July "Summer Fun"

Mom Working at Coney Island

June is passed, shall I say ending, and here we are going into July. They say when July 4th gets here half the summer is over.  When I was in school I used to hate to see the 4th of July come around, it meant school would start in eight weeks. We always started back to school after the Labor Day holiday, but that is the way it goes.  Most kids had the summer to have fun. I had to work.

My Mom worked at Coney Island. Her friends owned the games.  She took me up there and they decided to put me to work at the Fish Pond. Then after they discovered what a good little worker I was, they put me in the game called Fascination. It was the owner’s favorite game and he also worked it. I was told Ben, the owner, wanted me to work there because I was the only one who could out-work him. Of course that wasn’t true, his nephew Tom worked there and he was a great person and worker also.  But that was okay, I ate the flattery up.

I loved working at Coney Island. We had our special friends up there and we would all get together and go places on our day off. Those were some good times. Funny we would go swimming on our day off at LaSourdsville Lake. Isn’t that weird? We worked at Coney, had Monday Off, and we would go to another amusement park on our day off.  Oh well, there wasn’t any thing else to do. LOL!!!  So guess I worked up there until the summer  I was going to be seventeen. Believe it or not, I started working there when I was twelve years.  Back then, and especially up there in those days, they would say go swimming Barb or go take a two hour break. Well, I knew what they were doing. The child labor people were checking ages! But it was so much fun. I loved it because I was near my Mom all the time.  She didn’t have to worry about me.  Those were some good old days.

Love, Barb