 1979
In the News |
Butler County has its own amusement park skirmish
By Ozzie Kleinas Butler County enfolds a total of 469 square miles and contains two amusement parks. Both share one of those square miles. Both also share State Rte. 4, a property line, some of their patrons, and as little else as possible. Each of the two men who own these parks has decades of experience in the entertainment business, ambition that compels him to be always renovating and expanding ... and a 15-year disagreement with the other. Americana and Fantasy Farm and their owners, Howard Berni and Edgar Streifthau, are entwined in a struggle whose roots can be traced to 1901, when Streifthau watched blocks of ice being loaded on a canal barge near Middletown; or to the late 1800's, when Berni's great great uncle was manufacturing organs for merry-go-rounds. The two histories touch in 1960, at what was called LeSourdsville Lake. It was in that year that Edgar Streifthau sold his interest in the amusement park he built to Howard Berni and his partner for half a million dollars. The park was vastly changed from May 8, 1922, when Streifthau officially opened his dance hall, swimming lake and picnic area on 30 acres of land he leased for $600 a year; changed, too, from 1931, when Streifthau picked up an option and bought the land for $10,000. The property first formally changed hands in 1791, when Dr. Clarkson Freeman bought 631 acres at five dollars per acre (the earlier transfer of the land from the Miami Indians to the U.S. government was rather bloody, and formalized belatedly). In 1834, six years after the Miami-Erie Canal was routed through the property, the acreage was split among four buyers, who paid $30 per acre. One of the buyers was a former general in the French Army, Benjamin LeSourd, whose ambition was to establish a great city on the tract. For a time, LeSourdsville did prosper, thrived on canal boat traffic and guests riding the stage coach between Dayton and Cincinnati 'The town at one time boasted a blacksmith shop, packing house, sawmill, warehouse office, general store, two taverns and several residence. In.1855 LeSourd sold part of his land to the A. H. Knorr Co, of Cincinnati which built a 19-acre lake fed by the canal. Around the lake the company erected 12 large structures to store blocks of ice cut from the lake during the winter. The ice was shipped by canal to Cincinnati where 74 wagons delivered it throughout the city. Knorr even shipped to several southern states by barges traveling the canal to the Miami and Ohio Rivers. The
prosperity evaporated with the introduction of ice manufacturing
equipment in 1892, and the land became the home of a chicken ranch,
which abruptly failed. The land was sold to N. T. Taylor, who
farmed it until 1921, when Edgar Streifthau began rebuilding the
levy and excavation the lake, which had been filled in and farmed. The pattern continues at Americana under Berni's direction. In the past two years, almost 800 feet of midway have been added to the park, as well as a new game building, a food complex ,and, structures to house the Hanneford Circus and 180-degree movie. But for the past 16 years, Streifthau, now 82, has been busy building another amusement park next door. His new domain now includes over 250acres of pastures and woodlots for his buffalo and deer, 34 rides, picnic facilities, swimming pool and motel. Howard Berni is less than amused by the transformation. As he interpreted the contract he had with Streifthau, Berni said, "technically, he wasn't supposed to put a park up within a hundred miles of us. "We left the door open when we made the original contract with this fellow," he added. -"He took advantage of a loophole, which was unfair, in a sense, but it's something we have to live with." For his part, Streifthau said "I have no bad feelings against him, but he certainly doesn't like me. I've invited him to come by here at any time; I'm never ashamed of what I'm doing. If there were some way to cooperate, I think it could be an advantage to both of us - our competition, for both of us is Kings Island" he said, "not each other. We're not catering to the same group of people." Streifthau said that Fantasy Farm was intended to appeal primarily to families with small children, while Americana targeted your singles and teenagers." Berni doesn't seem to share that perception. "Basically, any amusement park is going after the same people. I would say that Kings (Island) is basically going after the teenager these days," he said. "We, in the past, have been going mostly for the families, but we will be bringing these big rides in, and then we'll go for the same group. The guy next door (Streifthau), he's going after the teenagers too." Identity plays a major role in the success of an amusement park, and both Fantasy Farm and Americana are working to define themselves in terms attractive to the patrons they want to lure. LeSourdsville Lake became Americana for precisely that reason, Berni said, though ,some persons were upset with the change when it was made, "It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the name LeSourdsville," he said. "it just wasn't a name that stayed in your mind, and nobody could spell it. We decided to change the name to change the image after the expansion. We were trying to get the image of the old park out of their minds. That was the whole bugaboo of the thing. And in the last two years, it's been on the upswing all the way." Curiously, when Berni stopped using the name LeSourdsville, it started to appear in Streifthau's ads, and the two men make one of their periodic appearances in court. Streifthau was ordered, Berni said, to make clear that his park was not LeSourdsville, bus was located at a community called LeSourdsville. And so on. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Just a Ferryboat Scheme Grew Into LeSourdsville
