Inferno Park (37 page)

“How long were you with the carnival?” Victoria asked.

“A few years. I learned a lot. In the winter, we’d go down to Florida, and I’d look for side work. This fellow came to find me, said he’d heard my haunted house was popular. It was, too. I made decent scratch most nights. The key was to give them one really good scare inside so everyone passing by could hear them scream. Later in life, I’d play records and tapes of the girls screaming so I didn’t have to wait for a real one, but back then it was real or it was nothing.” He grew silent, staring at the pictures.

“Who came to find you?” Carter asked.

“Huh?” Schopfer looked up and blinked, as though he’d been lost in thought. “Oh, yes. It must have been back in ‘52 or ‘53. This man had bought up beachfront land along both sides of the Gulf Coast Highway, and he’d built some tourists cabins and a motel—just a little wooden thing with about a dozen rooms. He said he leased a few amusement rides during the summer, and was looking for some kind of attraction to make people slow down, maybe stop at his little resort.”

“Should I turn the page?” Victoria asked.

“Yes, next page. What’s that?” He leaned forward and pointed to a one-story motel with the words CONCH CITY RESORT painted on the side. A two-tone Plymouth with a rounded, curvy 1940s frame sat in the sand-dusted parking lot in front of it.

“Conch City?” Carter asked.

“It was just the name of the motel. There wasn’t a Conch City, as far as a real town goes, until 1961. He made up the name, then made the city later.” Schopfer laughed a little, then held a gnarled hand over his mouth while he coughed. “In those days, old Highway 98, the original Gulf Coast Highway, ran right along the beach. When Conch City sprang up into the panhandle’s biggest tourist trap, traffic got so thick they rerouted 98 north, leaving Beachview Drive to run wild down there along the Gulf. You can see it better here.”

He gestured to another, wider view of the motel and a couple of simple, single-story tourist cabins. The blacktop of the highway ran through the foreground while the ocean lapped against the sand in the background.

“I didn’t know all that,” Carter said. “I’ve lived in Conch City all my life. Who built the resort? Was it one of the Hanovers?”

“Teddy Hanover.” Schopfer tapped a picture of a balding, chubby man in his thirties wearing a tie and starched shirt, his pants rolled up to his calves. He stood in the surf, talking and making giant hand movements, while a twenty-year-old Artie Schopfer, already wearing thick glasses, stood beside him listening, his unkempt hair and tie blowing in the wind. Carter guessed that was from an age when everybody wore ties all the time, like in old movies where guys wore fedoras and suits everywhere, even if they were on Mars or the moon.

“That’s the father of the guy we met?” Victoria whispered. Carter nodded.

“He was an idea man, ahead of his time,” Schopfer said. “He bought all that empty land dirt-cheap. He knew he could catch tourists off the highway if he could just make them turn their heads—a born pitchman, really.”

Schopfer gestured, and Victoria turned the page. A smile spread wide across Schopfer’s face.

The faded black-and-white picture showed a black house with large white question marks painted on the front door and all the exterior walls. The roof was high and steep to serve as a billboard, with the words MYSTERY HOUSE painted in ghostly white letters.

“That looks pretty cool,” Carter said.

“Exactly the idea, young man,” Schopfer said. “Hanover imagined carloads of families pulling over to investigate the ‘mystery.’ He also had more practical projects underway—a restaurant and a gas station. He wanted to give people every reason in the world to stop. Once you’ve got the cows inside the barn, then you can start to milk ‘em. Hanover saw that highway as a river of money just waiting to be fished.”

“Did it work?” Victoria asked.

“I believe so. By the next year...where’s the placemat? Next page?”

Victoria turned to a page filled with a folded yellow slice of paper, brown and curled at the edges, decorated with little drawings.

“You can take that out, but be gentle,” he said.

She lifted the plastic sheet that held the paper in place, then gingerly unfolded the paper place mat. Several panels tracked the adventures of a cartoon family, with two smiley kids and a happy mom and dad. The family built a sand castle, the parents ate dinner together, the kids rode in a biplane, the parents slept in a bed. Each panel was captioned with an attractive feature of the resort: BEAUTIFUL BEACHES! RESTAURANT! RIDES AND GAMES! SOFT CLEAN BEDS!

The final panel showed a cartoon of the black house with white question marks, with the simple caption MYSTERY HOUSE.

