2024: 52 Ancestors 52 Weeks: Week 25 (June17 – June 23) … Storyteller

My mother was the storyteller… the teller of all the family stories she had so silently listened to as a child… saving to tell me one day… and from my love of paper and pen… I wrote them!

I was never a “storyteller” as a child, but I loved stories… as Mama often told me how I asked for stories of where our family came from. Was that the beginning of my love of family history and stories through the years?

The first stories Mama told was the early evening ghost stories she told to the neighborhood kids on the front stoop of our house. They would gather on quilts Mama laid on the grass… waiting to be scared. Those stories came from the ones she’d heard as a child… making her afraid to venture outside in the darkness of night. While I don’t remember one stitch of those stories told on our stoop… Mama tells of how they made the kids so scared, that she often had to walk everyone home afterward!

While Mama loved to talk and tell the tales… she wanted nothing to do with paper and pen and would say how I most definitely didn’t take after her in wanting to write. If only my inner love of collecting and writing stories began when I was a child… Oh, I’d have so much more. It wasn’t until after I married and moved to Connecticut, that I began writing… more like scribbling stories down for… one day!

After leaving home, memories and stories seemed to be of more importance to me… they suddenly became more important in wanting to remember… and I suddenly was also hearing new family stories… so different from mine… and I could never get enough of hearing about Savin Rock.

My husband grew up in West Haven, Connecticut… a town over a thousand miles away of where I grew up… and so completely different. His hometown was set along a strip of beach that had housed a park known as Savin Rock… a place so unlike anything I could have ever imagined growing up alongside of. Even though much of it had disappeared before he was born… he heard the stories and saw the photos… and there was still much along Beach St. for a young boy to enjoy with the many attractions like Peter Franke’s Fun House, Laff in the Dark, Scooter’s Bumper Cars and the famous carousal… still there from the late 1800’s.

I was asked by fan page, Laff in the Dark, to write on the defunct fun houses of Savin Rock after reading my stories on them. It can be read HERE.

From the first stories told of Savin Rock… I was hooked… wanting more! I squirreled those stories away to write one day… stories that made me feel like Savin Rock had been a magical place. After hearing them so often through the years, it almost made me feel like I also had walked through those amusement facades… hearing the thunder of the rickety wooden rollercoaster and the shrieking of the famous laughing lady in the polka dot dress. She was hubby’s Grandma Minnie’s favorite attraction… not to go inside, but just to park nearby and hear her laugh while enjoying an ice cream. There’s no one that grew up in West Haven during the years before Savin Rock’s demise in 1967 that doesn’t still remember hearing the laughing lady… and some will admit they hid their faces and plugged their ears in riding by… in being that scared.

Those stories were told around every table at family gatherings… mesmerizing me… leaving me wanting to hear more.

When I came to West Haven in 1971… sadly, most of Savin Rock had been demolished, except for several local drive-in eateries… like the famous open-air hot dog stand called Jimmies. Hubby’s first job was there… cutting onions and helping on the hot dog grill… a two-week experience that left him jumping ship after working way into the late hours every night on the weekend; it was the place you brought your dates on weekends… not necessarily where you wanted to work.

My husband and I sit alongside that very beach today… sitting in the very area where he walked to the Fun House on the corner of Summer Street… and there’s never a day when someone doesn’t mention a memory of Savin Rock… saying, “Let’s go to the Rock!“

Thanks for Reading… Jeanne

To read more 2024: 52 Ancestor Stories 52 Weeks, click HERE.

More Savin Rock stories… HERE.

© 2024, copyright Jeanne Bryan Insalaco; all rights reserved