Sad Eye Joe

Before I write anything else, I want to acknowledge the terrible storms that hit our country last night. I hope none of my blogging buddies was affected in any way. But whether they were or not, it was a horrible thing and I am praying for them.
Also, I wish to offer my condolences to all those whose candidates did not win last night. I am included in that group. Oh, my candidate won some, but not enough.

OK. It’s back to the Berry Farm as it was in the old days. One of the most popular things there was ol’ Sad Eye Joe. Here’s his picture that I found in my old scrapbook. He wasn’t real, obviously, but when you went by the jail where he was and looked in, he would talk to you. He always knew something personal about you – where you were from, who you were visiting, and he would make other remarks that would make you wonder, “How in the world did he know that?” It took a while to figure out that someone in your party had gone ahead of the group (someone in the know) and paid at a front office to give him a list of questions. It was fun to see the puzzled look on their faces whenever relatives or friends would come to town that had never been there before. Boy, it didn’t take much to amuse us in those days.

My favorite thing there was the little chapel. You would go in, sit down, and the lights would go out. Then these doors would open revealing a life size picture of Jesus. It started out with his eyes closed, and with a change of lighting, his eyes opened during a description of him. This was pre-Disneyland and all the animation that was later invented. Here is a little hand-held version that I have kept all these years and recently scanned into the computer.
And then there was Disneyland. The first time I went there was in 1955, the year it opened. I’ll have to talk about that sometime in the future. I love to reminisce about Disneyland.