Underneath the cartoons, in huge letters, it read: CONCH CITY BEACH RESORT – CHEAP RATES! followed by a phone number and address.

“Hanover paid restaurants up and down the highway to use these mats,” Schopfer told her. “So many people flooded the place, he had to double the size of the motel. Next page, I think, there’s some good pictures of it.”

Victoria carefully replaced the old piece of paper. The next page held a brochure for Conch City Resort from 1954. The photographs showed a large motel, kids on small amusement rides, girls swimming at the beach, and the Mystery House again.

“I think he would imagine the advertising he wanted, then built a place to match the advertising,” Schopfer said.

“What was in the Mystery House?” Carter asked.

“A scattering of things. Optical illusions, like a room built on a special slant so everything seemed tilted, water flowed uphill...the room where you looked like a giant if you stood on one side, and tiny if you stood on the other...we had a wax-museum room, not much there...a ‘ghost room’ with some old furniture, with little bottles and reeds in the eaves above it that would sometimes make sounds in the wind. A voodoo-juju kind of room. Not a lot of logic to it, but I think the tourists got their nickel’s worth.”

“So that’s when you moved to Conch City,” Victoria said.

“Oh, no. I was back on the road in the spring, but I had a new trick under my hat. I made these...” He gestured at the photo album.

Victoria turned the page to a flier topped with the words “IS YOUR TOURIST ATTRACTION
HAUNTED
ENOUGH?” followed by pictures of Schopfer’s carnival haunted house and the Mystery House. It had Schopfer’s name and a Tennessee post-office box address in one corner.

“Wherever we traveled, I’d watch for these little amusement parks and roadside tourist traps,” Schopfer said. “I’d find the owner and try to convince him he needed a scary walk-through, or that the one he had could be cheaply improved. I built little things at forgotten places—Chippewa Lake in Ohio, Wonder City in Indiana.” The scrapbook showed tourists lining up at similar small haunted-house attractions with names like SKELETON HOUSE and DEATH’S DOOR, which had a wide front door with a detailed painting of the Grim Reaper.

“Now, the owner of Dervish Brothers—there never were any
real
Dervish brothers, you understand—was a man named E.B. Jennings, a real penny-snagger who had a sour look for everyone. He told me to stop building these attractions for other people, said it was a conflict of interest. At the time I had an offer to build and run a haunted railway ride in Kansas City, so I left the carnival and did that for a year...” The next page of pictures showed a miniature train full of frightened teenage riders chugging through a graveyard toward a mine tunnel. “Am I boring you kids yet?”

“Not at all,” Victoria said. Her eyes had been drinking in the old pictures with obvious fascination.

“I didn’t care to stay in one place very long,” Schopfer said. “I wanted to keep tinkering and expanding, and the owners always wanted to keep costs down. I moved wherever there was work. No, go on to the next page...”

Victoria turned to a poster advertising a four-story cartoonish-medieval castle splashed with the words CASTLE TERROR across the front.

“There,” he said. “That was the first really big one, though not as big on the inside as it looks from the boardwalk. Castle Terror, Atlantic City. 1961, 1962. Keep turning...you’ll see a few things there, Christmas Town outside of Brainerd, Minnesota...I built an indoor ride with a little sleigh on tracks that took you through Santa’s toy workshop, the reindeer stables, some snowmen and ice-skating penguins. We made the world’s largest snowglobe there, too. Well, we never checked whether that was true, but we sure
told
everyone it was the largest.” One photograph showed him standing inside a giant snowglobe, adjusting the cozy cottage scene surrounded by glowing Christmas trees. “Christmas Town lasted until the early eighties before they tore it down to make a shopping mall. I was proud of that little ride, though, considering the budget.”

“I had no idea you’d made so many things,” Victoria said.

“Oh, yes. I was the Johnny Appleseed of loud, gaudy tourist traps.” He showed them more pages of rides and walk-through amusements—a wrecked pirate ship full of rope ladders, nets, and slides; an Aztec temple boat ride; more haunted houses with names like LOST MANSION and MURDER MOTEL. “Now here comes the big one,” he said.

Victoria turned the page. The first picture showed a structure of wooden pillars and cross-beams under construction, already several stories high. A sign in front read
FUTURE SITE OF
CONCH CITY COASTER!

