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.

Knott's Berry Farm

If you’ve been to Disneyland, and who hasn’t, you have probably also been to Knott’s Berry Farm. When people visit southern California, these are on the top of their list of places to go.

The first time I went to Knott’s, back in the 1940s, it was called Knott’s Berry Farm and Ghost Town. Can you believe it was all absolutely FREE, even parking. In fact, it was all free in the early 50s as well. It was such a fun place to go. As far as I’m concerned, they destroyed it when they started changing it into another Six Flags kind of place. Now it costs as much to go there as it does to go to Disneyland. Of course, I was just a kid in the 40s and my cousin who was a year older than I convinced me that there was a rocking chair on a porch there that rocked by itself. He was always trying to convince me of some wild story. He was the one that told me there wasn’t a Santa Claus. Of course I didn’t believe him and it made me very angry. (That's him, that's Jerry, in the covered wagon behind me in the picture.) I'm the one in the middle.

Yes, I loved that place in the “old days”, but now the only thing there I care about seeing is Virginia’s Gift Shop, and maybe eating at the chicken restaurant.
Here is a picture made in their “Pitcher Gallery” in about 1945 or 46. The girl in back on the left is now Ginger’s mother-in-law. Ginger, of course, is the Ginger of “Enchanting Cottage”. The younger girls on each side of me are cousins.

The other picture made there, the one on the horse, is me in the front, and my best friend Irene behind me. This one was made in about 1949.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about “Sad Eye Joe”, one of the favorite attractions in Ghost Town.