A tale of two parks: One was a ‘poor boy's Disneyland,' the other had a Cobra Woman who was really a man

Los Angeles Times

8 hours ago

Here's a little story for summertime, a tale of two seaside amusement parks of days of olde:
One eventually got itself a reputation as a rackety, unsavory hangout where you didn't have to look hard to find gambling, dive bars, tattoo parlors (back when nice people didn't go near them), and 'soiled doves,' what the Victorians called prostitutes.
Notoriously, someone once found a corpse there — as a sideshow exhibit, not a murder victim. More about him presently.
The other park, not far up the coast, was as perky and clean-cut as a barbershop quartet, painted the colors of sand and sky, with shipshape and jaunty ocean-inspired adventures, and zippy, futuristic, razzle-dazzle rides.
Now, which one do you think lasted longer?
It was the first one, the older one — the Pike, in Long Beach. It opened in 1902, when the electric cars first brought sweaty, landlocked Angelenos to the beach breezes and the Pike's carnival delights, like the fabled Cyclone Racer roller coaster that swooped its riders fast and furious above the water.
It was finally done, and done in, in 1979, replaced by shops set among the Long Beach Convention Center and the Aquarium of the Pacific.
The other one, Pacific Ocean Park, straddled the sand of Santa Monica and Venice. It opened in 1958, three years after Disneyland, and didn't last even 10 years. Santa Monica has seen amusement parks come and go over more than 120 years, but POP is of fairly recent and fond memory.
That place should not to be confused with the much smaller Pacific Park that operates now on the Santa Monica pier, the heir to L.A.'s long beachfront amusement park heritage.
POP was a creature of Cold War America. Westinghouse Electric Corp. built one display, a replica of the hull of the atomic-powered Nautilus submarine, with sound effects like an actual submarine at sea. A 'spaceship' theater 'took' the audience to Mars, to see the Red Planet and its imagined Martian residents. A 'house of tomorrow' [sound familiar, Disneyland fans?] ran on 'electronic age' conveniences with an 'artistic representation of the atomic city of tomorrow,' as the old Pomona Progress-Bulletin newspaper wrote in September 1958. An 'ocean skyway' ride took visitors in clear gondolas out over the Pacific surf.
Zev Yaroslavsky, the L.A. native, longtime county supervisor, and city council member, still misses the place, even all these decades later. In elementary school, in junior high and high school, 'me and my buddies would take the bus out there, and we'd spend the day having fun. It was a great place to go with girls on whom we had a crush. It was the poor boy's Disneyland.'
You entered through the watery darkness of the aquarium, and when you came out the other side, Yaroslavsky remembers, you were 'greeted by the bright sunshine on the pier with the attractions and the Pacific Ocean in my line of sight,' like being wafted from the humdrum to 'the exciting fantasy land of a shoreline amusement park.'
'I felt wronged when it closed, and I have missed it ever since.'
In 1960, an FM station, KSRF – K-Surf – began broadcasting from POP, but it was POP's live dance shows that brought in big names and the crowds that followed them – Ritchie Valens, Sam Cooke, and the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson wrote a short foreword to the lavishly illustrated 2014 book 'Pacific Ocean Park.'
The 1950s and '60s gave us a glut of amusement parks, and as with any boom, there was a bust. POP became one of the busted. Competition from that place in Anaheim was unrelenting. So too is sea air, and its assault on wood and metal and human-crafted things in general, and the price for keeping all of that at bay was untenable. Rides broke down and went un-repaired.
City building projects messed up the roads into POP. By the autumn of 1967, POP was closed – ostensibly for repairs but in fact for good. The apocalyptic forces that work against amusement parks, neglect and fires, did their handiwork. As The Times wrote in February 1975, as the last of POP was being demolished, 'Sooner or later all dreams come to an end.'
Yet the Pike soldiered on — rather, sailored on. In 1919, Long Beach became the home port for the nation's Pacific fleet of battleships, and in time, more ships followed. The Navy was big business for Long Beach, and for the Pike, where thousands of Navy 'gobs' stationed here spent some of their shore leave and their earnings.
