1924: THE DARK FRIGATE by Charles Boardman Hawes
Philip Marsham was bred to the sea as far back as the days when he was cutting his milk teeth, and he never thought he should leave it; but leave it he did, once and again, as I shall tell you.
Here’s the opening of chapter fourteen of 1924 medalist The Dark Frigate, page 144 of the paperback I got from the library. As a reminder, this book is supposed to be about murderous pirates, literally the cover blurb says “Captured - by a band of murderous pirates!” Here it is, chapter fourteen of a swashbuckling and perilous adventure on the high seas:
“If an astrologer or an Arabian enchanter could say to a man, ‘Beware of this or that, for it is a thing conceived of the Devil to work thy ruin,’ there would be reason for studying the stars or smiting the sand. And this, indeed, they do, according to the old tales. But if a sailor seek out an astrologer to learn things that shall profit him, he is more likely to find a man grown foolish by much study, who will stroke his chin sagely and say, ‘Come, let us look into this matter. Under Capricorn are all diseases in the knees and hams, leprosies, itches and scales and schirrous tumors, fallow grounds and barren fields, ox-houses and cow-houses, low dark places near the ground, and places where sails and materials for ships be laid.’ And while he talks of fixed angles and of the Lord of the Ascendant being in the fourth week, some small unsuspected thing may be the very egg on which the Devil is sitting like an old black hen to hatch forth a general calamity. Thus certain incidents that shortly thereafter happened are to the point, for although they appeared of little moment at the time, they turned the tide of men’s lives and made a stir that has to do with the current of my tale.”
The Dark Frigate is the single most boring novel ever written. The fake novel1 in the episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Debra tries to lend one of her books to Ray and he keeps falling asleep every time he reads it, that book was less boring than this one. I got through over 50 Newbery winners - many were good, some were brilliant, some were laughably dated, some were horrifyingly dated - before finally getting to one that was just a brutal slog. I have nothing else to say about the book and plenty more to say about pirates as they relate to my childhood.
Look, this whole essay series is an experiment in revisiting childhood, which accompanies the real-life revisiting of childhood that I’m doing right now as I, you know, raise two children and live with two toddler-copies of myself, which feels like something Dante cooked up for my soul in the afterlife. So a lot of these essays veered into other books that I read and loved as a child or other movies I watched as a child or television that I watched as a child, and I’d like to take a few hundred words to tell you about some amusement parks that I visited as a child. Growing up in suburban Chicago mostly in the 1990s and 2000s, there were a few options if you were willing to drive, even if you weren’t willing to go as far as Wisconsin Dells, the hottest vacation spot in the upper Midwest.
The largest major theme park in the area was Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois - about an hour north of the city and still open today - which built up rapidly throughout my childhood, advertised heavily on TV every summer, and was the site of the eighth grade graduation field trip and multiple Physics Day trips in high school, because I took two years of physics in high school, because I was a dork. The ride offerings were basically identical to every other Six Flags park (the best coaster there is Raging Bull, but I am now too old to do coasters and not get sick). I once applied for, and was offered, a summer job there and declined it to make sandwiches at my local Potbelly shop instead.
The west side of the city was home to Melrose Park’s Kiddieland, home to a more traditional 1950s vibe in its ride selection and general aesthetic. The park was demolished in 2009 and is now home to a much less traditional Costco Wholesale, but the sign for Kiddieland is so iconic in suburban Chicago culture that the Melrose Park Library bought it and still displays it in their parking lot.
Places like Kiddieland - niche mid-size theme parks that aren’t owned by giant entertainment conglomerates - are a dying breed. The carnival used to come to one of the local parks in my hometown of Park Ridge, Illinois every year so the kids could ride that little Dragon Wagon roller coaster and Ferris wheel and that doesn’t really exist anymore either. They were hard businesses to run before COVID, and COVID certainly didn’t help, and the industry consolidated just like movie studios and movie theaters and bookstores and malls and coffee shops and now everything is flat and hot and concrete and steel and has a licensing deal with some dogshit Nickelodeon series.
