Quite a bit has changed since my childhood. Even more has changed since my father’s.
Human nature, on the other hand — how and why folks do what they do — details shift, but the basics don’t. Like kids taking crazy risks, and adults acting with dubious wisdom.
Background: The Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression
My father was born in 1921 on the family farm, west of Rockford, Illinois.
Those were the Roaring Twenties: good times for optimists in industry, business, and the stock market.
Agriculture was another matter: high prices for machinery didn’t help, and neither did the occasional drought toward the end of the decade.
So my father’s family moved to Rockford in 1929 — just in time for the Great Depression. Then some guy at a construction site where my father’s father was working dropped a crane on many of his co-workers, including my grandfather.
Sorting through the mess, someone noticed a bleeding corpse — very uncorpselike behavior. It was my grandfather. Not all of him, but what was left was still alive.
A Roller Coaster, Some Kids, and Safety Concerns
After the crane incident, my father was the son of a one-legged former construction worker, and Irish to boot. He was Irish before, of course; but you know what I mean.
It wasn’t all corned beef, cabbage, and dreariness, though. My father and his friends had an arrangement where they’d get free rides on an amusement park’s roller coaster. Until his mother found out. She told him that he wasn’t doing that any more, so he didn’t.
Reasons, Uncertainty, and Good Ideas
I gathered that she had nothing against amusement parks in general, or roller coasters in particular. She did, however, object to her youngest child being used as one of the weights in the roller coaster’s test runs.
Routine testing of roller coasters was starting to catch on around 1930, which would make the folks running Rockford’s Central Park Gardens early adapters. Getting details would mean diving down entirely too many rabbit holes this week.
The point is that the Rockford amusement park was safety-conscious, which I think is a good idea.
As for why the ride operator gave a bunch of poor kids free rides during the safety tests: that, I don’t know.
I like to think he was a good-hearted man who was convinced that the ride was safe, realized that these kids would never have the price of admission, and saw no harm in giving them free rides.
Other possibilities exist, of course. He might have seen them as better than sandbags for the required test, and unlikely to be missed if the test went badly.
But I’ll stick with my “good-hearted” paradigm. I remember when “paradigm” was a fashionable word in trade journals, and I’m drifting off-topic.
Finally, while looking for pictures of a roller coaster from around the time of my father’s free rides, I found this:
“Central Park Gardens Amusement Park, Rockford, Illinois. (1921-1942) — aka: Auburn Kiddieland, Rockford, Illinois“
Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D., The Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal (November 21, 2018)“…The wooden roller coaster at Central Park Gardens was designed by John A. Miller and built by Harry C. Baker in 1921. The Giant Coaster was named the ‘Jack Rabbit’ and then changed to the ‘Thriller.’ Some of Rockford’s Harlem Park’s most popular rides were moved here in 1928 when Harlem Park in Rockford was shuttered and demolished. Central Park would remain in operation until 1942, when it was sold for more profitable commercial use….”
I’ve talked about my dad, and living in a less-than-ideal world, before:
- “King Josiah, Consequences, and Love” (September 13, 2025)
- “A Crate of Oranges” (February 1, 2025)
- “Early Diagnosis, Tardy Treatment, and a Gimpy Hip” (January 25, 2025)
- “Liberal? Conservative? Republican? Democrat? No: Catholic” (July 27, 2024)
- “Good Nutrition, Radioactive Breakfast Cereal” (June 24, 2023)
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