My humor blog starts the year as it ever does: with a bunch of goofy top-ten lists that have nothing to do with the year just passed. Also more of a really very long MiSTing that may not seem to be going anywhere. But watch this space.
- MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 20
- Statistics 2024: Top Ten of 2024
- Statistics 2024: Top Absences Of The Year
- Statistics 2024: Top Alternate Histories of the Year
- Statistics 2024: Top Rare-Earth Metal Colors of the Year
- What's Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? Why is the Phantom in the 16th Century? October - December 2024
- Statistics 2024: Top Movies It Was Fine if You Didn't See In 2024
- MiSTed: The 72 Hours Saga, Part 21
And now, back to Camden Park in June of last year already and enjoy the aftermath of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's ride on a 300th roller coaster:
bunnyhugger getting into the seat for her ride. I like the action in this picture; if I hadn't had the bad luck to snap when her eyes were closed and she hadn't happened to be holding the 300 sheet the wrong way this could have been her official landmark photograph. (I had another picture after that would have been great except there too I got her with her eyes closed.)
And here we are with bunnyhugger having officially logged three hundred distinct roller coasters she could name having ridden! Also note the guy who looks like an off-brand Guy From Mythbusters finding this vaguely amusing but he doesn't know why.
And a more respectable photo with only ride operators running interference. I apologize for the look of running out of time for this on bunnyhugger's face but I'd taken a bunch of pictures at this point and they were all wrong for one reason or another, including an astounding sequence of ones where she was blinking. If you had only my pictures to go on you'd think she rode this roller coaster entirely in her sleep.
And now to the park's historic carousel. Wikipedia says the park's acquisition in 1903 of a carousel marks the event the park uses to date its transition from a picnic spot to an amusement park. It also claims this carousel to date to 1907 and to be manufactured by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company which, no, I'm sorry, there are fiberglass coin-op carousels in the dusty corners of abandoned malls that are more PTC than this ride.
So, AAA Magazine claims the carousel is from 1903 but is by Spillman Engineering (with the horses sold off and replaced in 1992). This is more believable except the company finally known as Spillman Engineering wasn't founded until 1915 (though Allan Herschell and his inlaws the Spillmans were building rides, including portable carousels, for decades before that, and saying 'Spillman Engineering' might be done for the sake of clarity). It's not on Wikipedia's list of surviving Herschell/Spillman carousels but that isn't definitive.
Some of the horses on the ride now, in extremely park paint, as the term goes. Anyway CarouselHistory.com has a thumbnail saying Camden Park lost a Spillman carousel sometime between 1964 and 1975 but if it offers any details I can't tease them out. The National Carousel Association census offers 1925 as the year built and agrees on the 1992 date for replacing the horses.
Here's bunnyhugger on the zebra, readying for her first ride on a carousel whose history baffles me but that she probably knows all about and can patiently explain. (I'm going to suppose the NCA Census is the least wrong of these threads and so the carousel reaches its centennial this year maybe.)
The NCA Census does claim the chariots here are original to the ride. The woman with the dog sure feels like something plausible those-old-days.
Some more of the carousel horses. The Big Dipper coaster is to the right of the picture frame.
Here's a more-or-less centered picture of the carousel. You can see the door leading into the machinery where they might have hidden the manufacturer's plaque.
The Happy Clown Toy Store is one of the gift shops, although, curiously for a park that uses a clown for its mascot, not the ones that are particularly themed to the park. It's more, like, toys you can happen to buy here and also candy.
Now this is the front of the Hawnted House, a 1960s Pretzel Dark Ride (much like the one at Conneaut Lake Park) and you can see how the artist put their all into this one.
Trivia: Throughout the period of the English Commonwealth (1649 to 1660) only one sailor was hanged for a crime aboard ship. Source: To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman.
Currently Reading: American Scientist, November - December 2004, Editor Fenella Saunders.
