Sylvan Beach

Sylvan Beach
No LL

Sylvan Beach, on the East End of Oneida Lake, is what I would describe as a blue collar Palm Beach. When I read Jean Shepard's stories about Hammond Port Illinois, I think of Sylvan Beach.

We ate dinner tonight at Eddie's Restaurant, right in the heart of Sylvan Beach. Eddie's is a local fixture, having been here for 70 years. Libby and I have never been there before, but we sure wish we had. Eddie's is our kind of place. On one hand, they have great food, at reasonable prices, and served in huge quantities for hearty appetites. As we waited for our waitress I saw dish after heaping dish of spaghetti covered with a delicious smelling sauce, and huge meatballs, sausages and peppers going by. That whetted my appetite. I ordered the Fifi special. Fifi was Eddie's wife and her special Italian dish was really good.

On the other hand, is the clientèle. The patrons of Eddie's are a real picture of Americana. They are what I call real people. Real people are, for the most part, not beautiful. In fact some are downright ugly. They don't dress beautifully, nor do they act refined. They like wearing tank tops to show off their tattoos. More important, they do enjoy being themselves, and they bring their extended families to the restaurant with them and everybody present enjoys themselves.

The Eddie's menu lists some of the famous people who ate there. Frank Sinatra, Dezi Arnez, Luis Prima, Tommy Dorsey, and Lisa Minelli among them. I surmise that there must have been a bandstand in Sylvan Beach that was popular in the pre-TV days. Libby and I are just barely old enough to remember bandstand culture but too old to have ever gone to a rock concert.

Another big attraction in Sylvan beach is the cocktail lounge / bowling alley. They appear to have three bowling lanes and six bar stools, not a big scale operation. I was going to go in but I was wearing sunglasses and the lounge appears so dark that I wouldn't be able to see my nose. Sylvan Beach also has a BBQ pit which sponsors biker night every Tuesday.

At the Sylvan Beach Amusement park they have a Buzz Bomb, a Tilt-A-Whirl, a Merry-Go-Round and a roller coaster. That sure brings back memories. My first job when I was 14 years old was at the now defunct Suburban Park in Manlius, NY. That was a neat job. I worked from 11AM to 1AM, six days a week and racked up lots of hours at $0.85 each in wages. On pay days, my pay envelope would jingle.

I operated all four of those rides that Sylvan Beach has, plus others. Each of them has a memory associated with it. The Buzz Bomb is a ride with two bomb shaped cars at each end of a long arm. The long arm spins and the bombs spin in an orthogonal axis. The secret of the Buzz Bomb that I remember from Suburban Park was that it was unsafe. Every year or two the long arm would break and the two bombs would swing down and crash into each other. Nobody got seriously injured that I remember.

The Tilt-A-Whirl is also a ride with cars that swing in non-orthogonal axes and also go up and down on a track. The Tilt-A-Whirl's secret was that it caused all the change to fall out of the pockets of the customers. The change fell out of the cars and through the tracks to the ground underneath. Once a year, some favored young person would be allowed to crawl into the grease under the Tilt-A-Whirl and prospect for silver. Suburban Park's Tilt-A-Whirl had been there for more than 80 years, and the grease under the ride was at least one foot thick. The young person would emerge a few hours later completely covered in grease but with a big bucket of coins that he would split with the owner. When Suburban Park closed permanently and they tore down the Tilt-A-Whirl, I heard that the owner retrieved a small fortune in remnant coins from the grease under the ride.

In the mornings, before the park open, my job was to walk the roller coaster and to replace any beams that appeared to be rotted out. That was a never ending job because no matter how many we replaced, there were always infinitely more rotted beams waiting for their turn. The roller coaster car, like the Tilt-A-Whirl, was designed to collect coins from the rider's pockets. However, the system in the roller coaster was much more sophisticated. There was a secret chamber under each seat, about two feet by one foot by four foot in dimensions. It was nailed shut. Each fall, when we closed for the season we would pry open the chamber and extract money. Each chamber was chock full each season.

The Merry-Go-Round was kind of tame. Nothing much happened there unless you count the guys who copped feels from the girls as they helped them up on the horses. Of course I never did that. Not ever.

I also learned a bit of carney language at the park. Carney means carnival people. We used the code phase “Hey Rube!” shouted loudly to mean that a park employee was in trouble and in need of immediate help from his fellow workers. Usually it was a fight or a threatened fight that was the emergency. Fights weren't fair because the park workers would gang up on outsiders. Still today, when I'm in trouble I want to call out Hey Rube! Although nobody today is likely to understand the meaning.

When I reached the ripe old age of 17 I was a seasoned senior park worker and I was dating Libby. Libby liked my job because she could hear the distinctive noise of my ride, The Bug, from her house in Fayetteville more than 10 miles away. When she heard that noise at night, she knew that I was on the job.