Children ride toy cars and a fire truck at Playland-at-the-Beach. Photo: Steven Faulkner, courtesy Western Neighborhoods Project

By Christopher Newton

Our family lived three blocks up the hill from Whitney’s Playland-at-the-Beach, and in 1946 it was blowing its top. I can see them coming right now through the fog: saddle-shoed bobby-soxers like my sister Shirley Jo and Jughead-capped jitterbuggers like my big brother Gary. They knew their way around Playland, you bet. Gleaming red candy apples on a stick meant nothing to them. Cloudlike cotton candy, what did they care?

But me, I was 4. I had a lot to learn. Maybe that’s why Momma decided to take me down there. She zipped my jacket up tight, made sure my shoes were tied and off we walked down the Balboa Street hill toward magical, scary Playland.

We passed the brick apartment house at 47th and Balboa where my friend Lillian lived. Her father was in the Army, and her mother was too busy for children to come and play, so Lillian was by herself a lot. Maybe she was watching us from her window right now. Maybe she was wishing she was on an adventure like me.

Across the street was the red-roofed cottage with its rolling front lawn. Kids gathered there to play Mother May I on summer evenings as the fog drifted in. First you took three giant steps, then you took six midget steps, then you took eight caterpillar steps. You had to do whatever Mother said or else you were out.

A block further on, we passed a desolate region of sand hills stretching off to the north all the way to Sutro Park. It was a lawless land where bullies roamed. It was covered with ice plant, lupine and the occasional rusting beer can. I didn’t know much, but I knew you didn’t want to go up there without a bodyguard.

Below us, we could see the horseshoe-shaped scaffolding of the Shoot the Chutes. Once my big sister Shirley Jo and her pal Barbara took me on it. As I climbed in the middle of the front car, Shirley Jo was on my left, Barbara was on my right. What could go wrong? The car clacked up the track.

At the top, for a long moment, I could see across the ocean the mysterious land of Horizon. There were its purple mountains and towering clouds at the edge of the world. I could see its forests, its cities and its fruited plains – someday I was going to go there to see for myself. Then, with high-pitched shrieks, we thundered down the ramp at a hundred miles an hour, crashed into the lagoon with great skips and splashes and everybody getting doused with spray and hooray! I wanted to go again, but Shirley Jo was out of money.

I knew Momma would never take me on the Shoot the Chutes. She wouldn’t go on scary rides. But there in its shadow was something nearly as good – the cars! Red, blue, green, wonderful cars, with headlights and horns you could honk, and and a firetruck with ladders and a bell, just big enough for me to possess for blissful, roundy-round moments. I waved at her as I chugged round the track and she waved back. Only 4 years old and already driving my own fire truck.

Later, maybe in 1947, the Whitney Brothers installed toy sailboats too, right next to the cars. Then, when I got tired of going around a circle in a car, I could go around a circle in a boat. That was progress. And there was Momma standing at the fence, looking proud of me – or maybe just looking cold, as the afternoon wind cut through her cloth coat.

On a great day like this, we might top off our trip with a candy apple from the hamburger stand beside the Big Dipper. I’d never actually eaten a candy apple, but the sight of other kids holding them filled me with desire. I would have walked all the way down the midway for a taste.

Except I would walk down the midway anyway. Everything about it was interesting. I liked to watch the sailors plinking at mechanical ducks paddling in a line across the river-green water of the shooting gallery. Then I watched more sailors and tough teenagers smashing baseballs into milk-bottle pyramids. It looked so easy, but no one could ever make them roll off the stand.

Next came the Diving Bell. I was 10 before I got the courage to go in it, under the ocean where sharks and octopi gathered with menacing looks — and what if the glass broke? We’d all die and get in the newspaper. Then what would my mother say?

I also passed up the Laff In the Dark ride as long as I could, but finally, on Peter Walters’ birthday party trip, I crashed through the iron doors of terror into skeleton-filled blackness. Why were the other kids laughing? Ahead of me was a blood-curdling Vault of Horror tableau of slime-covered monsters and giant spiders about to leap, cruel death and horrid decapitation, all to the sound of evil laughter and screaming souls in agony.

OK, so I was a sensitive kid. Maybe a crybaby. Even a scaredycat. But for weeks afterward, I had terror attacks whenever I thought of that tunnel.

Out where we lived on 47th Avenue, the nights were cold and foggy, even in the summertime. The other kids said never go out late at night, because after Playland closes the drunks come up Balboa Street. In my mind I could see them stumbling and cursing, looking for little boys to eat, the fog swirling around so you couldn’t see them ’til it was too late.

My bedroom window opened onto the tar-and-gravel roof of Jimmy’s house next door. It was fun to climb around out there during the day and look down at cats in the vacant lot. But a cypress tree grew in that lot, and in bed at night I was sure a drunk had climbed that tree and got onto the roof outside my window. In fact, if I dared look I knew I’d see a horrible, bloody face leering at me and sharp fingernails with blood dripping down. A drunk!

The stand by the Big Dipper sold hamburgers and that kind of red caramel corn that came in a brick, but I was there for one thing only: a candy apple. So beautiful, gleaming with reflected blue-red light, glistening like Virginia Mayo’s lips. And, when I tasted it … delicious hot cinnamon crackled in my mouth. But it turned out it wasn’t really a candy apple. It was a regular apple with a candy coating, and once you ate past the crackling cinnamon it wasn’t even a very good apple. It was a mushy one. In fact, the only thing worse was cotton candy, which looked like a luminescent pink cloud but tasted like steel wool.

Momma said since I wanted that apple so bad, I had to eat it. So, with my disillusion stuck on a stick, eating off all the cinnamon and accidentally dropping the rest on the sidewalk, we turned around and headed past the streetcar turnaround up Balboa Street toward home.

Do you have your own Ocean Beach Recollection — a story of a memorable experience in the Ocean Beach area? Long or short, recent or old, we’d love to hear about it and share it with Ocean Beach Bulletin readers. Tell us!

“I lived on the Great Highway for over 30 years. One of my fondest memories is watching next door neighbor Bill Hickey (of SF Surf Shop, click here to read about his history of shaping boards) shape and finish his boards. He would listen to piano music as he worked – another benefit on days like today when all doors were open. I was weaving at the time and on occasion would glance up from my loom and see that we were independently working with the same colors–cool!”

Remember, you too can submit an Ocean Beach Recollection. Learn how to by reading this post, and submit by going here.

A few points to mention before you roll up your sleeves and start typing:

• First off, our submission form is pretty basic right now. We are working on making it more sophisticated. In the mean time, the best approach for submitting, to allow great ease of re-reading your submission, is to type your recollection in a word processor, and then copy-and-paste it into our submission form.
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That’s pretty much the scoop. In terms of content, we are deliberately being vague. It’s your story to tell, not ours, so use whatever guidelines you feel are appropriate. We will try to remain as true to your submission as we can…with general decency in mind. We’re not against a bit of silliness, but we’re definitely not interested in being crude for crude’s sake. But we recognize that Ocean Beach caters to a wide audience, and hope to hear from the full gamut of opinions.

We appreciate all submissions and look forward to hearing your stories about Ocean Beach.