Down at the waterfront in our little community is a restaurant that has historic photographs on its walls. The photographs show scenes for the amusement park that was located in our village. Many of the attractions were next to an on a long pier that extended out from the place where the restaurant is now located. I’m not sure of the exact timing of the photographs, but the cars in the photos appear to be from the 1950s. A promotional postcard of the Birch Bay Amusement Park described it as the “Coney Island of the Northwest.” The park featured a carousel, a rollercoaster, a ferris wheel, and a row of booths featuring games of skill with stuffed animals as prizes.

Amusement parks figured in several family vacations when I was growing up. One memory is of the amusement park that we didn’t visit. When I was eight years old, we took a family vacation. It was our family’s second big trip with our twin-engine Beech 18 airplane. Two years prior, we had made a cross country flight to Washington DC, with a fuel stop in Indianapolis and a visit to Chicago on the return. Such trips were a big deal and pretty expensive for our parents. Our folks saved he money that they estimated they would have spent on smoking if they smoked and it amounted to at least fuel money for the airplane for a big trip every other year. My father’s work schedule didn’t allow for much time off during the summer, but one week every two years could be accomplished with planning.

When I was eight years old the planned trip was to Salt Lake City and on to San Francisco with a nonstop return. For us kids, the main reason to go to Salt Lake City was the Lagoon Amusement Park. The park is still operating, and I’m sure it has many more rides now than was the case back then, but I remember at the time looking forward to riding the merry go round, the tipsy tea cups and the roller coaster. We knew about all of the rides because we had seen the advertisements for the park on television.

Because we lived in a small town next to the mountains, we couldn’t receive television signals on the conventional television antennas of the day. A couple of entrepreneurs in our town erected a large antenna on airport hill and delivered signal to televisions in town via cable. Ours was one of the first towns in our area to have cable television. The system delivered two stations from Billings Montana and two stations from Salt Lake City as well as a local camera that was focused on a set of weather instruments set up near the antennas. I don’t know why we had signals from Salt Lake. Perhaps it had to do with FCC licensing, or the quirks of signals traveling through mountains. Whatever the reason, we received two stations with advertisements for Lagoon. I was pumped to go. It seemed to me that it would be the high point of the trip.

We arrived in Salt Lake and it took some time for our father to arrange for the rental car. Then there was the challenge of navigating from the airport to our hotel with paper maps. In those pre-GPS days we used paper maps for all of our navigation, whether traveling by air or by road. Our mother was the navigator who sat with the maps in her lap and gave dad turn by turn instructions. I think there was some confusion about directions and perhaps a missed turn or two. The tension in the car was rising. And we were a gang of kids in the back and not paying much attention. Our excitement turned into bickering and I’m sure we were getting louder and louder. At one point our father declared, “If you kids don’t settle down, we won’t be going to Lagoon!” The threat had been issued. But we couldn’t settle down. My parents believed in keeping promises. We never went to Lagoon.

Instead we took a tour of the Mormon Tabernacle. It was an impressive visit. The acoustics in the building were amazing I remember dividing our family into two groups and going to opposite sides of the building where we could clearly hear the other group way across the big space. We weren’t Mormon, so we couldn’t go inside of the temple, but there was a lot to see in downtown Salt Lake City.

The next day we headed to San Francisco. I think we had been better behaved since we lost out on the visit to Lagoon. At any rate, a visit to Playland was included in the plans for San Francisco. I don’t remember a lot about the place. I did ride the carousel and ferris wheel as well as some smaller rides. We drove bumper cars with two people in each car and sparks flying everywhere. And I was too short to ride the roller coaster. My big sister got to ride, but I had to watch from the ground.

Playland has now been closed for fifty years. There aren’t that many people around who remember it. I wonder what happened to the animated devise dressed with a woman’s dress and a long-haired wig that laughed as people walked by. I marveled at it. There was a house of mirrors and a place where jets of air came up from the floor as you walked by.

I’m sure that the costs of maintenance and insurance probably don’t make amusement parks into large profit generators these days. The amusement park at Birch Bay is only a memory for old timers. No one seems to know what happened to the carousel. The other rides were probably dismantled and hauled to the junk yard. Up on the hill stands a large waterslide park that failed to open this year. There have been rumors that the owners are working at getting things repaired and inspected to open next year, but it sure doesn’t look like it. The weeds are getting tall and the slides are showing the effects of sunlight and years of use. I suspect that they too will be gone in a few years.

Maybe we can still claim to be the Coney Island of the Northwest. After all that amusement park closed permanently last year. I have never been a fan of roller coasters and I don’t think I’m getting any taller.