School Picnic

As a kid, my three favorite days of the year were Christmas, my birthday, and the school picnic at West View Park. My friend, Joe Bullick, N. Allegheny’s local historian extraordinaire, says that when he attended Ingomar School (circa 1937), the picnic was in North Park. But all I can remember is how hyped up we were for that May day when schoolchildren from the entire district (and their teachers and janitors and mothers—fathers came after work) invaded West View. I believe we could get a ride down on a school bus; the drivers (like Pete Brandt’s Uncle Pat) enjoyed a day at the park, too.

A week or so beforehand the men from the park had come to school and sold us strips of tickets for the rides, which included an extra stripe of pink complementary tickets and maybe those 1¢ red tax tickets (whose bad idea were they?). Also I believe the school lavishly provided a ticket for a Dixie cup of ice cream during the afternoon.

Since its demise in 1977, many reminiscences about the old amusement park have been published, including a book (Goodbye, West View Park, Goodbye by Charles K. Jacques, Jr., 1984). Perhaps it’s just as well that I live far away so that my mental image of the park can’t ever blur. I’ll always visualize the drive down Perry Highway to include bumpety-bumping over the streetcar tracks and automatically glance to the right to see if a carload of screaming riders is about to make that plunge and snap around the hairpin curve of The Dips.

The park opened in May 1906 on 18-1/2 acres of swampy land in the newly formed borough of West View (more land was added throughout the 1950s). Not coincidently, the site was at the end of the Bellevue-West View trolley line. Streetcar companies were charged a flat fee for the electricity required to run their trolleys. Since there were few commuters on the weekend, the idea soon caught on (in other parts of Pittsburgh as well) of developing amusement parks at the end of the line as a destination (Kennywood still remains). Although Pittsburgh Railways Company didn’t own West View Park, they built a terminal facility and offered a special excursion fare. It was a Sharpsburg entrepreneur, Theodore Harton, and his associates who dammed up the stream running through the land to create Lake Placid with its fountain and various boats for rent. (I can still hear that park employee shouting through his bull horn that our time was up and we must bring that boat back immediately.) The narrow valley also had to be widened and pedestrian bridges built to connect the various hillside venues. That Pittsburghesque terrain that contributed to the charm of the place also hampered expansion, leading to the park’s downfall, I suspect.

The Dips was the first of its kind built in Pennsylvania. Among connoisseurs it’s known as “an out-and-back, wooden under-rail roller coaster”. My mother had a cast iron stomach and loved The Dips. I recall a number of her girl scouts—as soon as they were tall enough—asking her to take them on their first ride. And when I was 12 and such a scaredy cat, my Uncle Cy offered to buy me a pair of Keds (those white sneakers I dearly wanted) if I would go on The Dips, having master The Racing Whippets the previous summer. Again Mom obliged. She was good at filling up the seat so you felt there was no way to fall out.

I think my awe of going to the school picnic was greatest between 1948 and 1952 when West View Park seemed a fantasyland. By 1958, I was starting to notice its imperfections. The Midway was pretty dirty. Usually by afternoon several kids had lost their cookies after riding The Tilt-a-Whirl, but no one had cleaned it up. Cotton candy left a gritty taste in your mouth and when you went to get some water from the drinking fountains, it smelled like rotten eggs. There were rumors that on opening day a nest of snakes had been found by a rider on The Caterpillar. And clearly the prizes in the Penny Arcade were pretty crappy (although I always cherished that pen-shaped flashlight and the fortune that said I’d be in the movies).

We each have memories of the old park, many of them connected with our five senses: the sound of the cymbals clanging as the calliope played and the horses rose and sank on the wooden Merry-go-round; the view from the top of the Ferris wheel; the burnt rubber smell of the bumper cars in The Dodge’em (a good ride when it started raining); the sticky taste of Cracker Jack; and of course, the furtive kisses in the pitch black tunnel at the start of The Dips (not with my mother, however).

In my scrapbook I found a 1957 scorecard from the park’s miniature golf course. No more than 3 could play, and my opponents were Carol Kummer Gaus and Arnie Huwar. I guess I kept it because I beat them with a score of 51. That sounds pretty good until you notice that par is 40. And as someone who believes, along with Mark Twain, that golf is a nice walk spoiled, I know it was definitely the pinnacle of my career on the links. I even got a hole in one on the 10^th hole--“The School House.” We all bombed the 2^nd hole—remember how you had to swat the ball hard enough so it would go up through The Windmill and make the blades turn?

On a visit home around 1975, I took my two girls, Brenda and Lia, to West View Park along with Mom and my cousin Patty Orr. At ages 4 and 6, the kids enjoyed themselves but probably tired of hearing the adults extol the wonders of the place. At least on the ride back to Ingomar, one of them asked, “Next year will we go to Disneyland?”