Tag Archives: merry-go-round

Fair Makes Big-Eyed Kids Of Us All

by Woody

The John Mellencamp song “County Fair” comes to my mind every summer with one lyric especially making me smile: “Kids with eyes as big as dollars / Rode all the rides.”

That, in a single image, sums up the Ventura County Fair to me – kids getting their thrills on carousels and trains, sky swings and the Tilt-a-Whirl, small roller coasters and the giant Ferris wheel.

My favorite Ferris wheel memory is captured in a framed 8-by-10 black-and-white photograph. Snapped candidly by a Star photographer three decades ago, before newspapers became colorful, it still hangs on my daughter’s childhood bedroom wall. In it she is 4 years old with excited eyes as big as dollars, me seated tight by her side with one arm around her, as we soar high skyward. It was her first VC Fair and she says it remains one of her earliest vivid memories.

Alas, for the past two years, kids – and teens and adults – making new Fair memories was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic causing the event’s first cancellation since World War II. Happily, that changes this Wednesday (Aug. 3) when the “VC Fair Rides Again.”

The Fair makes kids of us all. If not the rides, then the win-a-stuffed-animal games or various exhibits or concerts or chocolate-covered bacon will give you eyes as big as silver dollars. The Fair is more timeless than baseball and for a week and a half each summer becomes our favorite pastime.

Speaking of baseball, legend has it Babe Ruth played an exhibition game nearly a century ago in the mid-1920s at Seaside Park which is, and has been since 1914, the site for the Ventura County Fair that originated in 1874 at the Pierpont Bluffs. This claim to fame makes the current fairgrounds all the more special. After all, while throwing baseballs at milk bottles on the midway you can imagine you are trying to strike out The Sultan of Swat.

The Fair is also special because of spinning, dipping, whirling rides with enough G-forces to make a NASA astronaut’s stomach woozy.

The Fair is special because the food can also make your stomach spin with offerings that include almost anything you can imagine served on a stick, deep-fried or dipped in chocolate – or all three.

The Fair is special because it serves as an excuse for parents to play hooky from work for an afternoon.

The Fair is special because of the amazing exhibits of paintings and photography, handmade quilts and home-baked cakes, and on and on.

The Fair is special because of the midway games, no matter if the basketball rims are too high and so bent out of round that LeBron James would be lucky to sink 1 out of 4.

The Fair is special because the carnies are such colorful characters.

The Fair is special because of the 4-H junior livestock auction and blue-ribbon rabbits the size of English bulldogs!

And, not least of all, the Fair is special because of the ocean-side Ferris wheel that affords a soaring seagull’s-eye panoramic view that is beyond spectacular. This magic is magnified if you are 4 years old, or thereabouts, or sitting beside such a kid with eyes as big as silver dollars.

Mellencamp’s song concludes: “Well the County Fair left quite a mess / In the county yard”

Indeed, come August 14, after the tents are folded, the rides taken down, and the trucks loaded up, there will be quite a mess left behind. But that’s how the best parties always end – with a happy mess and lasting memories.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

Sad Goodbye To A Merry-Go-Round

by Woody

The chronicles of my Hawai’i adventures, previously promised to continue today, are postponed a week in order to share about a dear friend I lost last Sunday.

There is a good chance, if you live in or have visited Ventura County, she was your friend as well. I say “she” because just as ships are lovingly considered female, so too should merry-go-rounds.

The carousel at Ventura Harbor Village spun round and round for the very last time, to be replaced – as too often happens to nostalgic treasures – by something new called “progress.” Wild horses could not have kept me away from saying a final goodbye to these mild horses that gallop gently in circles. The hand-painted menagerie also included a giraffe, zebra, rooster and St. Bernard.

The circa-1970s carousel found a home at the harbor in the mid-1980s and in 1990 I took my then-3-year-old daughter on it for the first time. A fair guess is that we returned a hundred times more, at least, in the years that followed for what she called our “Daddy Dates.” While we rotated among numerous eateries at Harbor Village, we always, always rode the carousel.

And always, without exception, my daughter rode Rudolph. I think she initially picked him because it was summertime and she thought that was the funniest thing in the world – Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer being here in the warm sunshine instead of at the snowy North Pole. Ever thereafter she continued to politely hand over her arcade ticket at the gate and then rush excitedly past all the other animals and climb aboard Rudolph.

My daughter and I have enjoyed other carousels near and far, from the Ventura County Fair to Monterey’s Cannery Row, from Disneyland to Disney World, from San Francisco’s Pier 39 to New York City’s Central Park, but nowhere has she found another Rudolph and so always she has been a little disappointed.

