Image created by ChatGPT
The Jersey shore where I grew up is just 19 miles south of New York City by water, although over 50 miles by land.
In the days before air conditioning, many city dwellers tried to escape the summer heat by visiting the area and the beaches with cool sea breezes. When steamboats were developed in the 1830s, one could simply take a boat ride down to the shore. Later on, railroads came into being, opening up even more distant areas. Local communities began to cater to tourists as a source of income more lucrative than clam digging, fishing or farming.
“Boardwalks” sprang up every 10 or 15 miles along the shore. These were wooden promenades roughly 50 feet wide running along the shore with the beach on one side and shops on the other. They offered everything from hot dogs, cotton candy and “saltwater” taffy to china and silverware. Tourists could rent beach chairs, umbrellas, floats and even bathing suits.
Interspersed with the merchants were “games of chance” such as bingo and keno, wheel of fortune and “games of skill” like shooting galleries, ring toss, baseball pitching at stacked up bottles, and a “test of strength” where you could ring a bell by hitting a lever with a sledgehammer and a weight would go up along a scale and hopefully ring a bell at the top to win a cigar. Most of these games were “fixed” so your chance of winning anything of value was slim to non-existent. For example: on the Test of Strength the weight which rises when you hit the lever rides on a wire which is controlled by the operator, he can tighten or loosen the wire with hidden control under his foot. The tighter the wire, the higher the weight will rise. If the wire is loose, the weight won’t go nearly as high before it falls back. A lot of times when a pretty girl came along with her boyfriend, the operator would loosen the wire for the boy and tighten it for the girl so she could ring the bell. (My father ran away with a carnival when he was a teenager and learned all these tricks … he came back home after a few weeks).
The larger boardwalks also had rides such as a Ferris Wheel, Roller Coaster, Bumper Cars and my favorite, the Merry Go Round, where you had a chance to catch the “Brass Ring.”
Merry-go-Rounds, or “Carousels” have been going around seemingly forever, but mechanized ones date back to the early 1800s. They were powered by steam with the iconic music provided by a steam calliope. Machinery linked to drive shafts and gears drove a slowly rotating platform with animals that you could ride moving up and down as the platform went around, these included horses and many other beasts such as dragons, dolphins, lions, tigers and bears! For the less adventurous riders, there were carriages also drawn by beasts.
Beside the revolving platform was a machine with a slot, dispensing rings which you could grab as your mount went by. Most of these rings were iron but every once in a while, one would be shiny brass. Anyone who was lucky enough to catch the brass ring got a free ride.
When I was in college, this was a great place to take a date. Being fairly tall with long arms and fast enough, I could usually grab two or three rings at a time. I’d count the rings coming down the slot and note the number of rings before the next brass one. Calculating the number of people ahead of me grabbing them, I would grab more or fewer, so the brass ring got down to the end of the slot just in time for me to grab it as I went by. I’d then give it to my girlfriend for good luck. Admittedly, this wasn’t a big thing, but it was something that very few other guys did.
Afterward, we’d walk over to the main drag, where we would sit at a table at a sidewalk café, enjoy an order of hot crispy fries and a pitcher of beer and watch the world go by. This is where the tricked-out cars and motorcycles cruised past, showing off their loud mufflers. Interspersed among them would be an occasional nerd in the family station wagon, windows rolled down, AM radio blasting, trying to look cool and hoping to get lucky.
Things were a lot simpler back then, and although boardwalks still exist, so many people depend on their smart phones for entertainment, I’m afraid there will come a time when Merry-Go-Rounds are a thing of the past and catching the brass ring is just a fond memory.
Image: created by ChatGPT
