I’ve enjoyed being a writer/author, ever since I was in fifth grade when our teacher, Mrs. Redd, led our class in creative writing exercises. As I matured, both as a person and as a writer, I found so many ways to prepare to write a story: culling through research material; hours of interviewing a subject; and of course using my total imagination. I’ve used all three, as most writers have.
I read “Fun at the Old Cedar Point” last summer and the author took a totally different approach. The readers climb aboard a time machine to experience a summer day in an amusement park 54 years earlier. It’s not a science fiction story. It’s time travel back to a one-day experience at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. Written by Glenn D. Everett in 1989, it’s a journey of his own memories of that one day long ago. Imagine being able to travel back in time to visit your favorite amusement park during its earliest years. The book was reprinted with additional photos and a new cover by Ken Miller’s 1870 Publishing Group earlier this year.
The journey is quite vivid. Everett paints a poetic picture of what a day at Cedar Point was like in 1935. His description serves as a private tour of not only the park, but of the world around us. Everett worked at Cedar Point as a teen and his father owned “The Tumble Inn” funhouse, so he knew the territory well.
With Everett as our guide, we travel with him to the park. I feel as if I am walking next to him as he includes me in his narrative, referring to “we” quite often. This is a journey back in time, led by a person with knowledge of the present, which allows him to comment on things he would not have known about in 1935, such as wars, advancement of ride technology, and the change in parkgoers themselves.
Following a ride on the “Chute the Rapids,” we hustle over to “Leap the Dips” roller coaster, before making our way to the “Caterpillar.” After a visit to the funhouse, we head to the beach where Everett points out all the lovely girls frolicking in Lake Erie. Then we are off to the peep shows, freak shows, and a flea circus. Later, as the girls attend a fashion show in the Hotel Breakers, we and the rest of the boys run off to watch the girlie shows, where the ticket seller is quite “liberal in checking driver’s licenses to make sure we were 18 years of age.”
As Everett first wrote in 1989, the acceptance in 1935 of the peep and girlie shows at a family amusement facility highlights how morals and societal expectations have changed through time.
History-telling through a time machine is a clever method. Well played, but I don’t think my agent could sell that concept today to a publisher. As I read Everett’s colorful prose, I visualized the park as I first knew it in 1965 while he whetted my appetite to visit Cedar Point in the 1930s. Now, if I could only find the door to that time machine!
