing them? Or did they just buy a million blanks back in 1959? --- and they were printed with a proper fortune and even the name of the park so it's another souvenir of the experience.
And a good thing we have the souvenir because somehow, facing this rare and eccentric and frankly exotic mechanical contraption with relatively few surviving examples? We didn't get any good photographs. I only have the one and it's from a distance; bunnyhugger somehow was so caught up in the moment that she didn't take any pictures. I can't think what was wrong with us there; if we had our wits about us we'd have gotten pictures all over and maybe a video of the movie in action. Our best guess is there may have been a curse surrounding the machine, keeping it from photography. This is absurd but I can't think how to get DuckDuckGo to show me anyone else's pictures of the machine either. We may have to go back to Sylvan Beach just for this.
And, besides the Cleveland Grandmother, there were our favorite coin-op attractions: pinball. They had a Simpsons Pinball Party, a (Stern) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and a (Stern) Star Wars. This gave us a new quandary as we try to always play some pinball when we visit a park that has it. But we also didn't want to lose too much precious time playing games that, really, we could play back home. We squared this circle by playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a game that is so brutally short-playing back home that nobody enjoys it. Our local TMNT game has been, we're told, set up harder than anyone else in Michigan has. This experience, the only other one we've touched, seems to bear it out. I can't say the game was great fun, because it really is a brutal rule set and series of shots, but the game was definitely more forgiving and more tolerant of our shooting than that back home. I ended up getting on the high score table, for the best Michaelangelo player, although that with a not terribly high score. (At the start of the game you choose which turtle you represent; each character has a slightly different starting advantage.) Presumably the locals prefer to play as other turtles.
So this I hope gives you some sense of what Sylvan Beach was like, apart from the things to ride.
We're getting now on the tail end of our day at Indiana Beach; this is from the part where we sat down looking for somewhere to eat, really, and ended up having a magnificent plate of fried vegetables that we might just drive back to Indiana to get again.
Cornball Jones, the roller coaster donkey(?), here pressed into service advertising barbecue. Not sure why but it does seem to avoid the cannibal-food-mascot problem.
Didn't get a better picture of the elephant used for the elephant ears sign there. You can also just about see the sign mentioning Ideal Beach, the original name for Indiana Beach and still used for the water park.
A park map! We never found park maps on paper, but there was this park map sign at least over near the water park entrance, on the north end of the park. It's out of date: the map doesn't include the new Cyclone coaster, and it'll need repainting for the American Dreier Looping when that's ready.
Don't we all? Decoration in the window of the Fascination parlor.
Looking in to the Fascination parlor in the quiet stretch shortly before the park closes for the day.
Some of the available prizes for Fascination winners. Yes, my eye was also drawn to that cute stack of 100% All Paper Playing Cards.
Trivia: Charles Dickens is known to have watched the London execution of murderer Benjamin-François Courvoisier in 1840, to have attended a beheading in Rome in 1845, and the 1849 execution of Maria and Frederick George Manning, who had murdered an old acquaintance for his money. He declined to attend a double execution in Genoa in 1845. Source: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, Judith Flanders.
Currently Reading: The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy: A Critique of the Historiography Of Space, Rip Bulkeley. I feel like I've read this before, but the library due-date card is blank, so either I didn't, or I read it from the Rutgers library (so, before 2012), or they replaced the due-dates card with a blank, but even if the old one was full why would they do that before someone checked it out?
