My Playland at the Beach Childhood

My San Francisco childhood resonated to the roar of the roller coaster and the shrieks of thrilling girls with their sailor suited dates. Our family lived three blocks up the hill from Whitney's Playland-at-the-Beach, a classic roller-coastering roaring amusement park at the end of the 'B' streetcar line and in 1946 that bopping place was peaking.

Wow! Here they come right now through the fog on the pavement wet midway - the saddle shoed bobby-soxers like my sister Shirley Jo and the cool Jughead capped jitterbuggers like my brother Gary. They knew their way around Playland you bet. Red gleaming magical candy apples on a stick were nothing to them. Fluffy cloudlike cotton candy so beautiful and desirous to look at and so horrible to eat, what did they care?

But me, I was four. Mom was walking little me down the Balboa Street hill to magical - and scary - Playland for a special treat.

We left civilization behind, passing the big apartment house at 47th and Balboa where my friend Lillian lived, passing the little red roofed cottage where the bigger kids played Mother May I on the long rolling front lawn - it was the only lawn in blocks.

Mom had on her de rigeur housewife's practical cloth coat and a scarf against the wind off the Pacific, me in my little green jacket. We crossed the streetcar turnaround and there they were - the cars! Red, blue green, wonderful little cars with headlights and little horns and without tops, just big enough for a four year old kid to possess for wonderful roundy round moments. They stood off to the south side of Balboa Street just past the rickety wooden Shoot the Chutes.

Once Shirley Jo and her friend Roberta took me on the Shoot The Shoots. We got on a little car and climbed and climbed up the wooden track with a rackety sound. I wasn't scared. Then, at the top, for just a brief moment I could see far away across the ocean the mysterious land on the other side called Horizon - it's mountains and clouds were just visible way out as far as you could see, then with a roar and high-pitched squeals of thrilling joy down we came at about a hundred miles an hour into the pool of water at the bottom, with great skips and splashes and everybody getting doused with spray and hooray!

Mom never took me on the Shoot the Chutes . With Mom, I went on the cars, and I liked that even better. My very own car to drive wherever I wanted! I felt proud when I waved at Mom as I drove round and round the little track. She was proud of me too. Only four years old and already driving my own car!

Later, maybe in 1947, Whitney installed little sailboats too. They were great. You could sit in the boat and go around in a circle and ring the bell as much as you wanted. And there was water all around you! Who knew where I was off to? Maybe all the way to Horizon. And there's Mom looking proud -- and cold, as the afternoon wind cut through her skimpy coat.

On a great day, we would end our adventures with a candy apple from the hamburger stand beside the Big Dipper -- the gigantic roaring roller coaster no one ever took me on. We got to walk up the Midway to get there. I always stopped to see the ducks paddling in a line through the green water of the shooting gallery. And I liked watch sailors throwing baseballs at the pryamids of grey milk bottles. It looked so easy, but no one could ever get them all to roll off the stand. They kept trying.

Then came the Diving Bell. Too scary to imagine. I was seven before I got up the courage to descend deep beneath Playland into the ocean where sharks and octopuses gathered round the bell with menacing looks and what if the glass broke? We'd all die and get in the newspaper. And what would my mother say?

I also passed up the Laff in the Dark as long as I could but finally, one horrible day at somebody's birthday party trip to Playland, we got in the car and passed through the doors of terror into the skeleton-filled blackness. The car crashed through black doors and beyond each door was another Vault of Horror tableau of blood covered witch-monsters and giant spiders about to leap, cruel death and horrid decapitation all to the music of even more horrid evil laughter and, if you weren't scared enough, extra piped in screams. OK, so I was a sensitive kid. Maybe a crybaby! Even a scaredycat! For weeks afterward, I had terror attacks in the bathtub when I remembered that dark tunnel. I didn't even have to close my eyes. There were skeletons coming up 47th Avenue!

I told you Playland was scary as well as thrilling. Out where we lived by Ocean Beach, the nights were usually cold and foggy, even in the summertime. The other kids said never to go out late at night (who would?) because, after Playland closed for the night, the drunks came up Balboa Street! I could just imagine them stumbling and cursing, looking for little boys to eat, the fog swirling around so you couldn't see them till it was too late!

The window of my bedroom opened on to the flat tar-and-gravel roof of the house next door. It was fun to climb around out there during the day when my mother wasn't home and look down at the cats far below in our backyard or at the vacant lot next to our neighbor's house. But there was a cypress tree growing in that lot and in bed at night I was sure a drunk had climbed up the tree and was on the roof outside. In fact, if I got up and looked out that window, I knew I'd see a horrible bloody face leering at me and big sharp fingernails with blood dripping down. A drunk!

Sorry, I got carried away. Mom was walking me down the Midway, right? The stand by the Big Dipper sold hamburgers and caramel corn and that red kind of caramel corn in a brick, but what I craved was a candy apple. So beautiful, gleaming with reflected blue-red light, and glistening like Virginia Mayo's lips. And, when I tasted it...delicious hot cinnamon crackled in my mouth. But you know what? It wasn't really a candy apple. It was a just regular apple with a candy coating, and once you ate past the crackling cinnamon - it wasn't even a very good apple. One of those mushy ones. In fact, the only thing worse was cotton candy, which looked like a heavenly pink cloud, but tasted like steel wool.

Then, with my faux-treasure in hand on a little wooden stick, we walked back past the streetcar turnaround to Balboa Street and up the hill home.








Photos from the San Francisco Public Library's excellent Amusing America Online Exhibit and from a site that unleashed floods of nostalgia for the Richmond District of my heart: The Western Neighborhoods Project.