Another happy memory of Dad
Daniel
Staring at the back of the local advertizing magazine the other day -- an ad for
a floor company, with a picture of hardwood. Hardwood. Pinball-brain starts to
bounce, spin, carom -- and comes up with: The Fun House at Playland on the
beach in San Francisco, circa 1960. They had these two-story hardwood slides.
You grabbed a cloth to sit on, and went up all those stairs to the top and
*whoosh* on either the straight slide or the undulating one, as I recall. I
must have been pretty little; I remember Dad going down *with* me, with me
sitting in front. They also had a hardwood centrifuge -- polished wood with a
peg in the center and you climb on and when they wound up the RPM's eventually
you'd go skidding off over the polished wood -- Dad would grab me and pull me up
to the center. "Hang on! Hang on!" But you could never hang on very long, and
*whoosh* again, out over a floor as smooth as ice.
A good "Dad memory". Forgotten (?) for 48 years. (?!)
I'm not the only one with Playland nostalgia:
http://www.geocities.com/beverlysykes/Sep20.htm
:: ... I did go into the Fun House. It was a two story
:: building and you entered through revolving barrels
:: which were elevated to about butt-height. The thing
:: about the barrels was that as you walked through
:: them, there were holes in the floor where air would
:: shoot up. Some guy up in a control booth would
:: watch the young girls come in and when a skirt was
:: positioned over one of the air holes, he would shoot
:: off a blast of air and the skirt would go flying. We
:: learned quickly to wear pants to the Fun House.
::
:: Other things you would find in the Fun House were
:: the hall of mirrors that distorted your figure, a huge
:: turntable where all the kids would pile one and try
:: to be the last one left, when the centrifugal force of
:: the spinning wheel shot all your friends off to the
:: side. There was the barrel you had to walk through,
:: hopefully remaining standing as the barrel rolled
:: around. Some of us cheated and just crawled
:: through. And there was a marvelous 2-story wooden
:: slide, highly polished. You grabbed a potato sack at
:: the bottom of the stairs, climbed to the top, decided
:: if you wanted the straight slide or the slide with the
:: bumps in it, sat on the potato sack, and took off
:: down to the bottom--and then ran around to do it
:: again.
My father was tall enough and strong enough that he could brace himself in the
rotating "barrel you had to walk through" and go all the way around,
upside-down, and back again. It was easy to feel proud of having a dad that
could pull off a stunt like that when you're three or four years old.
A good memory. Polished hardwood.
Peace,
--
Daniel ( deltae...@usa.net )
donna
donna
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(it probably would've helped if i'd written my message before i sent
it)
ah, daniel,
the polished hardwood and burlap sacks for the giant slide. i'm
smelling the cottoncandy and listening to the excited shrieks of the
kids ...
here's one good memory of savannah. in our family we have nicknames
for everyone. savannah was 'tweety bird'. over the years it morphed
into 'birdie' and finally was just, 'the bird'. when she was about 6
or 7 years old she wrote a note to her brother and when she signed it
she mis-spelled her nickname and put down: 'the brid'. and that's
what she was known as forever after.
memories of love, they are what life is all about, aren't they?
best,
donna