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About Eugene register-guard. (Eugene, Or.) 1930-1983 | View Entire Issue (May 21, 1961)
J4erita f IAXI MVnrtl HO Mi. MW1NII - AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Published every evening and Sunday morning by the Guard Publishing Co. an, .'M. 1) uifjni l mmm ii jh .1 ii i J'wii jjn';gire'BM'ii..v,A:- ? ' - ..".". "..!..... ' . - r,v.'-, : ,-,. :.!. sAr. A t - '.. ALTON F. BAKER Chairman of the Board ALTON F. BAKER JR. Editor and Publisher EDWIN M. BAKER . General Manager ROBERT B. FRAZIER ; . Associate Editor A. H. CURREY Associate Editor .-... The Register-Guard's policy is the complete and impartial publication in its news pages of all news and statements on news. On this page, the editors of the Register-Guard offer their opinions on events of the day and matters of importance to the community, endeavoring to be candid but fair and helpful in the development of construc tive community policy. A newspaper is A CITIZEN OF ITS COMMUNITY. v.. van ,r Vs J I Services Associated Press, United Press International, Audit Bureau o Circulations '4 . 10A EUGENE, OREGON, SUNDAY, MAY 21, 1961 I- Biatueisemsw Another Blow for Voluntary ROTC .' " Oregon Slate University students, in a student body election, have gone on record as opposing the compulsory fea ture of ROTC. This is in contrast to a vote of the Oregon State faculty last winter,. '.The faculty wanted to keep the first two years 'of campus military train ing compulsory, with the last two years, whichnormally lead to a reserve com mission, remaining elective. University of Oregon students have not voted for mally on the question. But the Eugene faculty is on record as opposing the com pulsory feature, agreeing thus with the OSU students but not with the OSU faculty. The state board of higher edu cation, which makes the real decision, backed the Oregon State faculty. So military training"; remains compulsory for 'college men in their freshman and sophomore years. ' : The Register-Guard thinks the OSU . students show more courage and wisdom than their teachers show. Compulsory ROTC is a hold-over from another era, an era when young men had no univer sal i military obligation and when the only time in his life that a young man might wear a uniform was on those aft ernoons as a college freshman and sopho more. Now, either before or after col lege, every young man likely Will serve a hitch in one of the services. Compul sory ROTC cannot be defended on the grounds, of ."military obligation." Nor can ; it be " defended on the . grounds that it provides badly needed re serve officers, It is the voluntary second half of the program that provides: the officers. They are the interested ones, young men whose first two years of mili tary training is now impaired because so many reluctant once-a-week soldiers are In their basic classes. Experience at the University of Wisconsin has shown that the advanced program does not suf- Make Haste Slowly In post-mortems on the recent Eu gene city election, one recurring com ment was that the City Council lost its fight for ' unadulterated authority in street matters because of its off-again-on-agaln initiation and revision of one way street patterns. The council, the ar gument ran, has shown an inclination to try anything once, or maybe twice, but hasn't demonstrated ability to see best' solutions to traffic problems in advance. Frankly, those arguing this way seem to oversimplify the task of making an . outmoded streets system suffice a little longer. They also seem to be arguing that a wise council would be one that (ticks with its mistakes rather than at tempt to rectify them. However, there is some basis for urging the council to move away from a trial-and-error system of deciding which streets should be used for one-way traf fic, and in which direction. In July, or thereabouts, the council will receive re sults of an extensive traffic study that has been conducted here by the State Highway Dept. Meantime, suggestions such as Coun cilman Dan Christensen made this week for reversal of traffic flows on 11th and 13th Avenues should be held in limbo. The council's committee-of-the-whole has approved his motion that an immedi ' ate study be made to determine if this shift, making 11th Avenue an eastbound route and 13th Avenue a westbound one, would be merited. All the study possible is needed, but hasty action certainly is not. It may be that the highway department's sur vey will lead the council to believe that a number of changes are needed in our one-way streets. If so, all these changes should be made at once in order that the full effects can be coordlnately planned Bloodthirsty learning, unlearning and then relearnlng