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HAZLE TWP. — Twenty-seven years after the train took its last trek, the tanks their last tours and the boats their last floats, Angela Park gets to take another bow, courtesy of a musical tribute composed by a man who never bashed a bumper car or twirled a tea cup in the long-gone amusement mecca.
“I grew up in Pittsburgh,” composer and music teacher Rob Walker said from his home in Boise, Idaho, far removed in space and atmosphere from Angela Park’s milieu. “I didn’t really ever go there. But I listened to people talking about their childhood and everyone had a story.
“The passion of the people in the area for that park, it’s palpable.”
The Hazleton Area School District Music department commissioned Walker to compose “Angela Park Celebration,” a piece that, accompanied by a slide show, will be the grand finale of the “Music in Our Schools Month” concert at Hazleton Area High School Tuesday night.
Multiple groups from the district program will take turns on stage, concluding with the about 80 students grade five through eight playing Walker’s commemorative piece, crafted from music that likely floated from the Angela Park Carousel as horses made their circular journey into lifetime memories.
How did a Pittsburgh native now living in Boise come to compose a tribute to a Luzerne County attraction he never entered?
Intersecting interests
Start with Tom Fadden, the anchor in this confluence. Fadden teaches instrumental music at Valley Elementary Middle School, one of the reasons Hazleton Area music flourished in recent years even as many districts, strapped for cash in a post-recession world, cut such offerings. Among the additions was the Music in Our Schools Month concert.
Fadden also happens to have grown up with Angela Park in his childhood. “The giant slide, that was my favorite ride,” Fadden recounted, referring to a wooden slide spiraling around a structure with little inside beyond the steps to the top.
Least favorite? No such thing, Fadden decided, though tastes did change with age. “The silly tanks with ray guns on them that you turn and shoot at your friend, the cars on tracks, I rode them even though you wanted to drive them off the tracks and take them on the highway.”
Once the idea of an Angela Park Celebration took seed, Walker was an obvious choice as composer.
Though he hailed from the Steel City, Walker said he first connected with Fadden when he wrote a piece in commemoration of Abraham Lincoln for Wilkes University. Fadden was in the band.
Walker eventually joined the faculty at the summer Ferrwood Music Camp, not that far from Fadden’s school, or from the former site of Angela Park.
“I was never in the park, Walker said. “But I drove by the remains on (State Route) 309 many times.”
Working in the camp and the area led inevitably to residents sharing memories of Angela Park, which operated from 1957 to 1988. “You could hear a real passion for the park just listening to people of a certain age,” Walker said in a phone interview.
Finding the music
Walker said he initially planned a different musical motif for each ride, but quickly decided that would be his perceptions of the attractions, disconnected from the actual experiences of park goers.
He researched the park, connecting with the Herschell Carousel Factory Museum near Buffalo, New York, where he learned the park’s carousel — as well as the tank, airplane and boat rides — were all made by the North Tonawanda Allan Herschell Factory outside Buffalo.
This led to the discovery that it was a Wurlitzer Band Organ playing the programmed pieces in the Carousel, and the museum’s Wurlitzer department helped suggest what music this type of organ would have played in that era.
Walker had already come across music played in an old radio spot, and wove it into the composition as both intro and transition among four other pieces suggested through his research.
That opening theme “gives way to ‘Over The Waves’ and ‘Ben Hur’s Chariot Race,’” Walker wrote in an explanation of what to expect. “The piece then winds its way over for an auditory ride on the Valley Coaster. ‘The Skater’s Waltz’ and ‘Under the Double Eagle’ round out this exciting visit to the park.”
The Final Piece.
Next came Jim Fichter. As a lifelong Butler Township denizen, Angela Park was practically his back yard, and literally across the street from his grandparents’ summer cabin.
“My favorite rides were probably the bumper cars and roller coaster,” Fichter, 52, recalled. And like Fadden he has no least favorite, though of course, “Obviously at some point you outgrow some of the kiddie rides, the tanks and boats.”
Along with frequent visits to the park and getting to watch summer fireworks from the cabin porch, “My first job was at Angela Park,” Fichter said. “I was 15.”
Years after it closed Fichter noticed how persistent the memories were among those he knew or met. He started collecting memorabilia, and amassed so much that, for a while he ran a website selling his finds.
That ended when he ran out of goods, but during that time people started suggesting he also create sell commemorative items like T-shirts, donating part of the proceeds to local charities and organizations. He did. A T-shirt is available for this concert, with money going to the district music program, through the website http://www.booster.com/HHSBand2.
But Fichter went further. He spent a weekend putting together a slide show of pictures of the park, postcards, newspaper ads and memorabilia to accompany Walker’s music.
Having seen the students in early practice sessions with the piece, Fichter said he realized the obvious: These youngsters never entered — never could have entered — Angela Park. It closed before they were born.
The pictures, he thinks, helped give them “a better vibe” about what the music represents.
And while the roughly five-minute piece is not synchronized with specific images, some moments are intended to coincide.
“There is a part where the band uses different instruments to mimic the sounds of the roller coaster, so the pictures will sync up with that.” Fichter said.
Other than that, the slide show generally works as a stroll up and down the park’s length.
Just the way most visitors would have experienced it decades ago, and remember it today.