My all-time favorite amusement park ride, ever, was the “The Flying Boxcars”. I think the official name at Gwynn Oak Park was “The Flying Scooters”, but they were always known to the local Woodlawnites as “The Flying Boxcars”. God only knows why. I can only conjecture that in the 1950’s pretty much the whole culture was influenced by the World War II generation, so maybe the local Woodlawn moniker had something to do with the famous Fairchild C-119 transport aircraft of the same name. But whatever the origin of the name, it was the scariest, craziest, most dangerous, neck-snapping ride I’ve ever been on, then or now. This was a vehicle you could actually fly, like an airplane. And I don’t mean they steered like the bumper-cars, or those whip-dick aircraft training simulators with complex computer graphics and sophisticated servo-robotics that give an amazingly realistic, but simulated and perfectly safe flight experience. I mean you could literally, physically, whip these babies around through the air like a real airplane, from 3 feet off the ground when standing still, to 40 feet in the air when moving at full speed. Hell, in many ways, these things were real aircraft, capable of being put into a steep climb or a gut-wrenching dive, and if snapped around hard enough, could break loose from its cables and be flung over the horizon like a sling-stone. Or lashed into the pavement like a brick on the end of a bullwhip.
In fact, now I come to think on it, the things handled so much like real airplanes that they may have originated as some kind of primitive training device for student pilots, just like the merry-go-round was originally developed in the Medieval period to train mounted knights how to impale each other with a lance while riding a charger at full gallop.
I haven’t seen this ride in any amusement park or carnival, anywhere, since the early 70’s. Oh, well…there are a few weak, mewling, kiddie-sized offshoots of the ride still operating in amusement parks around the country. But nothing possessing the speed, size, and power of the original ride exists today, that I know of. So a brief description of the ‘Flying Boxcar Experience’ would be in order:
First, we bought our tickets at a special ticket booth, exclusively for that ride, and for that ride only. The price was $1.25, as I recall, twice as much as any other ride in the Park, and, back in those days, a truly capital investment in Terror. Then, tickets clutched in trembling, sweating hands, we ran to the entry gate.
The ride operator collected our tickets, and we gathered around the fenced-off perimeter, jockeying our way as close to the head of the line as possible, getting more cranked up by the nanosecond. Out on the gravel pitch, the preceding ride coasted to a halt, and the passengers climbed out of their bouncing, swaying gondolas and staggered for the exits. Once the area was clear, the operator swung the gate open, and we sprinted across the crushed-gravel to make sure we beat the crowd to our chosen vehicle.
The shiny yellow, eight-foot-long by four-foot-wide elliptical gondolas hung three feet in the air, swinging slowly back and forth from twin steel cables, quietly awaiting their next load of knuckleheads. We skidded to a halt next to the metal car, yanked open the preposterously tiny doors on either side of the vehicle and climbed aboard, planting one foot on the swaying steel floor, then lifting ourselves onto the flat sheet-metal seat using a grab handle located under the dashboard. Finally, after a quick pre-flight inspection of the front rudder, flapping it back and forth to make sure it was in good working order, we pulled the doors shut and strapped ourselves into the seats with the cheap chain-in-a-rubber-hose seat belts. These were provided by the management to keep the passengers from tumbling out of the vehicle like bombs during hazardous aerobatic maneuvers. Or hurled like bloody, cartwheeling meat-puppets through the shaded picnic groves. Of course, what actually held you in the seat during hazardous maneuvers were centrifugal force and a white-knuckle death-grip on the seat.
Anyway, we’re finally secured into our steel gondola, bobbing slowly up and down, listening to the big metal support beams flexing and creaking; feeling much like the Apollo -11 astronauts must have felt when they sat waiting, strapped into the command module, listening to the steel gantry tower screech and groan in the wind; feeling the mighty Saturn rocket tremble under them as it was topped off with its final thousand pounds of liquid oxygen.
I looked up again to check the four, two-ton capacity steel cables our little metal car swings from. They looked serviceable enough; coated with sticky, smelly black axle grease, and no frays or worn spots that might snap under the strain of violent aerobatics and slam us right through the cinder-block wall of the neighboring “Laff in the Dark”. My last-minute visual check then followed the cables up at 45-degree angles from our gondola’s struts to their anchor points at the ends of two of the ten, thirty-foot long, white, elongated triangular steel spars radiating out from the central drive hub like the arms of some gigantic, inverted metal starfish. This inverted starfish assembly sat atop a right-side-up conical metal base, also painted white and of equal circumference and starfish configuration; forming a kind of squat, truncated hour-glass shape. All ten gondolas hung in a fifty-foot circle from identical two-spar rigs, and, with the controls in neutral, swung outward at 45 degrees when rotating at full speed.
The operator, meantime, after making a final circuit of the staging area to make sure all passengers were secured in their seats, hurried back to his concrete control bunker on the perimeter. Then, confirming that all systems were ‘go’, he pushed the throttle up to full power. The big, war-surplus 500 hp electric motor spooled up, the clutch engaged the starfish-wheel assembly, the gondolas jerked forward, and we were off. There were three distinct jolts as the transmission shifted through the gears to accelerate us up to full speed. After a half a minute, we were hurtling counter-clockwise through the air at thirty miles an hour, ready to do some serious yanking and banking.
Now, what made the “Flying Boxcars” actually fly came into play. These were two frame-and-fabric airfoils, made in the form of a ‘D’, standing vertically on the front and rear of each gondola - exactly like the rudders on the old frame-and-fabric planes, bracketing the gondola like a parentheses. The rear airfoil was fixed in place to keep the vehicle stable in flight, like the rudder of a conventional airplane. The front airfoil was hinged through its center on top and bottom pivots, and, using a big handle on the bottom hanging directly over the cockpit, could be rotated back and forth 180 degrees, causing the vehicle to swoop thirty to forty feet up and down at the ends of its cables, and in certain extreme maneuvers, created enough lift to make it fly. This flight only lasted a few seconds at a time, because the gondola was tethered by its cables to the big, rotating starfish structure, and could only swing with it around in a circle. But within that circle, the thing could dive, climb and bank like a stunt plane.
There were many creative and dangerous stunts that were regularly executed by skilled aficionados of the ride, but by far the most dangerous stunt, favored by all the local nut-jobs and bad boys, was a maneuver known as the ‘bounce’. This was executed by first whipping the rudder to the right, throwing the vehicle into a precipitous, nearly vertical climb, then, just as it shot to its maximum height, (about forty feet in the air), slam the rudder to the left, causing the gondola to stall in mid-air and then snap into a stomach wrenching dive. Then, screaming at breakneck speed towards the deck, as the gondola reached the bottom of its plunge, the rudder was whipped to the right again, flat against the wind. This brought the vehicle to a sudden halt for a split second, causing it to bounce about five feet into the air in a ballistic free-float, cables going slack in mid-air, passengers flapping around like rag-dolls and hanging on for dear life. Then centrifugal force yanked the cables straight again, causing them to slap together with a crack like a rifle shot. It was a scary thing to witness, even from the ground, and it was even scarier to be strapped into that flimsy metal box when it was being put through this spectacular and violent maneuver.
But we weren’t done yet. To make the stunt even more insane and dangerous, we would repeat this diving-climbing maneuver over and over again, climbing to ever greater heights, gathering momentum with each successive pendulum swing until the gondola was hurled as close as possible to the nearby trees, then lean out and snatch a handful of the overhanging oak leaves as we screamed by forty feet in the air. Finally, after landing safely back on our primitive airfield, we dismounted from our prancing metal steeds and swaggered over to the exit gate like victorious fighter aces, flourishing our boldly won oak-leaf clusters, (with acorns), to envious buddies and admiring girls. Sadly, the “Flying Boxcars” were swept away with the rest of the Park in the floods of hurricane Agnes in 1972, never to return. Since then, in all my wanderings across this country, and around the world, I’ve never seen their like again. Too bad. They were a great ride, unlike anything you can find today. Maybe in the next life, eh?
Barry Price was born in Baltimore, Maryland, into a long line of story-tellers. Barry retired from professional show-business in 2001 to pursue a career in writing. The Journal of the Median Man – Descent is his first novel.