The Heart of the Story: The Roller Coaster Kid, Pt 3

     The time has come to tell you about that last ingredient of  The Roller Coaster Kid (Viking).  The element that binds it all together.


     Death.

     No, no one in the book dies in an amusement park. I live near a Major Theme Park, which has had it's share of Unfortunate Incidents. When my local friends ask me what my new picture book is about, I have learned not to answer "Death and roller coasters," because one of those Unfortunate Incidents did involve a death on one of the "super" coasters.

   The heart of The Roller Coaster Kid, is learning to face fear, whether it is of riding a roller coaster, or the death of a loved one.  Publisher's Weekly put it much better than I can.

"When the time is right, you'll face your fear," Zach's grandmother tells him as they ride the Ferris wheel, after he refuses to ride the Whipper roller coaster with Grandpa. (This) moving story of grief and intergenerational ties, then skips ahead a year; "Everything's different.  Grandma's gone. Forever." . . . Rodman gives the story just the right measure of emotion...while underlining the importance of mourning and communication. 

     There really is a Roller Coaster Kid.  He is my next-door-neighbor's eighty-five-year old father. Mr. Baldwin is a good storyteller, and I always enjoy talking to him when he visits his son. (Some of the
incidents in Jimmy's Stars came from his own WWII experiences.) We bonded when I discovered that he grew up ten miles from my mother, at about the same time.

     We were deep into swapping Pittsburgh memories when he said, "Say, have you ever heard of West View Park?"  (See Monday's post for West View Park.) The story that Grandpa tells in the opening pages of The Roller Coaster Kid is Mr. Baldwin's own story. The only difference is that his experience with West View Park's Dips occurred when he was a teenager; in the book, Zach's Grandpa is much younger.

    Death.  What about death?  I'm getting to that.

    It was around this time that death cut a swath through my parent's generation.  Mr. Baldwin's wife.  Both of my in-laws.  My mother. People were comforting at the funerals, rarely at a loss for words.  But in the days to follow, I noticed that people seemed ill at ease with those left behind.  I particularly noticed that no one wanted to talk about the person who died.

    As a high school librarian I attended far too many student funerals. Their classmates wanted to talk about the friend who was gone forever. Students would gather in the library to share memories, personal, poignant, even silly.  The more they talked, the better able they seemed to deal with their loss.

                                     (Pawpaw Rodman, me, Mom, Meemaw, Dad)

   I lost two grandparents (one from each side of the family) within six months, the year I was nine.  I was told over and over that talking about Maga and Pawpaw would make my parents, or my surviving grandmother sad. I was an adult before I felt comfortable talking to my parents about their parents. As a nine-year-old, I was lucky to have literally dozens of cousins, more or less my age, with whom I could share my memories, and they could do the same.  As the cousins talked, we not only eased our own pain, but learned new things about our grandparents from each other.

                                                     (Maga and me)

     I don't claim to be any kind of psychologist or grief counselor. Like everything else I write, I write from my own experience. Zach's desire to cheer up Grandpa came from my own third grade desire to cheer up my parents. Zach's story ends the way I wish my own had.

     Roller coasters.  Fear. Death. Communication.  Those are ingredients that simmered in that mental crock pot for several years before I realized there was A Story In There.

     No discussion of The Roller Coaster Kid should not end without giving illustrator Roger Roth's work a tremendous shout out.  When I envisioned the setting for this book, I saw West View Park, plopped down on the site of Myrtle Beach's Pavilion.  Roger Roth took the sea motif and ran with it in ways I could never imagine (which is why he is an illustrator and I am not!)  Not only did he capture the atmosphere of an old-timey amusement park (think of the original Coney Island parks), he made Zach and Grandpa mirror images...fifty years apart.  Each time I look at the book I see some detail I missed before. I wish I could visit Oceanside Park and ride the Whipper . . . if only it existed.

     Don't forget to enter our Book Giveaway for an autographed copy of The Roller Coaster Kid. (See Monday's post for entry rules. Please remember: if you are entering via a comment, you must comment on that blog post. Or you may enter via email, as explained Monday.)  The deadline is 11pm (CST), Wednesday, July 25.

     Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

P.S.  Mr. Baldwin is still the Roller Coaster Kid. He enjoys traveling, and somehow, wherever he goes, he manages to find a new roller coaster to ride.