“Between jobs, I used to get in the car and just drive back along my own trail,” Schopfer said. “I liked seeing people lined up at the attractions I’d built. It must have been about ‘66 or ‘67 when I went back to Conch City. Now the place had blown up.” He gestured to a picture of Beachview Drive cluttered with neon-lit motels.

“That’s starting to look like the town I know,” Carter said.

“By the late sixties, Teddy Hanover had leased out several parcels of his land along the highway. They built motels on the beach side. On the other side, you had a candy store, an ice cream parlor, a few restaurants, a little nightclub called the Palm Grove. He’d torn down the Mystery House. He had an idea to put up a roller coaster in its place, to go with the other amusement rides he leased each summer. That was the first time I went back to a town and found my creation demolished without a trace, but it wouldn’t be the last.

“Anyway, Hanover and I had some drinks at the Palm Grove and he told me all about it—we were both a good bit older by then, and I had years of experience under my belt. I pitched him on the idea of building a little attraction around the roller coaster entrance, just a few snack stands and games to grab more dollars from anyone who stopped to ride the coaster. He wanted a stage, too, for music, magicians, ventriloquists, or anyone else who didn’t charge much to perform.

“The cowboy shows were popular then—
Gunsmoke
and
Petticoat Junction
and the rest—so we decided to build an Old West town at the base of the roller coaster. By the time the summer of 1968 rolled around, we had the roller coaster, the Triple-Z Saloon, the Cowpoke Theater, and games like Shoot-Em-Up Puppets. We had the cluster of rented attractions set up, too. Hanover put up billboards all along Gulf Coast Highway.

“When you’re in this business, you dream of a patron like Teddy Hanover. Stars in his eyes, more interested in creating something new and ground-breaking than in making quick cash. That’s all most of ‘em ever cared about, the quick cash, but not him. Teddy and I just sparked off each other. We’d feed each other’s ideas and draw out elaborate plans on bar napkins. Those were good times.” Schopfer smiled a little, staring off into space. “Good days.”

He didn’t speak for a while, as if lost in reverie. Carter and Victoria shared a tense look—now they were getting to the heart of things.

“So that’s how Starland began,” Carter said, hoping to get him talking again.

“Oh, yes. We didn’t call it ‘Starland’ yet. That first summer raked in so much money, he couldn’t wait to expand. By the fall, we’d drawn up all kinds of crazy plans. He wanted bigger, permanent rides, a full-scale amusement park. He sold off land farther down the highway to raise capital, and he leased out his rickety old ‘Conch City Resort’ building to a company that demolished it right away and built a new two-story motel, which they painted the brightest shade of pink you ever saw.”

“The Fancy Flamingo Lodge?” Victoria asked.

“That’s the one. You know your history. By the next summer—the summer of ‘69, wasn’t it?—we opened with games, food, music, and beer in Fool’s Gold, plus a permanent Ferris wheel and the prettiest merry-go-round we could find. That wasn’t enough for Teddy Hanover. He leased out some kiddie attractions, like a big slide and pony rides.” The pictures showed the park crammed full of families, with long lines waiting everywhere.

“The traffic started to get bad that year, with people driving in from all over to see the new amusement park. There was no front-gate admission then, you paid for rides and games as you went, so it was just packed with people day and night. Hanover leased off more properties at higher prices. More motels went up along the beach side of the highway, and on the land side you had an ‘authentic’ Indian village, a snake exhibit, things like that cropping up.

“He raked in all kinds of cash and put it right back into the amusement park. By 1970, we had a real circus-style midway with penny arcades and carnival games. On the west side, you had Fools’ Gold, the roller coaster, the merry-go-round, the kiddie rides. East of the midway, you had a swinging ship where Pirate Island was going to be. I built the first, one-story version of Dark Mansion. You had the Spinning Rotor ride, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Scrambler. Permanent kiddie rides, too, like When Pigs Fly.”

Victoria kept turning pages whenever he gave her a small nod, showing photographs of the evolving and expanding amusement park.

One of them showed Theodore Hanover, more rotund than ever, on a bandstand located where the wishing well would later be, at the dead center of the park, surrounded by a dense crowd of tourists, backed by a three-piece band. He spoke into a microphone while dabbing at his bulbous chin with a handkerchief and making a sweeping gesture with his other hand.