which streets run which way. fer when the first two years are also ' voluntary. ( ' ' ' So if compulsory ROTC cannot be. justified on the grounds that it satisfies a military obligation, nor on the grounds that it provides badly needed officers, then how can it be justified? The state board of higher education voted 5 to 2 to keep the compulsory fea ture at Eugene and Corvallis. Three of the five who voted to keep it compulsory '.said their opinions might be changed, if experiments at other schools show that the voluntary feature is satisfactory. We ask again: Why should Oregon not make the experiment, rather than sitting back to wait for others to do the pioneering? Indeed, to be consistent the board , should now institute compulsory ROTC. programs at Portland State, Southern Oregon, Eastern Oregon and Oregon Col lege of Education. These institutions do not have ROTC If the board is satisfied that they do not, why is it not satisfied to see a modification at the University , and Oregon State? If the board really wants compulsory ROTC, why not make it system-wide? We do not see how the board, can have it both ways. Our guess is that sooner or, later, and-probably sooner,, the board will come around to agreeing with Oregon State students and the University of Oregon faculty. One final word, however. Nothing said here is meant to disparage the ROTC program, nor to suggest that the smart young man not get in on this program. He'll find it pays, for as an officer he'll be better paid, better treated and allowed more freedom than, fellow soldiers who serve out their military obligation as pri vates. Moreover, a young man who takes seriously his "obligation" will want to serve out that obligation at the peak of his capacity. But the choice of how to go about it should be up to him all the way. .'',',' . ., . Colorful Names The Oregon Journal laments the dis appearance of colorful place names. It regrets that in Franklin, W, Va., city fathers are changing the name of Dog Alley and Dirty Run to Dogwood Lane and Walnut Street. We regret this, too, ; just as we regret that here in Oregon so many of our ancestors were influ enced by Sir Walter Scott novels. Too many of our place names are stolen straight from medieval England. ' We have a few colorful whisky -creeks, rattlesnake buttes, and grizzly peaks. But we don't have as many as we deserve. We no longer have a Gouge Eye. That was the name of a friendly little community in Harney County. Gouge Eye was so named for obvious reasons. But the Post Office Department didn't think the name dignified enough. So it was called Drewsey, after the daughter of a rancher, and Drewsey it is today. Portland still has its Goose Hollow and its Slabtown, but those are locally applied names for neighborhoods and they have no official standing. Bend now has a neighborhood with a name some thing like Westminstershire Terrace or Bolingbroke Gardens, It used to be called Home Brew Flats. We liked it better the old way. Accolade ' In Portland, Commissioner Ormond Bean has led the fight, successfully, for free swimming pools. For this the Port land Reporter suggests the commission er bo awarded the title, "Honorary Kid." It's a title he should wear proudly. Obvious The Russian name "Yuri" means "George" in our tongue. Now we know why Comrade Gagarin was the one they let do it first. One of the big automobile firms has come out with a new model called the "Cutlass." Add this to the showrooms full of cars named Lancer, Dart, Saber, Fury, and Invicta. No wonder we seem to be a bloodthirsty bunch of drivers. We await the unveiling of the new, pow erful Mayhem-8 and the super Carnage sedan. 1 '1 lS ' l.'.t... it' G 'v. CONEY ISLAND MAGNET - On the theory that the greatest show is people, George Tilybu turned a rich man's resort into a playground . (Courtesy of ttt Museum of the City of New York) for the masses. The enormous success of Steeplechase Park attests to his abilities as a master showman and inventor of amusements. Master Coney Island Showman s Formula Still Good EDITOR'S NOTE: A shrewd promoter, who recognized peo ple toouZd pay to make them selves look ridiculous, built the madcap town that is Coney Is land. Still king of them all, the playground of breathtaking rides, colliding cars, and tum bling barrels continues to en chant summer fun-seekers. A free-lance writer describes the formula that makes Coney al ways a hit show. ' Let People Amuse Themselves And They'll Pay You for It By PETER LYON ' , On every warm summer week end on Coney Island, a great swarm of people may be found heading for a. slow-moving line that leads always to the same entertainment device. Typically, they will wait nearly an hour to enjoy a ride that lasts for perhaps one mildly exhilarating minute. : It's the most popular attraction in any amusement park in the world the Steeplechase Horses, a lasting, monument to Coney's greatest showman, the man who in 1897' installed it as the princi pal attraction of his 'carnival grounds. This was George Cor nelius Tilyou, whose formula was a matchless mixture of sentimen tality, shrewd .psychology, and a suffusion of sophomoric sex. Coney Island's history falls into three well-defined periods the scandalous, the elegant, and the garish and the Tilyou family be strides them all. A PRECIOUS INSIGHT The first period was dominated by a political boss, John Y. Mc Kane, who swaggered to power at the head of a motley crew of barkecps, gamblers, pugilists, thieves and bawds, and was final ly tucked away in Sing Sing in 1894 for election frauds. Then came the period of ele gance, with millionaire sports men anchoring their yachts in Coney's waters, racing their horses at its three tracks, and squiring their ladies to' Coney's swank restaurants. The advent of the subway, about the time of the First .World War, brought the garish period: The masses de scended upon Coney's beach and boardwalk. '. .- Due largely. to George C. Til you, his family has had a hand in each of these mutations. No one in the outdoor . amusement field had a better psychological insight into what people wanted when they sought entertainment. He showed that people will pay good money over and over again for the privilege of supplying the entertainment themselves. During the season, the Steeplechase pa vilion resounds with the merri ment of those who have shelled out to make-themselves look ri diculous. In 1865, when ueorge was three years old, his parents leased a huge ' ocean-front lot at Coney, and on it built the Surf House. Thanks to the elder Tilyou's po litical connections, the hotel be came a favorite resort for New York and Brooklyn city officials., By the time young George was 14, lie had already displayed a precocious insight into the psy chology of the holiday pleasure That summer Coney was crowd ed with Midwestern tourists drawn to the ocean after attend ing the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Correctly guessing that these simple folk would be lieve that an article had value only if it had a price on it,, he filled medicine bottles with salt water and cigar boxes with sand, and sold them by the score at a quarter apiece. When he was 17, real estate beckoned. Though land at Coney was firmly held by the township, there was a brisk and piratical traffic in leases. Presently, young Tilyou was netting $250 a month, operating out of an office made by cleating two bathhouses together.- But this was just money, and it bored him. He thirsted to be a showman. When he was 20, he and his father put up the island's first theater. But there were prob lems with McKane, who held m t?.-- " --;.v-t (Courtesy of Gottscoo-Schletsner) THE COMPETITION Luna Park by night was a fairyland of soaring minarets. Built in 1903 for a million dollars much of it borrowed from "Bet-a-Million" Gates it was a competitor of Steeplechase Park until 1949 when the last of Coney Island's three greatest fires destroyed it alL Coney Island in his fist, extract ing from every businessman a tithe, and encouraging the most disreputable elements to open saloons. When his misrule became the subject of a legislative investiga tion, Tilyou was the only island resident who dared blow the whistle on the chief. He named the houses of prostitution; he had seen McKane's justices of the peace in gambling places. But while the legislative com mittee could stigmatize McKane, his friends in the state assembly were too powerful, and his grip on Coney for a time stayed se cure. George found it necessary to retire from the real-estate bus iness. His capital dwindled. In 1893 he married Mary 0' Donnell and took off on his honeymoon to see Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. There he was captivated by the Ferris Wheel, and decided . to borrow money to have one built on Coney Island. The time was propitious, since McKane was in trouble. ' i SURE-FIRE DEVICE : ' Tilyou studded his plaything with hundreds of incandescent lamps, and the wheel was making money before it had been in op eration 50 days. ' By that time, McKane was in Sing Sing, Coney Island was part of Brooklyn and decent people were again flocking to the beach. Tilyou decided to branch out. He imported an Intramural Bicycle Bailway; he built the Double Dip Chutes. But these were scattered all over Coney. When Capt. Paul Boyton, the first frogman, ar rived at Coney to open Sea Lion Park, where his stellar attraction was a kind of aquatic toboggan slide in flat-bottomed boats, Til you was