Remember a soft, late summer evening with a special treat after dinner: a trip to Kiddieland.
Remember the crowds and the sounds and smells of an amusement park sized for small people. Remember sitting astride a carved wooden charger on a pole, your feet dangling far short of the stirrups, and being brave enough to hold just the reins because you knew that your father, standing on the carousel right next to you, would never let you fall.
Remember flying in a rocket ship — and firing a ray gun, brap-brap-brap! — driving a race car (spinning the steering wheel wildly), sailing in child-size boats with brass bells to ring. Remember regretting it in the pit of your stomach the first time you were allowed on the Tilt-a-Whirl, and the way you staggered off when it finally stopped. Remember the little train that chugged around the park, and you just able to see above the side of the car, the half-anticipated, half-dreaded — because it meant you had to go home as soon as the ride was over — finale to the wonderful evening.
Once there were a lot of places like Kiddieland in the Chicago area and around the country. My family went to a Kiddieland in Kansas City, Mo.; my husband was taken to Gwynn Oak Park in Baltimore. Both have long since disappeared, the victims of development and competing forms of entertainment. Most of the parks in this area are gone, too. But the original remains and flourishes at 1st and North Avenues in near west suburban Melrose Park.
Kiddieland, founded in 1929 and now in its 70th season, is a welcome respite from the newer breed of huge, expensive amusement parks with their multimillion-dollar thrill rides, vast, trackless parking lots and costumed commercial characters. Those seem to cater to groups of bored and aimless teens; Kiddieland is unabashedly attuned to the family trade.
The sign on the corner, like the rest of the park, is an amalgam of past and present: an old-fashioned image of happy children, allied with a modern, computerized flashing display. Compact discs of calliope music play over the loudspeaker system. Kiddieland has the newfangled water rides and a giant swinging ship. There are Ferris wheels large and small. There’s a hands-on play area for children. There are games of skill, not too difficult to win, to judge by the number of garish plush toys being lugged around the park. But the best parts are still the old parts.
There’s the Little Dipper, an old wooden roller coaster designed to elate, not to terrorize; coaster fans from all over the country come to try it out. There’s the Tilt-a-Whirl and the rocket ship ride, a kiddie helicopter ride that goes up and down and around, and a flying saucer ride whose little round spaceships bear the names of the planets. There are bumper cars, the mushroom ride (the riders in each car decide how much they want to spin around) and the Roto-Whip, which was purchased in 1939 but still looks brand new. There are the trains that chug around the perimeter of the park; the little cars are perfectly sized for itty-bitties, so adults will find that their knees almost graze their chins and that looking out the windows requires an unusual degree of flexibility.
The oldest ride is the horse carousel, built in 1925 and currently undergoing painstaking restoration of its handsomely carved herd. The most charming — and genuinely beautiful — ride is the car carousel from Germany, and if you’re reading this, you’re probably too big to be allowed on it. It’s for small children only, and the height restrictions are strictly enforced. But it’s exquisite, its miniature conveyances — antique automobiles, motorcycles, a tram, bicycles, airplanes and a fire truck with a firefighter clinging to the ladder — are all carved of wood and meticulously maintained. A comical band of carved wooden musicians plays in the center, and humorous paintings of athletic animals decorate the panels above it.
The wooden carousels are carefully protected from the weather and insured as works of art, says Tom Norini, whose wife, Cathy, is the granddaughter of Kiddieland’s founder, Arthur E. Fritz. (The Norinis and her brother and sister-in-law, Ron and Mary Rynes, bought the park in 1977.) In 1929, Fritz, a down-on-his-luck German immigrant builder, scraped together the money to buy six docile ponies and offered rides to children. He gradually added other attractions and coined a name for his child-oriented amusement park: Kiddieland.
That name turned into a generic term, but the original park is now sui generis, not only surviving but flourishing, largely as a result of the third-generation owners’ policy of regular, meticulous maintenance and restoration of their rides. The ponies were retired in 1962, when, according to Norini, “we started the transition from a kiddie park to a family park.” More rides to appeal to adults and older children were added, and the updating process has continued without losing sight of the park’s basic concept.
“We’ve avoided getting a big (roller) coaster,” says Norini, “because we’re about families with kids.”
Kiddieland’s patrons are also in their third and fourth generation. A survey taken for the 65th anniversary season revealed that the average adult customer had first been taken to Kiddieland before his or her second birthday.
“We don’t have an audience like Great America, in the millions,” says Norini, “but we have a loyal core audience that comes back three, four, five times a year.” It probably helps that Kiddieland charges $13.95 (less after sunset and with specials; children under 36 inches are admitted free) for a day’s fun, compared with $34 for adults and $29 for most kids at the Gurnee megapark. “If you put together a park like this today, you’d have to charge $25,” avers Norini. “The investment is phenomenal.”
New rides are expensive. Labor takes a big bite. There are as many as 250 seasonal employees (hired largely from local high schools and through referrals from employees) running the rides, serving up popcorn and pizza slices, and cleaning up; there are six to eight sweepers on duty at all times, and a pair of workers who just empty trash cans.
The rides themselves look as bright and new as they did a generation ago. There are 15 full-time employees who spend the off-season laboriously taking the rides down, cleaning them, carefully touching them up.
“Everybody thinks that when September comes we all go to Florida,” Norini says, “but we just cut back to 40 hours, with a lot of long weekends.”
Kiddieland opens in mid-April with weekend hours, goes full time in June, and reverts to weekends in September, closing after a special (and very popular) Halloween haunt in October, complete with hayrides and characters in costume. Of course summer is the prime season, but the park has its own charms in the softer light and crisper air of autumn.
I visited Kiddieland with three children on a recent weekday afternoon. The two older ones skipped off to get wet on the flume ride and the water coaster, while 4-year-old Eleanor stuck around the south end of the park, where the rides for young children are clustered. She liked the mushroom ride and the helicopter; she did not at all enjoy the miniature Ferris wheel. Every minute of the train ride brought happy exclamations, and she rang the brass bell on her little boat with noisy enthusiasm.
Still, her greatest pleasure was the most old-fashioned one, the carousel rides. She rode the car carousel twice, choosing among the variety of sized-just-right vehicles to sit in the tram and a pink auto. But she kept returning to the horse carousel, starting with a stationary mount, then selecting steeds that moved up and down.
Finally she dared, on her fourth and final ride, to hold on to just the reins, secure in the knowledge that her mother, standing next to her, would never let her fall.