By Ozzie Kleinas It was clearer water that led Edgar Streifthau to build an amusement park - an elaboration on his ferryboat scheme, actually. He figures it must have gotten started around 1920. The "war to end all wars" was over, he and his two brothers were back from their Army stint repairing motorcycles at Chillocothe's Camp Sherman, and suddenly crowds of young persons were looking for good places to swim. Well, Edgar knew opportunity when he heard it knocking. In fact, Edgar knew opportunity when he hear it breathing faintly across town. It wasn't blind luck that transformed him from a 19-year old motorcycle mechanic to a 20-year old partner in two motorcycle dealerships. The dealerships were running smoothly by 1920, and young Streifthau needed new vistas to conquer; hence the ferry. He got a boat and ferried swimmers across the Miami RIver to the mouth of Twin Creek, where there was a reasonably comfortable beach area. The operation didn't take in a lot of money, but it allowed Edgar to keep active. The only problem was that the creek often ran muddy, which drastically reduced the urge to swim, similarly reduced Edgar's income, and started him thinking. Of only two memories he can recall of the two years his family spent on a farm between Amanda and Middletown, one is a vivid picture of ice being loaded on the canalboat A chunk got away once, he said, and his brother tried repeatedly and fruitlessly to fish it from the water. And in 1921, Edgar thought of ice again. He thought it might be feasible to rejuvenate the old LeSourdsville Ice Pond and make it in to an artificial lake. By that time, the ice operation had been abandoned, the lake filled, and the land farmed. For about three months Streifthau and his workers used teams of horses and slip scoops to build a new levy. At the same time, his crews were building a dance hall, bathhouse, lunch counter and picnic areas. Canal water was used to fill the lake, and on May 8, 1922, LeSourdsville Lake opened. Admission to the park was a dime. For that price, customers could swim everyday during the season and attend the dances three nights a week. The popularity of the park wildly exceeded Streifthau's expectations - he had to enlarge the bathhouse three times during the first summer. Also exceeding his expections was the number of brawls that occurred during his dances. "LeSourdsville became a major battleground between Hamilton and Middletown. It seemed to me that that was their meeting place where they had all their fights," he said. "After three and a half years, I decided I'd had enough; I'd never run another dane (in fact, it was 12 years before dances returned to LeSourdsville)." At about the same time, on May 8, 1924, Edgar married Nellie, and remains married to her today. She bore him two children - Lindy, named after Charles Lindbergh; and Anne, named after Lucky Lindy's wife. "I was really a lIndbergh fan," Streifthau explained. Over a period of 8-10 years, 30 cottages were built at the lake, rented by the week, month or season. In 1928, it was a shooting gallery and a merry-go-round that were added, and in 1940, the roller coaster went up. In 1934, Streifthau took on a partner, architect Don Dazey, who also became park manager. Edgar kept expanding his mIddletown hardware business and in 1936 started building LeSourdsville Subdivision. When Dazey died in 1959, Streifthau decided to sell his interest in the park. As he explained it, "they (Dazey's heirs) were going to sell his interest, and I was concerned that they might sell it to someone I wouldn't get along with." And in 1963, he started building Fantasy Farm, with absolutely no fear that its location next to LeSourdsville would increase the chances of failure. "In all my operations, there's one thing I could stress: it never entered my mind that I would fail. I wa sure that I could put anything over that I wanted to, and I put up enough effort to do it." "I'm getting pretty much to the end of my string now," Streifthau said. "I know the day is coming when I'll be incapacitated, but as long as I have anything to do with anything, I'm sure there will be some expansion in it as long as I love - I love to accomplish something." Progressively worsening arthritis keeps Streifthau from being as active as he'd like, though he still spends his days cruising the park on his motorized three-wheel bike. What he really misses, though, is on-site supervision of construction that's continuing in his subdivision. Because of the arthritis, he said, "I can't get on and drive those tractors, trucks, Cats and 'dozers; I just love to do that." _______________________________________________________________________________________________ French Fries and Galleries Turned It Into Americana
