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Boardwalk Images by Emily Seibel Yates
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“I’ve grown up here. This has been my whole life,” Tom explains of his time on the boardwalk.
His earliest amusement park memory? “Dino the dinosaur!”
You can still ride the Cave Train and look out for Dino to pop up every few minutes, spouting water from his mouth. The dinosaur hasn’t aged a bit since 1961.
Walking through the park today is overwhelming—in the best way. Bright lights gleam from the retro-fabulous signage and whirling, colorful rides. Appealing scents waft through the air. One minute, you can almost taste the fried sweetness of oversize stuffed churros, a boardwalk specialty; the next, you’re catching a familiar whiff of pure beachiness, the gentle scent of salt water. All senses merging, you can’t help but feel the tug of nostalgia on your heartstrings.
Tom loves the opportunity for reminiscing. “One of the best things is when parents and grandparents walk in with their kids and I hear them saying, ‘I remember when,’ or ‘I did that when I was a kid,”
he says.
Santa Cruz native and longtime park employee Tish Denevan took her first trip to the boardwalk when she was just an infant, and her family had been customers long before she was born.
“My whole family has been coming here for the whole time the boardwalk was in existence,” Tish explains. “I have pictures of my grandparents at the boardwalk in 1917.”
“The boardwalk means family to me,” she says.
rides taken on the Giant Dipper since its opening in 1924.
60 Million
"The Boardwalk means family to me..."
Never Let the
“No one goes to an amusement park to have a bad day.”
A little cliché, Tom Canfield admits, but he says it’s
simply true.
Tom is Executive Vice President of the Santa Cruz Seaside Company, owner/operator of the oldest amusement park in California: the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.
The company and the park have been in his family for generations. Talk to any longtime Santa Cruzian, and there seems to be a trend—years of family memories at the oceanfront amusement park, which first opened its gates
in 1907.
On any given Sunday, more than a century later, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is still packed with thousands of visitors, mostly families with young children. Absolutely no one seems to be having a bad day.
Paint Fade
by Emily Seibel Yates
While others chased short-term profits, California’s longest-running amusement park had its eyes on the horizon.
Pride for the park
In it for the long ride...
Preserving the rides that families have enjoyed for generations has always been a priority for the Canfields. “They care deeply about it,” says Tish.
“For most people that grew up around here, you get to see things that you remember from when you were a kid,”
she says.
Two of the rides that have been painstakingly preserved over the years are the parks’ pride and joy – The 1911 Loof Carousel and the 1924 Giant Dipper wooden roller coaster. Both have been designated as National Historic Landmarks, putting them in the same category as Mount Vernon and the Alamo.
“The carousel needs someone almost full-time to maintain those horses, repaint them, to maintain the nicks,”
Tish explains.
“I remember talking to the guy who repaired our organ from 1896,” she recalls. “It went all the way to Ohio by train to be fixed, and the guy in his 80’s who repaired it said that a lot of people would not put that kind of effort into maintaining the history of their parks.”
Investing time, energy, and funds in the park’s history
has paid off.
After enjoying the amusement park as a customer throughout her childhood, Tish got her first boardwalk job as a ride operator in 1978. (It was the Red Baron kiddie airplane ride, in case you’re curious – and of course, kids still ride it today.)
“Some of my best friends are still my friends from when I was a ride operator,” Tish says. Since those days, she’s held 13 different jobs for Santa Cruz Seaside Company—from training operator to security officer to safety manager, she’s done it all, and worked her way up to Community Employment Manager.
The Canfield’s respect for the park and long-term commitment is contagious, Tish says. “There is a lot of pride in the family for the park, and you cannot help but feel a sense of pride and a connection to that as a long-term employee,” she explains.
That seems to extend to the entire Santa Cruz community, as well. “People feel like this is their park too,” says Tish. “They are Santa Cruzians, and this is their park, which is really so sweet.”
To me, it seemed that even the sea lions splashing in the Pacific and sunning themselves on the wharf nearby seemed to keep a watchful eye over the boardwalk park—and did so with a proud smile.
In its earliest days, the boardwalk was one of many seaside amusement parks across the West Coast. Tom Canfield describes the business strategy of the majority of other park owners back then: “They used it as a cash cow and milked it for all its worth.”
Tom’s father, Charles, and his grandfather before him, Laurence, both had long-term visions for the Santa Cruz Boardwalk; they knew they needed to invest in the business, and saw that was the best way to grow. While other owners let their parks fall into disrepair or sold out for beachfront housing developments, the Canfields pressed on.
Today, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is the only major seaside amusement park left on the West Coast. In a modern world where many demand instant results, the Canfield’s long-term perseverance and dedication to tradition is even more refreshing.
“The reason why people who run amusement parks do what they do is because we provide the opportunity for families to make memories with their children,” Tom explains. I noticed he didn’t mention money.
“We’re an open-gated park, so people only pay for what they use; they can walk in and not spend any money at all and just enjoy being with the family,” he says.
Tish Denevan echoes the sentiment. “There’s so much free entertainment,” she says. “I came from a family of nine kids, and we didn’t have a lot of money, and you could come to the boardwalk and not spend a lot of money and still be immersed in the rich experience.”
Today, the park has free concerts on Friday nights—Eddie Money recently performed—as well as free movie screenings on Wednesday nights, and two “retro nights” per week, where all rides are
only $1.50.