Primal Scream at the Amusement Park; The Writing of The Roller Coaster Kid; Pt 2

     Today is Part Two of "How I wrote The Roller Coaster Kid" our Teaching Author book giveaway.

      Both Riverview and West View Parks were demolished and replaced by shopping centers and such. (Sigh). I eventually got to Disneyland, which, in my twelve-year-old eyes, wasn't nearly as exciting as West View.

     After that, my encounters with park rides were reduced to the ones set up every fall at the Mississippi State Fair.  By then (high school) it was more about who was at the Fair with whom than riding the Wild Mouse or, my favorite, the Double Ferris Wheel. The Fair never felt like a park. 

      I grew up (sort of).  I got a degree, a job, and a husband.  Amusement parks faded from both my life and the country.  Mom-and-Pop parks were replaced by bigger and gaudier "theme" parks...the theme determined by whatever corporation owned the facility. These places became family vacation destinations.  If there was any place my husband and I (in our childless state) did not want to spend our precious vacation time, it was a place where you paid an obscene amount of money to hang upside down at 60 miles an hour on a "roller coaster" or squish around in wet shoes, after sitting in the front of a log flume ride.  Besides, my husband has a thing about heights.

     My husband and his friends grew up in the Carolinas and had always vacationed along the Grand Strand.  So married, and childless, we joined our unmarried (and childless friends) at the beach.  On one of those group beach holidays, someone suggested a trip to the Myrtle Beach Pavilion. I soon discovered that "The Pavilion"was a cross between West View Park and the Mississippi State Fair,
set a block away from the ocean. There were my old friends: the Bumper Cars, the Tilt-a-Whirl, and a roller coaster that looked very much like the late, lamented Dips.  Best of all, the Pavilion was an affordable cheap thrill...no outrageous admission fee, reasonably priced rides.

    Even though I was much closer to 40 than I wanted to admit, I joined our friends on every ride.  My acrophobic husband obligingly held our hats, purses, and sunglasses as the rest of us paid to be flung and flipped around.  My inner eight-year-old was having a Big Time.

    I was having such a great time that I didn't think twice about climbing on something called The Swings.  Sounds pretty tame, hunh?  It looked tame...from the ground. I settled myself into a metal chair, suspended by chains, not unlike a playground "baby swing."  The ride operator came by and hooked a chain across the front of my seat and away we went.

     Up, up, up the swings rose.  OK, guys, I thought, as the Atlantic Ocean spread into panoramic view, that's high enough.  The swings jerked to a stop. Good. What had seemed like a harmless little ride on the ground felt downright unsubstantial and...well...scary, however many hundred feet we were above the ground. (You can see from the picture that it wasn't that high up.) Suddenly, the swings spun around like a demented merry-go-round, shooting out to the side at a ninety degree angle. For the first

time in my life, I felt utter terror.  I was going to die.  I knew it.  One of those chains would come undone and I would go flying out to sea.

    I screamed.  I am not a screamer, so I had thirty plus years of screams to unload. I screamed from some place deep inside me, as if something had broken lose.  I closed my eyes, pretended I wasn't suspended on playground chains flying sideways....and screamed.  Never before and never since have I felt so terrified.  Once The Swings of Death (as I had mentally re-named them) returned to earth, I slid out of my seat, and tottered over to my husband on jello-like legs.

    "Have fun?" he asked as I reclaimed my belongings.  Not exactly.  More as if I had gone through some sort of rebirthing scream therapy.  As if I had conquered a fear I didn't know I had.  Weird.

    The Pavilion was torn down in 2006 and turned into a parking lot for a giant Ferris Wheel.  I never had another chance to experience that moment of total terror on The Swings again.  Maybe once in a lifetime is enough.

     So what happened to The Roller Coaster Kid?  Well, that fear and catharsis forms the core of the book.  I'll talk about the third and final "ingredient" of the story in Friday's post.