Like Las Vegas, the Pike, too, underwent an identity shift, if not a crisis. It too suffered from competition of more family-focused resorts. As parents took their kids holidaying at Disneyland or Knott's Berry Farm, the Pike was left more and more to grownups like boisterous sailors and footloose Angelenos and their tastes for pool rooms, bars, dance halls and sideshows.
In 1946, a sideshow fixture billed as 'Miss Elsie Marks, the Cobra Woman,' died after her seven-foot diamondback rattlesnake bit her. That was the first big headline. The second was that 'the Cobra Woman' was in fact a 6-foot-3-inch man surnamed Nadir, who had traveled in circus sideshows over the years as, serially, 'the dog-faced boy,' then 'the monkey man' and 'the bearded lady.'
The Pike's louche doings made for great newspaper copy. In 1914, the 'Duke of the Pike' — a debonair character who lived large, mostly on brash cheek and bad checks — finally got caught when his car broke down in Compton. He was asking the police chief to lend him $10 for repairs when a sergeant recognized him as a wanted man.
The next year, a businessman who said he had simply wanted to show a young girl the sights on the Pike was arrested for breaking a local law delicately phrased by The Times as being 'in a certain state of mind when approaching an apartment house' where the girl was living on his largesse.
In 1943, at the height of World War II, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ted Sten announced that gambling was going on on the Pike: 'I personally counted eight last night. There are wide-open crap games, and the only police down there are watching the merry-go-round.' In fact, the Pike was probably the most heavily policed part of Long Beach, but players will be players.
In the 1950s, the Pike rebranded itself Nu-Pike, in a makeover that tried to snag more families as customers. That didn't rescue the Pike, nor did another new name for the area: Queen Park, after the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary, permanently anchored on the Long Beach landscape.
Geography itself worked against the Pike, too. Beyond its actual borders, unsavory operations sprang up, but the whole stretch was identified as 'the Pike.' In 1965, as Long Beach began sprucing up the harbor, a dredging operation piled up a landfill at the edge of the Pike. In short order, the Pike was no longer at the beach. A man who ran a grill restaurant in the Pike's 'Fun Zone' told The Times in 1979 that 'they pushed the beach back so far they killed business.'
By 1967, a columnist at the Long Beach Independent had to defend his town to an anonymous letter writer demanding an expose of Long Beach's gay bars and brothels, including the Pike, 'that nightmare alley with its rock-bottom characters and perverts in plain view … ' The columnist's retort was valiant but rather weak sauce: There are only three gay bars in Long Beach — down from nine two years before. At the 'notorious hotel' occupied by prostitutes, there was only one arrest there in the last six months.
In 1979 the city had big plans that did not include the Pike. 'Nu-Pike May Be No Pike,' ran The Times' headline. Leases were not renewed. Attractions that hadn't already fallen down were knocked down.
(A small museum of Pike artifacts survived in the Lite-A-Line game arcade in Long Beach, operated by the Looff family, which had run the same attraction at the Pike for decades. But even that closed, in 2022.)
By 1979, too, one of the Pike's foremost attractions was already gone, first to the L.A. County coroner's office, and then to a graveyard in Oklahoma.
In 1976, a wax dummy painted Day-Glo red was being moved around in the Laff in the Dark attraction when an arm fell off. Underneath was not more wax, but a human bone. The dummy was a mummy — the desiccated corpse of Elmer McCurdy.
McCurdy was a B-list, turn-of-the-century outlaw, a ne'er-do-well train robber who was so lousy at his craft that he held up virtually empty trains instead of the gold-toting ones he thought he was targeting.
He once blew up a train's safe that was full of loot, but the 'bang' fused all of the coins to the safe's inside walls. He was shot down by a sheriff's posse in Oklahoma in 1911. After that, his unclaimed body began its wanderings: as a greeter for an Oklahoma funeral home, as a sideshow attraction for touring carnivals, and even in a titillating 1933 pre-Code film, 'Narcotic.' (It wasn't a speaking role.)
Once out of the carny racket, McCurdy became more famous in death than he had been in life. Times columnist Steve Harvey christened him the King Tut of the Tumbleweeds. McCurdy's post-posthumous credits: a BBC documentary, two biographies, a Celtic folk song, and a murder mystery weekend. He was buried in a historic cemetery in Guthrie, Okla. — under a two-foot layer of concrete, lest anyone be tempted to take him on tour again.