There was one very niche theme park I remember from my childhood so fondly that I set a scene there in my most recent novel, Rosemont (which is, largely, about Chicago's Northwest suburbs and all of their absurdities). It was called Pirate's Cove, in Elk Grove Village, and it was a theme park specifically for children under the age of 12, adults wouldn't even fit on the attractions and thus weren’t charged admission. It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated theme park: it had a little train that made maybe a 60 second circuit, and it had fun little paddleboats in a fun little pool, and that was really as complex as things got, but it was pleasant and unassuming where other parks were garish and annoying. And perhaps the most important thing to know about Pirate’s Cove is that it’s still around if, say, you grew up visiting there and decades later you now have two young children of your own:
Yes, that’s right: as I’m writing this, I am still basking in the glow of my previous morning’s visit to Pirate’s Cove, the jewel of Elk Grove Village, Illinois. It has changed exactly zero percent in the past thirty years. The paddleboats are still there2, although “Ye may get wet”:
Pirate’s Cove 2023 ruled. We got there shortly before the park opened at 9am and had the run of the place for about 90 minutes; by the time the place started really hopping at lunchtime, we were out of there because it was naptime anyways. The park is not very big at all, and my four-year-old could do the whole thing without ever needing a stroller. My one-year-old probably could too; she couldn’t do as many of the attractions but loved the Safari Train:
“What about outside food, Tony?” Oh don’t worry, you can bring in all the outside food you like, because there are three different picnic table zones and one of them is onboard Pirate Pete’s Pirate Ship:
Soarin’ Schooners was closed that day for maintenance and I didn’t even care, we were having so much fun we wouldn’t even have had time to get to it. My four-year-old said “this is my favorite place”.
The entire park is staffed by a gang of very friendly hungover sixteen-year-olds in matching “crew” t-shirts, ready to lend your child a hand with the rock wall or to help them put down their burlap sack so they can go down the Pirate Plunge slide. Whichever one of them won that morning's arm-wrestling contest to pick the playlist for the speakers absolutely nailed it and we had an entire morning of no-skip hits of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and today, "today" of course being 24 years long. It’s just wonderful to see the teens with good steady public-sector jobs.
See, that’s the most striking thing about Pirate’s Cove, something I didn’t realize when I was there as a child: it’s a public good. While they charge admission for children and sell souvenir pirate hats, most of the funding from the park comes from the taxpayers of Elk Grove Village, whose park district maintains and runs the park.
That’s the thing: every for-profit theme park, like every for-profit business in any industry, has to keep growing its profit. It has to keep accumulating more, more, more, which means it has to cut corners on cleaning the park and tear down old rides and replace them with flashy new ones and find cheaper vendors for the corn dogs and find a way to stomp on their workers as much as possible and occasionally sell the land so the park can become a Costco instead. Pirate’s Cove is not trying to make a profit, it is simply trying to be a good place where the little kids can play in Elk Grove Village. Everything is well-staffed because the goal is not to get more done with less than you had last year. The attractions all appear to be exactly the same as they were when I was four years old, because you don’t need to bring in new visitors every summer with some new draw. The park is spotless because the taxpayers are paying for it to be spotless.
Now, the problem is that Pirate’s Cove can’t exist just anywhere. Elk Grove Village is generally well-off as Chicago suburbs go, and the full park district includes 473 acres, and you don’t maintain that unless your residents are comfortable enough that they can pay some decent property taxes. But property taxes, that thing which homeowners famously complain about all of the time, seem a lot less burdensome when you can get 473 acres of parkland, including a place as awesome as Pirate’s Cove, in exchange for those taxes. Communities pooling some of their resources to make something that can just be a nice place for their young children to play together can be, as it turns out, a very good thing, and maybe proof that we can occasionally approximate something like civilization.
The bottomless hunger for profit might kill us all. Our energy industry has a bottomless hunger for profit, and they’ll probably fry the Earth as a result. Our healthcare industry has a bottomless hunger for profit, and they leave people dead and sick and bankrupt and alone. Our housing industry has a bottomless hunger for profit, and we have hundreds of thousands of unhoused people in our country while countless apartments sit vacant. The profit motive in the theme park industry is perhaps not a very direct threat to the future of human existence compared to those examples. But there is proof, in the jewel of Elk Grove Village3, that taking out the profit motive doesn’t stop us from having nice things we can share with one another, things we can pass on to our children. The Dark Frigate blows.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1958 medalist, Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith.
Which was obviously a stand-in for Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.
Any photos with children in them come directly from the Pirate’s Cove website, as I’m not the kind of guy that generally likes taking photos of strangers’ children and posting them publicly.
Referring, again, to the theme park, and not the chain supermarket in Elk Grove Village, which is called, of course, Jewel.