7 Old-Timers Go to Bat for Long Beach’s Old ‘Pike’

They’re all gone from Long Beach’s Walk of a Thousand Lights now--Reckless Ross, the Stone Man, Painless Parker, the bullet-riddled Al Capone Car (which really wasn’t), the Oklahoma Mummy Man (which really was, although no one knew it at the time).

The Walk of a Thousand Lights, better known as the Pike, is about 997 short today.

It’s a 13-acre asphalt desert inhabited by a couple of abandoned buildings, junked cars, a cafe, a bar and, lit up by a red copper sign, Looff’s Hippodrome. Looff’s, which is topped by a cupola, offers a 64-seat, pinball-bingo game called Lite-a-Line (“The World’s Most Thrilling and Fascinating Skill Game!”).

Most of the 86-year-old amusement park’s land has been acquired by Pike Properties Associates, which unveiled plans last week to transform the area south of Ocean Boulevard into a $1-billion development of office towers, hotels and condominiums, but no tattoo parlors.

But Al Brown, Looff’s 80-year-old proprietor, and six other private owners have refused to sell their parcels.

The holdouts in this litigious sideshow, a quarter-mile inland from the Queen Mary, have been given a tentative deadline of Oct. 1 to change their minds. Otherwise, the city’s Redevelopment Agency could begin eminent domain proceedings.

“I’ve been here (at the Pike) nearly my whole life and I’m not leaving,” said Brown, who has worked at Looff’s for 66 years. “I’d just as soon be buried here.”

Like the other holdouts, Brown is intransigent partly for nostalgia’s sake and partly for money; he contends that he has been offered too little for his two vacant lots, about $175,000.

Brown also owns part of the profitable, 77-year-old Looff’s operation; the land belongs to a daughter-in-law of the founder. The pinball-bingo parlor, usually at least half filled, draws players seeking cash prizes of up to $25. (The courts have ruled that it is a game of skill and therefore legal under state law, as opposed to games of chance.)

“My attorney and me will fight this, you better believe it,” Brown said of the redevelopment plans.

He sounded as unbending as the Stone Man.

“What was the Stone Man’s name?” Brown asked his manager, Al Davis.

“Roy,” Davis said.

“That’s right, Ossified Roy,” said Brown, the Pike’s unofficial oral historian.

“Had arthritis or something, so he couldn’t move his arms or legs,” Davis recalled. “He’d lay on a slab, and people would come and look at him.”

They were talking about the Pike’s Sideshow Museum in the park’s glory days--the 1920s, ‘30s and the war years--when looking at a motionless person on a slab still constituted entertainment. It was before television, of course, and before more sophisticated parks like Disneyland presented unbeatable competition, before the city replaced the Silver Spray Pleasure Pier with landfill.

The Pike more or less went out of business in 1979, when its main operator shut down operations to make way for the development.

“They had a headless chicken, too,” Brown remembered. “Life magazine ran some photos of it. Then there was Al Capone’s Car, too. Really wasn’t, of course. They just found some car at the junkyard and had the police shoot it full of holes--police would do things like that back then. . . . “

He was sitting in his office, surrounded by photos of the period when the Pike offered more attractions than any Southern California park, including the first “dark rides” (i.e. “fun houses”) that are now so popular in the Magic Kingdom and elsewhere.

It was eerily quiet outside, except for the sounds of an earthmover.

“Marjorie Williamson,” Brown said with a sigh, pointing to a shot of 100 entrants in a 1925 beauty contest at the Pike. “She’s the one in the boyish-bob haircut and the silk-skin bathing suit. She was a real beauty, you better believe it.”

The term, “Walk of a Thousand Lights,” still found on the property records, was the marketing creation of the park’s promoters in the early 1900s. No one seems to know the derivation of the Pike nickname.

Brown started working at Looff’s in 1922 as a fare collector on a carrousel while still in high school. The merry-go-round, which was dismantled in 1980, graced the current site of the pinball games. It was at a nearby popcorn concession that Brown met his wife-to-be, Lavona, in 1931.

The Pike drew thousands in those days, and the rivalry among the carnies was fierce.

Reckless Ross’ specialty was riding his motorcycle round and round the walls of his barrel-like arena, while spectators watched from above.

When he was devoid of business, Reckless would lie down underneath his motorcycle and scream.

“His helper would come running, and Reckless would yell at him to call an ambulance,” Brown said. “Pretty soon an ambulance would be there--it was all part of the act. And then they’d announce to the crowd that had gathered that Reckless had suffered a terrible injury and had to go to the hospital. But first he wanted to play one farewell performance.”

Brown laughed.

“Reckless might have several farewell performances in one day,” he added.

Daredevils could be created on a few minutes’ notice.

Once, Brown recalled, the Flaming Man called in sick for his performance, which consisted of sliding down a cable from a nearby hotel into the ocean while on fire. A local painter volunteered to replace him.

“His name was Harry Tipple,” Brown said. “They doused him with kerosene and lit him on fire. I guess he didn’t know he was supposed to wear an asbestos outfit. He started screaming, you better believe it. The crowd did too. They loved it, thought it was part of the act. The poor guy fell into the sand about halfway down. Fortunately he wasn’t burned too badly.”

Crowds also used to gather to watch brave souls be worked on by a dentist named Painless Parker. Painless--his first name had been legally changed to that--would demonstrate the wonders of anesthesia.

“He’d put on quite a show, you better believe it,” said Brown. “He’d get some old guy already hyped up on Novocain beforehand--he didn’t want people to see the needle, I guess--and he’d say, ‘I’m going to extract a tooth from this gentlemen painlessly! Why he’s more comfortable than you! He’s sitting down!’

“Then he’d gently pull it out and drop it in a bucket so it’d make a noise. And he’d pass out his cards. He had an office on Ocean Avenue.”

The carnies and performers were the real stars of the Pike but occasionally the celluloid types would use the park as a backdrop. The Cyclone roller coaster (“The World’s Greatest Ride!”) was eaten by the title character of “Monster From the Bottom of the Sea” (and destroyed for real in 1968, by developers, to make way for the construction of Shoreline Drive).

Everyone from The It Girl, Clara Bow, to the Six-Million-Dollar Man, Lee Majors, appeared in films shot there. It was the latter production that occasioned the discovery of the Oklahoma Mummy Man.

“We’d heard it was the mummy of an outlaw,” Brown said. “No one knew whether it really was because there was so much b.s.”

The Mummy Man hung from the ceiling of the Laff in the Dark fun house until the day a member of the film crew attempted to move him and accidentally pulled off an arm, revealing a bone.

The story made headlines nationally and the Mummy Man was subsequently identified as Elmer McCurdy, a small-time bank robber who had been killed in 1911. His body was later sold to a traveling show.

Ah, happy memories.

“It was a great time, you better believe it,” Brown said.