     Don't forget to enter our Book Giveaway for an autographed copy of The Roller Coaster Kid (Viking).  For contest details see Monday's post.  The deadline is 11pm (CST) Wednesday, July 25 with the winner to be announced Thursday, July 26.  I am looking forward to more entries and amusement park memories.
Posted by Mary Ann Rodman
     

Ride with The Roller Coaster Kid, a TA Blogger Book Giveaway

   Welcome back from "summer break," dear readers. Your reward for checking in with Teaching Authors...another fabulous book giveaway.  In this case, the book happens to be my latest picture book,

The Roller Coaster Kid (Viking). Instructions for entering the Giveaway will be at the end of this post.

     Those of you who have been reading this blog awhile have probably encountered my philosophy of "crock pot
writing." (Crock pot not crack pot.)  I think of my creative mind as a slow cooker, simmering with various ingredients, on low heat. Every now and then I lift the lid, give the brew a taste test, to see if "it's soup yet?" (Those of us of a "certain age" will remember that line from the Lipton Cup of Soup commercials.)  Mostly, the answer is no. The lid goes back on until next time.

     The Roller Coaster Kid's "ingredients"come from such diverse sources, I didn't realize I was even writing a book, until the final "ingredient" presented itself in one of those rare Eureka! moments.

    I have mentioned my storytelling family before, particularly my mother's side.  I especially enjoyed the stories that involved their local amusement park, West View Park, in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh. (West View Park appears in Jimmy's Stars.)  Most of the male members of Mom's family, her grandfather and brothers, worked at

West View during the Depression. That good looking fella to the left is my Uncle Andy, working the Milk Bottle Pitch kiosk.

     West View was one of the first amusement parks, built in 1906.
Since it was literally around-the-corner-and-down-the-hill from my Grandmother Smith's house, it was the only amusement park I knew as a child. Of course I had heard about Disneyland (this was waaaay before Disney World or any of the modern "theme parks") but that was in California, for crying out loud. I lived in Chicago and my relatives all lived in Pittsburgh. Only rich kids or Californians went to Disneyland. I didn't know anyone who had been to California let alone, Disneyland.

   Growing up in Chicago, I did see TV ads for Riverview Park, which was roughly the same vintage as West View. Every summer I begged my parents to make the trek from the Southern Suburbs to the North Side of Chicago, but somehow I never got to Riverview. As my mother reminded me, "Why would you want to go to Riverview?  It's just like West View, and you can go to West View with your cousins."
     

   Mom had a point. A trip to West View was always a big occasion, including at least a half of my dozen plus cousins living around Pittsburgh.  A big occasion, which in true 1950's fashion, involved wearing Sunday School clothes, crinolines, patent leather mary janes and all.  How those clothes survived the Bumper Cars, Tilt-a-Whirl and the Round-Up, I don't remember.

      I do remember that most fearsome of all the rides, West View's gigantic wooden roller coaster, The Dips.  Being tall enough to ride The Dips was a real milestone. And if you could ride The Dips without throwing up....well, you were practically a teenager. I think I rode it once or twice before the park was torn down in 1977.

     I suppose you could say that my memories of West View Park were the basic "stock" of the soup that became The Roller Coaster Kid...a book I didn't realize I was writing.

To Enter Our Roller Coaster Kid Book Giveaway: 
1. You must comment to today's post, telling us why you would like to win The Roller Coaster Kid.  Will you be keeping it for yourself or sharing it with another young reader? Addition from Carmela: or you may enter by sending an email to us at teachingauthors [at] gmail [dot] com with "Book Giveaway" in the subject line.
2.  You must include contact information in your comment.  If you are not a blogger or your email address is not accessible from your online profile, you must send us a valid email address in your comment.  Entries without contact information will be disqualified.  Note:  The TeachingAuthors cannot prevent spammers from accessing e-mail addresses posted within the comments, so feel free to disguise your address by spelling out portions such as "dot" and "at."
3.  You must send us your post by 11 pm (CST), Wednesday, July 25. Winner will be chosen at random via Random.org. and announced on Thursday, July 26.  Note:  Winners automatically grant us permission to post their names here on the TeachingAuthors website.
4.  You must have a mailing address in the United States.
5.  You must respond to the notification e-mail and provide a mailing address within 72 hours, or the prize will be forfeited and an alternate winner chose.

Those are the official rules. If you feel like sharing an amusement park memory, that would be great, but certainly not required. I've already told you mine in today's post. I can't wait to hear your memories.

     More on The Roller Coaster Kid Wednesday.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman