by Jay Ducharme
(All text and images copyright Jay Ducharme 2022)
by Jay Ducharme
(All text and images copyright Jay Ducharme 2022)
As fate would have it, a week after I finished the course I found a Mountain Park Country Club scorecard in my basement. It listed names for each of the holes, like "Loop the loop" and ""Covered Bridge, which would have been a big help in figuring out exactly where all the stunts were supposed to go. Surprisingly, my arrangement did seem to match up except for four holes near the end (14 through 17). Since hole 8 was called The Olde Mill, I suspect that's where the paddlewheel was supposed to go. And that would explain why the building was offset from the green. That would leave four holes in a row without any stunts. I don't recall what the "Bulls Eye" would have been. It must have been some sort of target. The "Dog Leg" makes perfect sense, since that fairway had a right-angle turn. "Over the Hill" must have had some sort of ramp. That hole is where I placed the Covered Bridge, which is supposed to be on the next hole. But that fairway (17) is long and curving, which is why I placed the building on the straighter hole 16. It also could be that the holes changed over the years and the cards were never updated. After all, there's no "Humpty Dumpty" hole, yet that stunt was definitely on the course (on hole 9, which is listed as "The Wave"). I suspect that the ramp stunt I placed on hole 3 ("Double Trouble") should have been on "Over the Hill". I stared at the fence pieces on my workbench. They'd been sitting there for a couple of years, unpainted. And I didn't understand why I was so hesitant to finish them. So instead I turned to trees. I hunted through my photo collection to find as many angles of the midway as I could, to get a sense of where the dozens of trees were located. One problem was that even though I had ordered 200 trees, they were all the exact same. And they looked it. I did have a few big pine trees which I cut down to get two or three smaller trees out of each. But the real midway had a mix of pine, elm and maple of all different sizes. But I'd have to content myself with the trees on hand. As I began adding trees to the midway, I realized it was going to make things really difficult for when I had to add the fencing. I knew I needed to tackle the fences first, so I re-examined that problem. The first thing I noticed was that the fence sections I had printed out were huge, larger than some of the small buildings on the model. The scale was completely off. So I was glad I never painted them; that would have been a waste. Those sections were also extremely thin and flimsy. So I went back to the drawing board and redesigned the fence sections, making them ridiculously beefy so that I could print them reliably at a much smaller scale. Then a light bulb went off that made the whole concept of fences much more workable: I strung together nine sections so that I could print them as one unit. Because of the small scale, I was able to easily stack a half-dozen sections on the print bed and they took very little time to complete. I made the fence for the Flying Jets first as a test, and it worked out great. The strips were sturdy yet pliable and could stand up on their own. I could even bend them and they'd retain that shape. And most importantly, they were at the right scale. So I used the same technique with the fencing around the Scrambler (which was also used throughout other areas of the park). When I had printed a half-dozen sections of each type, I began painting them. The Flying Jets fence had a red border with blue crosspieces on the inside. The Scrambler fence had red posts, blue rails and pink crosspieces. It was finicky work that took me about two days. As I was test-fitting fence sections on the model, I began to think about all the chainlink fence there was at the park. It was along the side of the coaster, around some of the rides and in parts of the mini-golf course. Now that I could crank out sections of flexible fencing, it was no longer a daunting task to add the chainlink sections. So I used silver filament and printed out a stack of the Flying Jets fencing. I laid a bead of 3-in-1 glue along the surface of the model and set the fence sections in place. In a couple of hours, the area near the coaster turnaround, Flying Jets and Scrambler was finished. I felt much more confident and knew I could get all of it done in a few days. While I was working on the fences, I thought of something else I was missing. The park had a giant trash receptacle in a style that was common at parks and carnivals in the 1960s and '70s. It looked like a colorful circus wagon with a friendly lion behind its bars. The lion's head stuck out from the wagon and it had a big hole for its mouth. Inside the wagon was a fan that created a vacuum. So putting trash in the lion's mouth would suck it out of your hand. When I was a kid, I found it really amusing and would actually look around on the ground for more stuff I could "feed" it with. The wagon also had a speaker. An 8-track tape machine inside would play a loop of the lion saying, "I'm hungry! Feed me!", and other similar phrases. The wagon itself was easy to create. I found a lion's head on Thingiverse and stuck it on the front of the wagon. I made the wheels extra thick since it would be such a tiny print. I also remembered that inside the Cutie Caddie area were two large objects: a totem pole that used to be in a flower bed where the boats ended up, and a zebra that in later years was repainted to look like a tiger horse. I hunted around and got those files from Thingiverse as well. I was amazed at how well they all printed at that scale. After installing them, I looked around at other areas to make sure I hadn't forgotten any fencing. The mini-golf course still needed to be finished. Quite a bit of the "fencing" there was actually neatly manicured shrubs. But I hadn't left myself enough room, and I didn't think I'd be able to find or make similar shrubs at the scale I needed. I knew that at the far north end of the course by the tunnel, the park used the multi-colored wood fence. I installed that and opted for the grey fencing for the rest. In a short time, that whole area was finished. Now that I was comfortable working with the fence sections, I decided to put some around the Sky Ride entrance. Originally it had simple red iron pipes around in a square around the loading area. I once again opted for the grey fencing and quickly had that finished. The only fence section left was surrounding the kiddie Ferris wheel, essentially a 30 mm box. So that didn't take much time. I painted it dark green to match the original color of the chainlink fence. Before I went back to the trees, I decided to finish the coaster. The first thing I needed to do was figure out how to create the brake run. I had photos taken from the final hill that definitely showed a sharp right-hand turn that I neglected to include. I went back and looked at the coaster's blueprint, and the turn was there, just before the station. I wasn't sure how I got that part wrong. It was definitely obvious in the blueprint. But I couldn't tear up that whole section now. As for the roof over the brake run, I knew that foam core board would be too thick, but card stock would be too thin. So once again I turned to the computer and created the brake run roof section in Blender. It was simple since it was a straight run with no turns (unlike the real thing). My first version of it was a bit too narrow, so I widened it by about 4 mm. Then I realized it wasn't long enough. So I printed two of them and glued them together. They seemed a bit too bulky, but they worked. I took a detour and finished off the fencing around the kiddie Ferris wheel. I also had forgotten about the rounding board above the Hershell kiddie autos. That rounding board held quite a bit of significance for me. It was rimmed with reflective shields that held short vertical florescent lights. When I was watchman at the park, those lights were left on and were the only source of illumination in Kiddieland. It didn't take me long to design it in Blender. I used the bamboo toothpicks as posts to hold it up. There was a somewhat intricate stencil pattern around the panels, but I just used small dots of paint. The result wasn't too bad. The only remaining detail besides trees was the roller coaster. So I began at the lift hill, which was the most visibly messed up. I carefully removed the old track and then glued a new piece in place onto the last quarter of the lift, and bent the piece to the bottom of the first drop. It formed a smooth arc and demonstrated how inaccurate the bents were. So the next task was to tear out all the bents along the first drop and resize them so that they correctly followed the contour of the drop. Then I could glue the track to the bents. I also created the "Do Not Stand Up" sign that was at the top of the lift. After a couple hours of work, the first drop profile looked much better. About that time, I had emailed Wistariahurst Museum to see if they had any interest in displaying the model in the event that things didn't work out at Heritage State Park. They replied that they had no interest. Shortly after that I got an email from Mel at Heritage Park. He said that FLN-MAR, a local fabrication company near the Merry-Go-Round, had agreed to make the plexiglass cover for the model. That was terrific news. I had worked with FLN-MAR in the past. They made the leather belts that powered the Merry-Go-Round and had done other work for us on the ride. So I felt confident they'd make a good cover. Something else that I needed to do was attach stringers to the structure. Those were boards that were affixed horizontally across the coaster bents to provide a little more stability. It was simple to create them for 3D printing; they were nothing but thin strips of plastic. I printed 20 of them, each about 120 mm. I figured that would give me enough for the entire ride, but I ended up having to print a second batch. I needed to space them evenly, and a leftover section of the ladders that I used for the bents worked perfectly as a guide. I just laid it on its side and used it as a straightedge to place pencil marks across the bents. Then I put a dab of glue on each pencil mark and applied the stringer. Within a short time, I had completed the lift hill. I didn't have to put any stringers on the bottom section of the lift that faced the park because the brake run cover was going to hide that entire stretch. Once I got comfortable completing that section, it was fairly quick work to finish off the rest of the coaster. I wasn't happy with the brake run. It was just too bulky. The supports on the actual brake run were much more simply: vertical bents with stringers running across them, just like the coaster itself. So I redesigned the structure and also doubled its length so that I didn't need to glue any pieces together. The stringers took me a while to complete. It was pretty messy work, trying to get little dots of glue onto each bent and then affix a stringer before the glue set. I worked on only a small section at a time to make sure the pieces set properly. I also finally added the side braces onto the structure. And as I went along, I repaired any blatant track problems. For the turnaround, I had to design a special small track section in Blender just to span three bents along the curve, in order to even out that area. There was still an old dried blob of glue at that point that I couldn't remove, but it looked a lot better than it did before. For the turnaround, I didn't know whether I could bend the stringers so that they'd hold their shape before the glue dried. But then I remembered the success I had with the fencing. So it didn't take long to complete the outer section. The inner section was a bit more challenging because I had already glued two trees in place right in the middle of the turnaround. I was going to work around them, but I figured it was easier to pull them out and then "replant" them when I was finished. Unfortunately, that didn't pan out. The bigger of the trees was so firmly attached, I would have ruined it. The smaller pine next to it came out without trouble. In a short time, the entire turnaround was completed. I next turned my attention to the problems with the track. A few of the issues were with where the track sections connected. Some of them didn't bend properly and created a "V" in the track. I was able to fix those by carefully prying up one section and gluing it with the PLA glue. That helped blend the sections together. The biggest challenge was after the turnaround, where the track was curving left and then took a sharp right. On the actual ride, everyone in the train would be tossed to the left at that point. It was really fun. But the track piece simply wouldn't bend that way, and it ended up partly on its side. So I removed that entire section and got a new piece of track. Then I got a hair dryer, heated up the center of the section and gently bent it until it matched the radius of the turn. After cooling, the track fit perfectly and looked a heck of a lot better. Unfortunately, one of the ties snapped off near where the pieces joined. So I snipped a bit of track and glued it underneath. I also attached the new brake run, and then the coaster was finally done. Something else I thought of while I was working at that end of the park, was the RV trailer behind the Clambake Pavilion. It belonged to the Goodwins, who owned the cotton candy stand. They spent their summers in it, and when the park closed drove it down to Florida for the winter. There was also a similar RV trailer behind the midway stage. Performers used it as a dressing room. So after a long search, I found a suitable trailer model online and modified it in Blender to more closely resemble the ones at the park. I remembered that the one by the dressing room was sort of tan in color; the Goodwins' trailer was white. So I painted them accordingly. I had then reached the last chore: completing the trees. My biggest concern was how much the cheap trees I got from China were shedding. So before I attached them, I "fluffed" them, trying to remove as many of the loose particles as possible. That had an unexpected benefit: doing that occasionally exposed bare "branches" and made the trees look a bit more realistic. I had printed out a set of photos with different angles on different parts of the midway so that I could figure out where most of the trees were. I was concerned with installing so many that you'd no longer be able to see the midway. But fortunately, I didn't have to worry about that. Because the trees I had were so small and uniform, they didn't take up much space. Althought the park was filled with a wide variety of trees, the model was going to be mostly small fake maple trees. It took me only about an hour to finish them. There were surprisingly fewer needed than I expected. I also added a few more behind the roller coaster. Another little detail I had to fix was the flagpole on the top of the merry-go-round building. This time I made the pole out of stainless steel wire and wrapped the paper flag around it. It would be an easy matter to simply punch the wire through the top of the roof. Or so I thought. As I pressed down on the top of the roof, it collapsed like a wet Dixie cup. I let out a scream. I had just destroyed the roof of one of the first buildings I had created. In a panic, I began using the wire to pry up the structure from the center. Eventually, I was able to get it back to nearly its original state. I had expected the cardboard structure to have a bit more stability than that. But obviously it didn't. So I abandoned my plan to have a flagpole on the top. In all my years at the park, I don't recall flags every being flown on those poles. I had pictures from the 1950s where they each had an American flag on them. But since I was focusing on the park from 1980, I figured I'd leave them off. I was going to install flagpoles around the first-level roof, like they were at the park. But after my debacle with the top pole, I decided to leave well enough along. It was Karen that gave me the idea to return to my 3D printer. The top flagpole had a metal skirt at the bottom that wrapped around the peak. It was easy to recreate that in Blender, and then add a pole. It took very little time to print it out. Then I was able to glue it onto the building's peak like a little hat. It worked out really well and hit the dent where the roof got crushed. I noticed one other little detail I was missing. There was a gap between the Dinosaur Den and the Pirate's Den building fronts. In reality, a locked chainlink gate prevented guests from wandering back between the buildings and over to the roller coaster. That gap on the model was pretty tiny and hard to reach. So instead I placed a small leftover section of the chainlink fence between the back of the two buildings, which made it look like a continuation of the fence from the Scrambler and Bubble Bounce. I didn't want people thinking that the park allowed people to wander around back there. Karen mentioned that there were no tracks for the miniature train. I hadn't yet figured out a way to do that realistically at that scale, since the train tracks were narrower than the the roller coaster tracks. But I suddently had an idea. I had a small pen that contained reflective silver oil paint. So I used a ruler to draw faint intermittent silver lines along the path of the train. In a certain light, you could see a glint of silver, which looked like track. And with that, after nearly four years (to the day) of work, the model was finished. There were some details that I decided to forego. The red coaster railings would have been really difficult to finish, though I did find something I could use: I had a roll of very thin red copper coil wire. I also didn't include the criss-crossing strings of lights that hung from tree to tree above the midway. Nor did I add the red barrels placed around the midway that held fire hoses. Nor did I made the trash cans and the numerous park benches; they were just too small. I had many people ask me if I was going to include people on the midway, but again they would have been much too tiny. If I had been working at H0 scale, that wouldn't have been a problem at all. There were also lots of telephone poles and light poles on the midway, none of which I included. My mission was to focus on the rides and buildings. By the time I finished the model, the park had been closed 35 years, and there were fewer and fewer people alive who remembered going there. So I wanted to show a new generation what used to exist on that surprisingly small strip of land on the side of Mount Tom. In May of this year, something happened that gave me renewed energy to finish my work. I was contacted by the head librarian at Forbes Library in Northampton. There were students at Easthampton High School (my alma mater) who were doing their history class final project about Mountain Park, and they wanted to interview me. I don't know how the librarian tracked me down, but I told her I was happy to cooperate. So I paid a visit to the school, which had been completely rebuilt since I graduated nearly a half-century ago. The teacher, Kelley Brown, welcomed me and took me up to the library where I met with the three girls who were doing the project. I was really impressed with them. They had done an enormous amount of research, spending hours poring over the historical collections in the Holyoke Public Library. They knew more facts about the park than I did! They couldn't understand why the park closed, so I showed them the video of Roger Fortin explaining the reason. Sometimes the truth is simpler than you expect. We talked for over an hour, and they were even more excited about their project when we parted. They invited me to their formal presentation the following week, and they did a really good job. I was thrilled that a new generation who never had experienced the park was interested in knowing more about it. I was building this model for that generation, to show them the remarkable place Holyoke once had. Overall, I was really happy with how the model turned out. Comparing it with photos I took in the 1980s, the replica was fairly convincing. Naturally, the more I look at it, the more things I want to modify. But hopefully, its current form will bring pleasure to both people who remember the park fondly and those who never knew it existed. But before that could happened, I needed to display it. So the last component to make this all work was Heritage Park. I had an upcoming meeting with Mel to iron out plans for where the model and accompanying exhibit was to be housed. With any luck, by August it would all be on display. |