With summer basically over since school has started, I gazed back into summers of yore in Alexandria. The memory that gazed back was City Park Funland.
It was the Circle of Life. The Carousel went round and round. The boats went round and round. The planes rose up and down and went round and round.
Granted, this wasn’t the amusement park of my youth. That would’ve been Pontchartrain Beach in New Orleans. Comparing that to City Park Funland isn’t fair. It would be like comparing New Orleans to Alexandria. But Funland, thanks to the late Jimmie Thompson, found its niche in Central Louisiana for nearly four decades, and brought countless smiles to generations of youngsters in small town Americana.
It opened in 1953, and Thompson, after thinking about it for several years, shut it down in 1990 – 11 years before he died in 2001 at age 83.
To know about Funland, you’ve got to know about Jimmie Thompson, an entrepreneur unmatched in my experience in Alexandria. He was into everything, it seemed, when it came to promoting, buying, selling or trading anything. He did it all with an optimism and confidence and seek-until-ye-find determination.
Don Thompson, one of his three sons who worked at the zoo as a youth, said his father, as a young adult, opened a skating rink on the corner of Rapides and Madison when Alexandria and the surrounding area overflowed with military personnel involved with the Louisiana Maneuvers, a large-scale military training exercise held in central Louisiana in 1941, involving approximately 400,000 troops. These exercises were crucial in preparing the US Army for World War II.
He and a friend got involved in the theater business, Don said, gradually expanding beyond Alexandria and Natchitoches to cover many theaters and drive-ins across the state, north of I-10. Then he opened the Jimmie Thompson Arena on North MacArthur Drive (site of the current Sai Convention Center) mostly to host professional wrestling, although a young Elvis performed there during his Louisiana Hayride days.
Then he got involved hosting rodeos. “The story is,” said Don, 66, “he went to a big rodeo in Texas and saw how much the cowboys were making, and he saw how many people were there to watch, and thought about what they paid to get in, and he did the math on what he figured might be the expenses, and decided to give it a shot.”
Not one to go into anything cold cocked, Jimmie Thompson decided he must learn more about rodeoing first. He bought some livestock and property by Browns Bend Road. He learned how to rope and ride. “He even patented a stadium design,” said Don, “feeling there was a need for such stadiums that could be easily assembled. He sold stadiums all over the country. Some are still around.”
We’ll get back to Funland soon, but he and two other fellows started Bowlero Bowling Lanes, and when it didn’t go as expected, the other two wanted out, so Jimmie bought them out. This was in 1958. “He stumbled on a deal in Japan, which was having a big bowling boom,” said Don. “They were building several multi-storied bowling centers. They flooded the market, the popularity waned, and several went out of business.”
Thompson, then, started importing used bowling equipment from Japan and “sold it all over the country – pin setters, lanes, the whole shooting match.” He used an abandoned Sears warehouse as his base for shipping and building. He had a big shop with industrial type equipment where he could “build about anything,” Don said.
Bowlero eventually shut down, to be replaced by a honky tonk and then the current Surgical Center.
Back to Funland. It was initially named Kiddie Land. Oldtimers might remember Virgil Adams and his wife ran the place early on. Virgil was the general manager, and his wife ran the concession stand. Thompson’s daughter, Fay, and her husband John Day eventually took over.
If you’re wondering what inspired Thompson to open Kiddie Land, he told the Town Talk he did so at the behest of then Streets and Parks Commissioner Bill Lambdin. Lambdin said the city wanted some rides in City Park and wanted Thompson to help them, since he was a buyer and seller of carnival rides and park equipment at that time.
“The next time he met with me,” Thompson said, “he was saying, ‘We’re going to do this and we’ll do that.’ A few weeks later he came over and said, ‘When you put the rides in, you need to do this and that. It had gone from ‘us’ and ‘we’ to ‘you.’”
Anyway, against his better judgment Thompson agreed to put the rides in City Park. He’d have preferred putting the amusement park on MacArthur Drive, where he already owned land where it could have been built.
John and Fay Day’s daughter, Kitty, worked several years there, including when it was Kiddie Land.
“I was part of the park; I’m Kitty Lynn, and it was Kiddie Land,” she said, recalling her parents took over the management in 1962. “I worked there in the concession stand and moved up to the ticket booth after I learned how to count money and be responsible.”
Kitty, 60, said a benefit of the job was being able to ride all the rides for free, and there was a game room for a while, which was popular with teenagers.
The park’s longest surviving ride, the carousel, didn’t sell at auction for what Thompson was hoping. He said he turned down an offer of $65,000 when he thought he’d get a four-year lease on the park from the city and continue operating the park. When the City Council offered only a two-year lease, Thompson shut it down.
At the closing auction, the carousel was sold to a buyer from Oregon for $27,000. The Funland Express Train sold for $15,500 to a man who ran a large amusement park in Fort Worth. The black “Octopus” ride was sold to a man from Bunkie for $5,000.
“It’ll make a lot of money for him,” said Thompson, who insisted he wouldn’t shed a tear about closing the park.
“”I am not a sentimentalist,” he said after closing the park. “I live for tomorrow and always have. I have just a little sentiment about the park because of the children who came to the park to ride the rides.”
I am a sentimentalist, and now, when you drive in the parking lot for the Alexandria Zoo, think for a moment of what used to be there, and thank Jimmie Thompson for bringing that fun place to our town.