Indeed, while some merry-go-rounds are bigger, or have brighter lights or shinier paint, the Harbor Village carousel will forever remain my favorite because of all the memories it carries with my daughter – and son, too, although he has never adored it quite so dearly. Yes, on the soundtrack of my life’s happiest moments the calliope music of the Harbor Village carousel plays a verse.

Adding to the melancholy of the farewell day, my daughter – herself now a parent of a 3-year-old girl – was unable to make it down from the Bay Area for a final carousel “Daddy Date.” Happily, I took an equally beautiful date. One of my favorite pictures of my wife is a black-and-white portrait when she was 5; now, as she sat astride the St. Bernard, I imagined her in living color at that age.

When I first started taking my daughter on the carousel it cost all of dollar as I seem to recall. This time it was four bucks per person, a bargain nonetheless because a five-minute ride on a time machine is priceless.

As I emotionally orbited round and round, I took a selfie video to send my daughter. My quick-thinking wife did something even better – she made a video call and that is how our little girl “virtually” rode her beloved merry-go-round during its last go-round. Naturally, she teared up saying goodbye even from afar.

“Don’t cry because it’s over,” I said over the phone, repeating a quote by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, “smile because it happened.”

I need not tell you which carousel animal I rode. Some of the red paint has worn off his nose, but to my wistful eyes Rudolph never looked finer.

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

In ‘Fair’ World, It’d Be Smiling Time

by Woody

FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM: @woodywoodburn

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In a ‘Fair’ World, It

Would Be Smiling Time

A John Mellencamp song comes to my mind every summer at this time. Titled “County Fair” it takes a dark and depressing turn, yet one bright lyric sticks in my heart and makes me smile:

“Kids with eyes as big as dollars / Rode all the rides”.

That, in a single image, sums up the Ventura County Fair to me – kids having their thrills riding carousels and roller coasters, trains and the Tilt-a-Whirl and, of course, slow turns on the giant Ferris wheel with its seagull eye’s view of the ocean and Ventura Pier and city below.

Sadly, a new Fair Poster for 2020 was not to be.

George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr.’s famous invention debuted at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Remarkably, that was actually 18 years after the debut of the Ventura County Fair.

Our 145th edition was scheduled to have opened its gates yesterday, July 31. Because of coronavirus, however, some 300,000 smiles have been cancelled and the turnstiles will dutifully remain locked. Like you, I am disappointed.

I had planned to take my young granddaughter to her first Fair this year. Instead of making new memories with her, I must be content with reminiscing about two other little girls with eyes as big as dollars.

The first girl, then 5, went to her first Fair alone with her father. Her biggest thrill that afternoon was riding the Ferris wheel. On their drive home, as her father retells it, she could be heard softly whispering to herself, “Ferris wheel, Ferris wheel, Ferris wheel,” so as not to forget the name.

Arriving home, the girl – now my wife – raced inside and excitedly told her mom: “I rode the merry-go-round!”

A second Ferris wheel memory was captured in a photograph that remains one of my favorites of my own little girl. It is in black-and-white, taken candidly by a Star photographer before newspapers became colorful, and hangs in a gold frame in her childhood bedroom.

Frozen in time nearly three decades past, she is 4 years old and my arm is wrapped around her as we ride the Ferris wheel. It was her first time at the Ventura County Fair and she will tell you it is one of her earliest vivid memories. I imagine most adults remember similar childhood Fair magic.

The Fair still makes kids of us all. If not the rides, then the exhibits or games or concerts still give us eyes as big as dollars. The Fair is a time machine. For 12 days each summer, we turn back the calendar.

Our Fair roared back after World War II, the last time it was cancelled, and it will do likewise after this war with COVID-19 ends. For now, sadly, the win-a-stuffed-animal games and whirling rides are on hold.

The chocolate-covered, deep-fried, bacon-filled food concoctions are on hold, as are the amazing exhibits of paintings and photographs, quilts and cakes, flowers and plants. The mini-pigs and giant rabbits the size of bulldogs and 4-H livestock auctions are also on hold.

In short, being a silver dollar-eyed 4-year-old, no matter one’s true age, is on hold.

Mellencamp’s song concludes as it opened: “Well the County Fair left quite a mess / In the county yard.” It is a lyric that carries extra melancholy this year since there will be no tents to fold, no rides to take down, no happy mess left behind.

And no new memories left behind, either.

However, since legend has it that Babe Ruth once played an exhibition baseball game at this very Seaside Park site, the late-season motto of sad-but-hopeful baseball fans seems in order: “Wait ’til next year!”

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …