Skip to main content

Aero Memories

March 2023
1min read

What a flood of almost forgotten memories ‘The Aero View” (December 1984) brought back on the VCR of my mind! The overhead photography of the Atlantic City shoreline shows Heinz Pier, scene of my first job out of high school. I was probably in the attic projection booth showing Seeds of Service , the company film, when the picture was taken.

Then, next from the top (and unmentioned), Garden Pier Theater, which one June afternoon prompted a buddy and myself to play hooky and attend our first burlesque show. That was before sex education in the schools.

Next came Steel Pier with its “fifty attractions for the price of one”—and if you arrived before 11:00 A.M. they threw in a free steamboat ride down the coast for the fifty-cent admission.

Finally, Young’s Million Dollar Pier, with its gigantic ballroom located just off the Boardwalk and the thousands of electric light bulbs in the ceiling adding to its pre-air-conditioning glory. So what if your prized white suit was dripping with perspiration? Dancing to the music of Paul Whiteman and his orchestra and the incredible banjo wizardry of Al Pingatore made me almost oblivious to the rivulets of sweat running down my spine.

Of even more interest is the aerial view of Willow Grove Park, which I visited as a child, about 1930. Apparently there were four, not three, coasters. One was hidden in the grove of trees running left-center from the big white racing coaster that was called, in illuminated letters, “A Chase through the Clouds.” We all decided that the simple little out-and-back coaster was the best of the lot. It probably never got more than forty or fifty feet off the ground, but every dip went to ground level, creating that tingling sensation in the pit of the stomach, while the branches and tree trunks rushing past created the illusion of great speed.

In “The Canals of Venice” one rode majestically in gondolas through a waterway that twisted and turned and doubled back upon itself, at gradually lower elevations. We glided silently, except for the gurgle of water against the gondola, through the splendors of Venice as interpreted on canvas hangings and backdrops. A bewitching journey!

I remember Mother done in by the Swiss Alps mountain ride. She was deathly afraid of roller coasters in any form, and in all innocence we persuaded her to join us on this “gentle scenic ride.” We loved the animated scenes inside the mountain. There were miners at work, shuttling ore cars, and waterfalls. Mother was as ecstatic as we were until we suddenly burst out of the top of the mountain into daylight and into the first drop of a horrendous roller coaster. At the end of the ride Dad and I had to support a mother whose legs had turned to jelly.

Today everything is gone, and even the beautiful merry-go-round has been broken up and scattered to the four winds. Only a few fiberglass replicas of the horses, going nowhere, now decorate the huge shopping mall that, alas, has replaced this fairyland of our childhood.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April/May 1985"

Authored by: Andrew Kull

It was a hundred years ago, and the game has changed a good deal since then. But there are plenty of people who still hold that cranky old Hoss Radbourn was the finest that ever lived.

Authored by: Jonathan Yardley

Walden is here, of course; but so too is Fanny Farmer’s first cookbook

Authored by: Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr.

While a whole generation of artists sought inspiration in the wilderness, George Inness was painting the fields and farms of a man-made countryside

Authored by: David Nasaw

One of the country’ more bizzarre labor disputes pitted a crowed of outraged newsboys against two powerful opponents—Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolf Hearst

Authored by: Joseph E. Persico

Forty years ago, a tangle of chaotic events led to the death of Hitler, the surrender of the Nazis, and the end of World War II in Europe

Authored by: Roland Marchand

The twenties and thirties saw a host of new ways to separate customers from their money. The methods have not been forgotten.

Authored by: William D. Middleton

Magnificently impractical and obsolete almost as soon as they were built, the cable lines briefly dominated urban transportation throughout the country

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.