[NJARC] Fame and fortune?

[Dave Sica]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:42:02 -0400 (GMT-04:00) Nick Senker
<ns539 at earthlink.net> writes:
> I grew up in this area and have been traveling the 'cloverleaf' for 
> 50 yrs.  Yes it has changed to the point I try to avoid it.  It's a 
> neat photo from 1930 or so; what's the wavy track in the background 
> - it looks like a roller coaster? Nick Senker


Nick,

You've a perceptive guy. We had that picture here for a while before one
of us looked at it closely and said "What the heck is THAT??". 

"That" is the Whoopee Track, a sort of an amusement park for your car.
These were popular (at least to the extent that we have found photos of
one in Woodbridge and one adjacent to the Camden Circle) in the 1930s.
You drove your own car around this roller coaster kind of track. Must
have been a l-o-o-o-o-o-n-g time before the insurance industry, OHSA and
the lawyers started running our lives!

I know a fellow in Woodbridge who remembers riding on the Whoopee Track
as a passenger as a kid before he got his driver's license. Before we
found that photo buried in the state archives, a very few people
remembered the Whoopee Track, but no pictures were known to exist of it.
They publish a calendar with a historic scene of Woodbridge on it every
year and supposedly next year's calendar is going to feature that photo
of the Whoopee Track I found. After seeing that as part of her research
on the Cloverleaf story, the reporter from the Star-Ledger now wants to
research the Whoopee Track for a story, but info is pretty scarce on the
subject. I'd love to find out that someone out there knows something
about them.

For anyone who's wondering what it looks like, you can see it at
http://www.sicaproductions.com/cloverleaf_stills.html. It's visible in
the top half of the sepia-toned photo about halfway down the page. 

--Dave













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