impressed by the idea of a park enclosed by a fence. He cast about for a sure-fire device like Boyton's, and decided the most popular sport of the time was horseracing. In 1897, he opened Steeplechase Park, where the premier attraction was the Steeplechase Horses: an undu lant, curving metal track over which wodden horses ran on wheels, coursing down by gravity and up by momentum. In 1901, Tilyou went scouting at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo and came back with the exposition's most spectacular attraction, a Trip to the Moon, plus the Giant See-Saw, having gone into partnership with the inventors of these entertainment innovations. PROOF OF SUCCESS The season of 1902 was one of the wettest in Coney's history. Business at Boyton's Sea Lion Park was macabre. But thanks to A Trip to the Moon, Steeplechase did handsomely. It did so well, in fact, that Tilyou's new partners decided to build a park of their own that would drive Steeple chase out of business. What they built, at a cost of nearly one million dollars, was Luna Park, a magic fairyland ,of spires and minarets and towers, over which they had strewn a profusion of entertainments. Its stupendous success was at tested by the fact that there was an immediate attempt to imitate it. Just across the avenue from Luna, a real-estate speculator spent three and a half million to build Dreamland, where every., thing was on an exuberant scale. There were a million incandes cent light bulbs shedding radi ance on flower-topped eolumns, an esplanade- where a band played seemingly without pause, and a great ballroom built out on a pier. But all these delights had by ; no means crowded Steeplechase into the ocean. George Tilyou en. thusiastically welcomed competi tion. His intuition had equipped him with a different formula: people. All he needed to do was contrive the most appropriate backgrounds for his star perform ers. By 1905 he had invented fivs of them: The Wedding Ring, where as many as 70 people at a timn could perch insecurely while four muscular attendants rocked, it back and forth. The Barrel of Love,, wher passengers were strapped into seats in a revolving drum that rolled gently down one incline and up another. The Dew Drop, where patronj were whirled down from a -tall tower feet first. j : The Whichaway, a swing that whirled its passengers eccentric ally in any of four directions, "but invariably catapulted a girl into ' her escort's lap. The Earthquake Stairway, which was a flight of steps split down the middle to jerk its pas sengers erratically up and down. NO DIFFERENCES YET In the following half century, all three of Coney's parks were to' be ripped by fire. But only at Steeplechase would there be a disposition to rebuilid. The day after an 18-hour fir in July, 1907, leveled hjs park, Tilyou set up a large sign whera the entrance had been: ' - I have trouble today that I did not have yesterday. I had troubles yesterday that I have not today. On this site will be erected shortly a better, bigger, great er Steeplechase Park. Admission to the Burning Ruins 10 cents. In a sense the fire was a boon, for it enabled Tilyou to design a steel and glass pavilion over a five-acre hardwood floor, called the Pavilion of Fun. Here hs concentrated all his earlier de vices, and added still others. He evolved the Human Rou lette Wheel, a whirling concavet disc of polished wood, a melting pot in which the ingredients were laughter, exhibitionism, and sex. Another addition was the Human Pool Table, a set of flat spinning discs. When a girl came whirling down the polished slide, she came to rest on one disc, was flung to a second, her skirts flying, her squeals rising to the roof, her friends doubled up with laughter. And the Barrel of Love was now a great revolving drum, so that two or three girls without escorla might find, before they had ne gotiated the sliding, slippery, treacherous 30 feet, that escorU were thrown into their arms. With the coming of the subway. Coney gained millions of patrons and lost some of its effervescence. But neither these changes nor Tilyou's death in 1914 made any difference in the Steeplechase formula. Season after season, thousands flock into the park, where sooner or later they end up standing in line to ride on the Steeplechase Horses, as people have done now for two genera tions. (Copyright 1961, -American Heritage Magazine) member or THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The Annclt4 Presn l entitled cluslveiy to the m of republlcatma of an the locel newe printed In thte newspaper. WILLIAM L. WASMANN, Newi TA tlONN L. ftONHAM City Editnf JAR!, K. FUGLE, Circulation Maneeer RORERT K. BERTSCK Promotion W. B. JOHNSTON JR. Audltn ARNE STROMMER Prodttttisa
