Oh, How We Hate It When Someone Messes With The Things That We Love

December 15, 2007
By Larry Cottrill

Larry Cottrill

Someone threw out a pair of my most comfortable slippers just yesterday. Or so it seems.

The formal announcement was made yesterday that a local shrine of mine was sold. Having lived all of one’s life about 45 minutes east or so of Pittsburgh, there are few places as hallowed to the natives as Kennywood Park in West Mifflin, PA.

Kennywood is a throwback amusement park, known throughout the industry as the grandest of all "Traditional" amusement parks in the country. Opened more than 100 years ago, the park has been family owned for multiple generations, and each successive link in the family lineage has kept Kennywood true to its roots. In fact, the entire park has been declared a National Historic Landmark.

While the park does have modern rides, including a steel roller coaster which boasts speeds over 80 mph and a 230-ft drop over a riverside cliff, it is the classic older rides that give the park it’s soul and meaning. There is a haunted boat-ride/tunnel-of-love, a rocking "Noah’s Ark" walk-thru funhouse, the classic carousel, and most importantly, three vintage wooden roller coasters that are over 75-years old . The "Racer" is an oddly designed, side-by-side, twin-tracked racing coaster which features trains that run beside each other so closely that riders from opposing trains can slap hands during the ride. The "Jack Rabbit" is the smallest of the three, but it features an absolutely insane "double-dip" that is easily one of the world’s most staggering moments of "Air Time" ( and being a veteran of over 200 different roller coasters, I feel quite confident with that statement ).

The final "woodie" at Kennywood is the most famous; the Thunderbolt. Like the big steel coaster, it too goes over the cliff ( a total of 4-times! ), but its best moments are in the middle of the ride when it twice circles over and around its station house in a clockwise direction. During these two "laps," the rider on the right side of the bench seat is mercilessly thrown ( or smashed, as the case may be ) into the rider on the left side of the seat. Rest assured that hundreds of thousands of western PA boys and girls first got "up close and personal" with the opposite sex on a muggy July night while riding the Thunderbolt.

Well, just yesterday it finally made the papers that a park management firm from Spain had bought out family-owned Kennywood. The new company has untold millions at its disposal I’m sure, and in their initial press release they made sure to say that the park will remain true to its heritage, and blah, blah blah ....

Immediately however, visions danced in my head, and they weren’t of "sugar plums."

I’ve seen large corporations and park chains ( that I choose to keep nameless ) squeeze the life out of countless traditional parks that they’ve bought out, and I’ve no reason to believe that the new parent corporation is any wiser in this case. Within the next few years I expect numerous changes to the park, and none of them do I expect to be for the better.

Of the many fears I have, the most dreaded is that they’ll put seat dividers in the middle of the bench seats on the Thunderbolt. I’ve had to have a number of very dear pets put down over the decades, and I almost wish the same for the Thunderbolt before seeing it castrated so.

There are some things that you just are better off leaving as they are.

I can still remember the day that I first saw an artist’s rendering ( in a "New Car Preview" magazine, back when people still cared ) of the new 1973 Chevelle. "You’ve got to be kidding me..." I thought. The ‘70-‘72 series were soooo instantly timeless and classic. They weren’t necessarily the sleekest or most modern looking intermediates out there ( I might give that nod to the Torino or Charger ), but just as the "Forward Looking" Virgil Exner designed Chrysler products of the mid 50's fade from our memory in comparison to the ‘55-‘57 Chevy, the early 70's Chevelle was a work of art.

These types of thoughts also make me feel like a hypocrite.

Every day it seems, I can find numerous articles telling me how NASCAR is shooting itself in the foot ( and I’ve even written some of them ). The Busch/Nationwide series is a joke, the "Car of Tomorrow" is a piece of dog crap, the races are too long, the Chase sucks, tickets cost too much, they’ve abandoned their roots, Brian France has his head up his ...., etc... etc... etc...

Maybe instead of dwelling on my trepidations, I should be glad that Kennywood was bought out. It’s likely that the capital investments coming will assure that my friends’ great-grandchildren will be able to ride the Thunderbolt someday, seat-dividers or not.

Everything in life ends up being judged and viewed through the perspective of times’ lense. If you like rock and roll, and grew up in the 50's, Elvis will always be the King. The next generation had the Beatles and Stones. After that it was Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Pearl Jam, and God-only-knows who’s big today ( of course, I guess only rappers are big today, but I’m too old and set in my tastes to have any tolerance for that "music" ).

In NASCAR, I watched Petty, Pearson and Yarborough duel, I watched Darrell and Dale come and go, and I remember a punk kid crying at the banquet. I saw a "wuss" put power steering in the first Cup car ( that just had to be the end of real racing, didn’t it? ), cars lose their real sheetmetal, and a four-doored car and a front-wheel drive car get approved to race on my tracks.

Since ‘03, I’ve watched Brian France make either the boldest or the craziest changes in such a short amount of time as we’ve seen since 1971. Back then, his "moron" father had just about ruined the sport by "selling out" to the tobacco giant RJR. As if people were going to watch a sport named after a brand of cigarettes! Not only that, but they’d gotten rid of over half of the tracks on the ‘71 schedule!!! Bill Sr. had done such a great job birthing and nurturing the sport of organized stock car racing, and now his son was about to destroy it all within a few short years.

Seems in retrospect that maybe Bill Jr wasn’t half-bad, and, maybe even a genius.

Time will tell just how Brian’s rule over NASCAR will pan out. I can only hope that he’s half of the "moron" that his father was.

Continue to be bold Brian.

The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.

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