By Ozzie Kleinas "I was born in the business," Howard Berni said. From at least two perspectives, he's absolutely right. First, his is the fourth generation of the family to become involved in the international amusement business, and second, he actually entered this world in a home directly across from Palisades Park in New Jersey. Most of the Berni's have operated concessions in various amusement parks, though others have diverged from that path - the great, great uncle who made organs for merry-go-rounds, for instance, or the uncle who ran a park in Johannesburg, South Africa, until WWI arrived and the British rounded up all the Italians and locked them in camps. Howard operated his first stand in 1940 or '41 at Cedar Point, when he was only 15. He sold french fries, a very hot-moving item in those days. Before too long, he and his partner had become successful enough to put in rides and shooting galleries. When both he and his partner went into the service, operation of the business was left to his girlfriend (now his wife). The partners returned to Cedar Point and continued as they had until 1959, when ownership of the huge park changed hands. The group of investors had originally planned to tear down the park and build a development, Berni said, "but they met such resistance from the people in the area tat they decided to go into the amusement park game, and became very successful." In his estimation, Cedar Point today is second only to Disney in quality and number of patrons served in a season. Berni left Cedar Point and began looking for his own park, he said, "because I knew that sooner or later a large outfit like themselves would have to operate all their own concessions." He looked exhaustively in several Midwestern states until suddenly, Don Dazey died, and LeSourdsville came up for sale. He bought the park in 1960 and completed his first operating year in 1961. "I was looking forward to upgrading the park," he said. "We din[t have the enormous capital we would have liked, so we had to play it by ear. We knew what we wanted - to make a nice looking park, and one families could enjoy." Much of the profits from the operation, he said, were pumped back into renovation or expansion. "I feel that you must continue to grow, whether you like it or not, because people like to see something new all the time. We try to bring in something new every two or three years. "Folks who haven't been here for 15-20 years came by and said they couldn't believe the changes that have occurred," Berni said. "We have changed from a, to put it bluntly, a dirty old park, to something to be proud of. We have three shifts of workers who do nothing but clean the park. "It took us so many years to develop this; that's why so many people have not come back to see this yet, because it was not the cleanest park," he added. Of his amusement park neighbor, Berni said, "it's a different operation, but it has to affect us. That's along story and I don't want to be involved with it. Both he and Kings Island keep us on our toes. We're not big enough to hurt Kings in any sense, but they do know we're here." _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Dive for car keys at Americana Park Middletown
Journal Americana
Amusement Park will open the 1979 season on Memorial Day weekend
with 300 contestants jumping into 880 gallons of green (lime)
Jello in a contest to win a special edition 1979 Pontiac Trans
Am valued at $13,000. Keys will be hidden in pieces of plastic
fruit at the bottom of the Jello but only one key will fit the
new car’s ignition. Contestants will jump in groups of 100
on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. All contestants will get a chance
Sunday to try their key on the Trans Am. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ Americana Theatre for Thrill-Seekers
Middletown Journal Americana Amusement Park will feature a new attraction, the Great American Thrill SHow, at the park this season beginning May 26 during the grand opening. THe show is an unusual process production in 70mm motion pictures filmed aboard stunt plants, helicopters, roller coasters, hang gliders, Grand Prix auto races and the like. The production utilizes a special 180-degree spherical filming technique showing these breathtaking thrills on a large, three-dimensional dome screen that surrounds the audience and gives the intense feeling of participating in the sequences, according to producers. Americana has completed construction of the special theatre in which the 16-minute film will be shown. The film wa acquired from Graphic Films, a pioneer in dome film projection systems since its production of "To the Moon and Beyond" for the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. The show will be presented free to Americana patrons each hour on the half hour beginning at 11:30 each morning during the season, May 26 through Labor Day. Americana (formerly LeSourdsville Lake Amusement Park) is located south of Middletown on Ohio 4. |
