Happy birthday to Children’s Fairyland, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.
It all began in 1948, when Arthur Navlet, who owned Oakland’s largest floral nursery, and William Penn Mott, the city’s parks superintendent, approached the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club with a novel idea: an amusement park for little kids on the shores of Lake Merritt.
The club agreed to sponsor the park, and Mott and Navlet hired painter, sculptor, photographer and industrial designer William Russell Everett to design it. In two weeks, he presented them with a scale model of the first set, the Merry Miller’s Cottage, a perfect reproduction of a medieval English cottage.
Mott hated it. He didn’t want realism, he wanted whimsy, a cockeyed, child’s-eye view of the grown-up world. Enraged, Everett is said to have grabbed a baseball bat and smashed the model to pieces and stormed out of the room, with Mott and Navlet sure they’d never hear from him again.
Everett is said to have returned a week later, though, with a new model that was oddly askew, with no square sides and was painted in crazy colors.
“That’s it!” exclaimed Mott. Thus was born the motto that has ruled Children’s Fairyland ever since: “No straight lines and a surprise around every corner.”
Mott spent a lot of time in the children’s room of the Oakland Public Library to check out what the kids were reading so he could turn their favorite books into sets for Fairyland.
Years later, he met the library’s director, who told him, “We used to see you hanging around the children’s section all the time, so we decided to put special guards on you to see just exactly what you were up to. The staff thought you might be a child molester.”
Mott was amused by the suspicion, but the issue of children’s safety was no laughing matter. So he and Navlet devised a simple policy to keep the bad guys out that has remained in force to this day: No child admitted without an adult, and — here’s the important part — no adult admitted without a child.
Soon the Merry Miller’s Cottage was joined by the Jolly Trolly, Willie the Whale (With the Curly Tail), the Happy Dragon, the Wonder-Go-Round, the Three Men in a Tub and Oswald the Bubble Elf, who sits atop his gigantic mushroom blowing bubbles through his pipe. On the base of Oswald’s mushroom is a plaque with a quote from Oscar Wilde: “The best way to make children good is to make them happy.”
On Sept. 2, 1950, Children’s Fairyland opened its doors. More than half a million people visited the park in its first year, including Walt Disney, who modeled Fantasyland on what he saw, but with one big difference: Fairyland was designed to be interactive, not passive.
Except for the Jolly Trolly and the Flecto Children’s Carousel, there are no rides per se. Children climb all over the Pirate Ship’s rigging; pet the sheep, goats, ponies and miniature donkeys in the Animal Corral and climb down Willie The Whale’s gullet to see the fish in the aquarium in his tummy.
They play chimes, gongs and harps on the walls as they run through the 118-foot Fairy Music Farm tunnel; eat munchies in the Teddy Bear Picnic Area; and take in a puppet show in the Storybook Puppet Theater or a live musical production on the Emerald City Stage or Aesop’s Playhouse.
Yes, everything at Fairyland has a storybook name, from the Fountain of Youth drinking fountain to the restrooms labeled “Hansels” and “Gretels.” Though Fairyland was designed for tiny tots, many of them didn’t want to give it up when they got older.
So the Storybook Personalities program — now called the Children’s Theater program — was created to give them a way to retain their contact with the park. In addition to performing shows, they stayed in character to greet visitors and represented Fairyland at public events, including Oakland’s July Fourth parade.
“They always warned us to watch our step when we walked behind the horses,” recalls Storybook Personality Katie Love.
Another Storybook Personality was former Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who played Raggedy Ann in 1975.
“It taught me how to speak in front of large groups, to be on time, to work well with others and to be responsible for the commitments I make,” says Schaaf, who still has her Raggedy Ann wig. “But most of all, it taught me to be kind.”
Martin Snapp can be reached at catman442@comcast.net.