The Sherrif

http://www.salemmuseum.org/hist_lakeside.html

The Sherriff

“Howdy partner, come on over and try the Dodge City Shootin’ Gallery. You can shoot at the ducks, frogs, flowers, trees and bad guys; all for only 25 cents. So come on over and give it a try. The Dodge City Shooting Gallery.”

Bev Roberts passed away over the weekend. He was the voice of the Dodge City Shooting Gallery at Lakeside Amusement Park in Salem, Virginia and the park’s owner, too. I can’t say that I really knew Bev, but I did know that voice, shared a dream, and knew enough to fear him.

I was a lowly games operator back in the late seventies. I had taken my job there to escape the nightmare of working odd hours at a Wendy’s fast food joint located 45 minutes from my house. They’d only call me in when there was a rush, and I’d drive the 45 minutes one way to collect my $2.35 and hour. Considering gas cost $0.77 a gallon and I drove a car that got 12 miles per gallon, I pretty much had to work three hours to break even. They usually only allowed me to work two. Plus, they would take out money each week from my pitiful check for meals and uniform cleaning even though I never ate anything there and I did my own laundry. Hence working at the local amusement park for $1.80 an hour wasn’t such a bad job.

The one drawback of the carney job was the long stretches of complete boredom, especially if I worked job without a microphone to bark at guests. While Saturdays were usually hopping at the park with thousands of visitors streaming by all day, weekdays were a completely different story. Some weekdays we’d be lucky to have 700 people there. It was on those most slow days that if I was assigned to the front games, the dime pitch or the weight game that I’d have to listen to old Bev’s Sheriff voice encourage players to come on over-day after day, minute after lonely minute. His voice permeated my being, my conscious and unconscious self.

Sometimes, we’d have a Bev alert issued. Apparently, the old man was a stickler for detail. He supposedly liked his game row spiffy and full of flash. That meant that once the warning went out from the games boss, we were expected to fill the walls surrounding our games with plush animals and slum prizes. Cigarettes had to be out of sight (although chewing tobacco was acceptable), counters shined with silicone spray, and loitering girls shooed away. We were expected to be actively barking when Bev made his visit. Interestingly, Bev never seemed to give the games a second glance as he walked by to enter his office. Yet the drill instilled fear.

The only person I ever saw Bev talk to other than my games boss and the general manager was a ride mechanic he nicknamed, “Bull Fighter.” I knew Bull Fighter as Johnny Larocco. Johnny’s parents were my little sister’s godparents, so our parents were pretty close friends. Sometimes as kids, we’d go over to the Larocco’s house and play with their kids. They seemed to have kids that matched up with our kids (Leslie-->Becky, Jimmy-John-->Jody/Becky, Joey-->Jody, Chip-->Greg, Bull Fighter-->me). Johnny and I were about the same age, but other than these occasional visits, Johnny and I never really became good friends. In fact, I kind of lost track of him as we grew up. When I first encountered Johnny at Lakeside, he came across as a really macho short guy. Bull Fighter had a gift for loading on the bull really thick. On the spot, he could invent heroic stories where he always played the central role. I always wondered if he was that way because he never grew past 5’2”. All I know was that he was one tough son-of-a-gun, perhaps that’s why Bev nicknamed him Bull Fighter. I remember Johnny used to say that he never grew taller because he used to drink coffee all the time when he was a little boy. He told that tale with such authority that I believed every word. Bev loved Bull Fighter and treated him like his own son.

Bev was portrayed in the newspaper article about his passing as being one of Salem, Virginia’s greatest youth league coaches. I believe that’s how he met Bull Fighter. The paper went on and on about how dedicated Bev was to that organization. The paper also mentioned that he owned our wonderful amusement park and opened its doors to the entire community. I’ve always heard that you should never speak ill of the dead, and I plan to adhere to that sacred tenant; however, I do wish to seriously point out something about Bev and his family that just seemed plain wrong to me. You see, Lakeside was very white when Bev bought the park and it remained very white as long as he could keep it that way.

When Bev bought the park in 1965, Lakeside was famous for its old rollercoaster and its huge open air sand beach pool with an incredibly high diving board. He immediately went about investing a million dollars to build the state of the art Shooting Star wooden roller coaster, a true masterpiece in engineering and thrill. But civil unrest all across the country was spilling even into Southwest Virginia and Bev was soon faced with the prospect of having to open his pool to dark people. This was intolerable to him. So when that time came, rather than allow one single dark-skinned person to “pollute” his pool, he closed it down and paved over it. Also at that time, he was faced with having to admit Black people into the park to ride his rides and drink from his lion’s mouth fountain. Grudgingly he accepted this reform, but I personally think that every time he walked in to the park and saw a black person, he cringed. I also believe that he was convinced that the black people were the main reason the park was going down hill in the 70’s. Personally, as an insider there, I believe the park began to lose ground because he simply stopped investing in it. I don’t know why, but I have my suspicions. So in 1981, Bev sold the park to Frank Selby, a local businessman who bled even more money from the old lady.

In my last years at Lakeside, I had risen up the ladder to be in charge of the games department. Quite often, I’d find myself fascinated as I rummaged around the old junky 1920’s ballroom above the penny arcade. This huge room, where we stored all of our games stock on an expansive system of rickety shelving anchored into the floor with screws and nails, had long ago hosted its last dance, but its skeleton remained; a beautiful although scarred dance floor, lights-many broken-strung on a chain all across the expansive room, and crusty, filthy windows effectively sealing in the past. That’s the room where Bev stored all of the park’s treasures, unbeknownst to most people. I don’t even think the new owners knew those treasures were all there either. In one corner were the old Wildcat roller coaster cars. Pigeons loved them. On the far side of the room sat the old hobby horses, hand carved and painted, gathering pigeon droppings and dust; conservatively valued at $250,000 back then. But my favorite treasure in that room was a fading map poster that was stuck on a wall. It represented what I believe was Bev’s dream.

Apparently, before King’s Dominion and Busch Gardens came to Virginia, Bev had a dream of creating his own super theme park near Martinsville, Virginia. That framed map poster was the only known lay-out of that imaginary park. Bev had gotten a hold of the land. I’m not sure if he bought, leased, or made some other arrangements for it, but he had the land. He had someone draw up his vision. It was going to be filled with a wild animal park and lots of water features on many, many acres. Looking at the site plan, I could only guess that its size would rival the early Disney World. I don’t know what caused Bev to abandon his dream. I suspect it was some sort of money issue, but I never heard for sure. Imagine what Martinsville would be like today if he had succeeded in building his dream.

I would visit that ballroom often and just stare at that faded poster. In a sense, Bev’s dream became my dream. It might be the only connection we actually shared, although he never knew it. “Come on over and give it a try. Right now.”