Lunch: Taco Lite (no tomato), Chilada, Coke
Taco Casa's slogan is "Still the same since 1972".
No freaking kidding. Have you ever seen something so awesome in your life?
Food's good too.
It was while having lunch that I saw the headline about the Jantzen Beach Thunderbird Inn burning down. Wow. The landmarks visible from the I-5 bridge are falling at a rapid pace in recent years. The Waddles sign now touts Hooters. Jantzen Beach Center may as well be gone.
The Thunderbird (the original Red Lion Inn) was an expansive property with multiple buildings (two of the six apparently survived the fire). In its heyday, it was a beautiful top notch hotel and convention facility. It's been closed for the past few years, supposedly in the way of a new bridge (though Walmart wanted to build there once.) I saw some pictures taken of the interior just this year by somebody somewhere. Still looked pretty nice.
I'm pretty sure I never ever even once set foot in the hotel, but the sprawling facility was instantly recognizable in my mind. It was an impressive sight when driving over the bridge. And hearing the news of the fire got me reminiscing about the Jantzen Beach area in general, at least as I saw it in the 80's and 90's.
Jantzen Beach started out as an amusement park in the 1920's. One of the original investors was Carl Jantzen, co-founder of the Jantzen swimsuit empire. The amusement park's amenities included four swimming pools.
In the 1970's, the amusement park made way for a shopping mall. A merry-go-round from the amusement park dating back to the 1920's was installed in the mall, and is still there today. The mall's history has always been sketchy at best (the whole area...shops, cars, condos...have always been targeted by thieves), but I liked the place. There was always something just a little different about it.
It was the last place I ever saw a Whirla Whip vendor. When Stereo Super Stores liquidated their Jantzen Beach store, I got a new pair of speakers for my '75 VW Dasher wagon (yellow with fake wood paneling!) for five bucks. (The car had a factory AM-FM 8-track with stereo sound...the left channel being in the center of the dash, the right being in the right rear quarter panel.) Even when I was living elsewhere, I'd drop in when visiting the area.
I have a memory from my childhood of being in the mall's Montgomery Ward looking at a small race track toy that was one uni-body piece of plastic with cars roughly the size of Hot Wheels. It had a mechanical pump winder that fired the cars from a rubber wheel peaking out from underneath the starting point, which upon contact, sent them flying around the track. The motor made quite a racket, one that for whatever reason I hear in my head now when I play Tiny Wings. When the birds drop into a dip and go flying, I hear that noise. Every time.
Most of the mall was demolished in the 90's in favor of big box retail. The rest of it is apparently going to be demolished (if it hasn't already) as part of a Target store replacement project. (Target currently operates a weird 2-story store in the old Wards building.)
I wandered the remaining wing a few years ago. It just made me angry. They'd painted all the wood beams in a dreadful gray and navy color scheme. Few businesses were still operating in there, mostly local mom-and-pop oddball shops. The few 'customers' inside all seemed to be homeless people using the place as a daytime hangout.
At least they're claiming the merry-go-round will be salvaged...even restored.
Still, won't be the same.
