"Maybe they should have set fire to this place years ago..."
I had a lot to do Saturday. I was thinking about changing the oil in the car, I captured, cleaned up, resized, and posted the photos for the CoasterMania '03 transcript, and I had to work a couple of hours today. But it was a beautiful day. I didn't get the car done, I couldn't bear to just sit around the house after work, and all those things I've been putting off...well, they can wait. The sun is shining, it's 76 degrees, and doggone it, I'm going to Wyandot Lake for the evening.
So I went to Wyandot Lake. When I got there around 5:00pm, the parking booths were closed for the night, each outfitted with a sign indicating that the Zoo was closing at 3:00pm Free parking for everybody tonight! I noticed that some kind of portable PA system was being set up just outside the Zoo gates, I drove around to the Wyandot Lake side of the lot, parked the car, and headed for the entrance. Once inside, I was in familiar territory. Sort of. The Ferris wheel, an Eli "Aristocrat" ground-mount wheel (could it be the #1000 Wheel sold to Floyd Gooding back in the 1950's? The data plate is long gone...), was out of service for the day, and the misters at the Meijer Cool Zone appeared to be turned off. That's the building that used to house controls for remote control boats. Out in front of that building is a cart selling "cool hats." I guess they call them "cool hats" because they wouldn't sell as well if they were accurately identified as "silly hats" or "stupid hats". Those things sure are popular this year!
I saw that on the bridge over the Canoochee Creek lazy river, a new sign points the way to Croctail Island, the bar in the middle of the Lazy River. Next to the Creek dry entrance, the popcorn and cotton candy stand seems to have an expanded popcorn operation. I noticed that the park is experimenting with a new upcharge season pass which includes drink service and popcorn. Some of us have been saying for years that a season-pass upcharge would be better than those annoying giant souvenir mug deals. Wyandot Lake is also doing souvenir refill deals: a $7 mug can be refilled all season for $1, and a souvenir popcorn bucket is refillable. What's with the popcorn? Has Wyandot Lake been taken over by the Humphrey company [Footnote 1]?
The next building down is the gift shop, a retail building that has a kind of a New England seaside town look to it. The front door is a little smaller than it was last ye--
Wait a minute. That's right...this wasn't like this at all last year! Last October, a fire broke out in the bumper car building, which included all of the structures in this block, totally destroying all of the buildings from the gift shop on down. This building is all new construction, but they've done a great job building a new building and making it look like it's been here for half a century or more. It reminds me of some of the updates I've seen in recent years at Kennywood, such as the Jack Rabbit control booth or the Racer stairway.
Unfortunately, the new gift shop is still lacking in good Wyandot Lake merchandise. I moved on. Around the corner is a new locker rental facility, and a new weight guesser stand, both of which look exactly like the old stands that were destroyed last fall. On around are the most dramatic changes. The first (and second-most obvious) is the new bumper car building. Stylistically it adopts the same tin-roofed seaside warehouse look of the other new stuff, a look more appropriate for the park than the old midway building. Inside, a totally new set of bumper cars was running. A long line extended out to the midway. My understanding is that the old bumper cars were not in the building when it burned, but somehow the park managed to get Six Flags to buy them a new set anyway. The new cars are the circular "tank-steering" type cars from RDC. I believe Wyandot Lake is the only park in the region to have a set. There is a set at a local FEC, but none in any of the parks. This set uses electric drive motors and a floor pick-up power system, so there is no stinger pole, and no overhead grid. Unfortunately only seven of the 18 cars were functioning, so the line moved very slowly. So slowly, in fact, that I abandoned it and went down to ride the roller coaster.
Before I got there, though, I came face to face with the most obvious change. One of the casualties of the fire was the Most Annoying Game in the World, one of those talking electronic High Striker games. It sat between the bumper car building and the roller coaster, and after the fire all of the light covers on one side had melted, and I understand the thing's electronic brain, attached to the side of the destroyed building, got cooked. That location on the midway has been taken over by a basketball game. Out on the midway now is the biggest electronic High Striker game I have ever seen. It stands about 30' high, I swear, with a huge decorative ball on top. The front of the unit is a large red matrix display panel that was advertising the park's Dive In Movies (with Free Popcorn for upcharge season pass holders!) to be shown in July. This thing is ENORMOUS! And best of all, it DOESN'T talk!
On down the midway I waited a few cycles, then took a ride on the Sea Dragon. The car that was removed mid-season last year has been returned to service, and the back seat of Car #3 still wobbles on the rear axle pivot shaft, as it has for years. John Allen's oldest surviving roller coaster is running well, and it's refreshing to ride one of these without a trim brake. Speaking of brakes, this is one of only two wood coasters in the State of Ohio still equipped with skid brakes, and it's the only wood coaster in the State still controlled with manual brake levers [Footnote 2]. It's running pretty well, and while it isn't by its very nature a very impressive coaster, it does run better than the Beastie down at Kings Island, even though Beastie is two feet taller.
I failed to ride the carousel of mysterious origin (don't believe the sign...this one is not a Mangels-Illions) and noticed that the recorded carousel music is practically inaudible. In this age of recorded, piped-in, amplified background music coming from all the rocks and utility poles, I think we've mostly forgotten about why carousels have traditionally been equipped with band organs, and indeed the function those automated musical instruments were meant to serve. Ah, well...
I went back to the back of the park and got a really good ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl. The tub hoods have an annoying but harmless rattle to them, but my tub whirled very nicely. Next door, the Spider tub didn't spin quite as freely as, say, one at Holiday World, but it was respectable. The operator, though, was pretty amazing. First of all, he was manipulating the clutches so smoothly I could hardly feel them engage. Second, he was using a very strange pattern for loading the ride. Or rather, he was using what initially appeared to be a very strange pattern for loading the ride, loading 1-3-4-7-9-10-11-12-2-5-6-8. It seemed weird, but in fact during that load he had actually changed his loading pattern three times...he was dynamically allocating seats based on the constantly-changing length of his ride queue while still keeping the thing balanced. For his next cycle, for instance, he used an even stranger pattern, but ended up with exactly four empty tubs positioned opposite one another. He was pretty good at it.
I wandered through but did not participate in the water parks. I finally took a ride on the new bumper cars and I still can't make up my mind whether I like them or not.
In all, the park looks good, with hardly a trace of the disasterous fire last fall. But then, they had that pretty well cleaned up a couple of days after it happened. The good thing is that Six Flags has finally decided to make some noteworthy improvements, in the new buildings and the new bumper cars. Given the unpredictability of the weather here, and the nasty, cold, wet spring we had this year and in three of the past five years, I think it is clear that Wyandot Lake could use some expansion and updating on the non-waterpark side. And it's a shame that it took a disaster to get some attention in that regard. But the park seems to be on the right track. I hope this proves to be a good season.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Footnote 1: The Humphrey Company sells popcorn and popcorn products in the Cleveland area. For many years, they were also in the concrete business, the food service business, the construction business, and the amusement park business...they owned and operated Euclid Beach Park. [Return to Text]
Footnote 2: The Big Dipper at Geauga Lake mysteriously kept its brake handles, but they are now strictly decorative; they're not even attached to the machinery anymore. [Return to Text]
--DCAjr
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