Curbside Kiddie Attractions – MOM!!! Can I Ride??

Doesn’t it sometimes feel like life is all movement, yet going nowhere?  Back and forth, up and down. But at the end of the day we’re right where we started. Or as Shakespeare and later Faulkner noted, life is but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So in that vein, here’s today’s tale of a favorite American pastime. Paying to sit in one place, making no forward progress, but having an imaginary blast nonetheless.

As much as I am fascinated by vehicles that take you places, it should be clear that I’m also enthralled by conveyances that turn out to not actually convey you anywhere. Here in the U.S., such things have developed in the form of “kiddie rides”; and as we will eventually see, the same concept in general applies to many amusement rides.

By kiddie rides, I mean those machines that sit in commercial places and consume parental small change in return for a few moments of entertaining the kiddies. This assumes that the kiddies are entertained by some amount of janky music and being jiggled up and down. More often than not, these machines come in the form of a horse, although the ponies have always had animal and vehicular competition as we will soon discover.

From the looks of this horse that lives outside of a grocery store near me, clearly a whole lot of jiggling has been going on. Those round spots on the ride’s front legs are wear marks from years of little feet climbing up on the thing.

Kiddie rides have been around in one shape or form for just about 100 years. Odds are, similar devices entertained many of us well before we mounted things that actually took us from point A to point B. The typical kiddie ride starts at Point A, and then ends at Point A. Nevertheless it seems that this is just fine for the kiddies.

You might assume that the kiddie ride in 2025 is entering its twilight years. After all, kids today have a vast array of entertainment options and the idea that they could be appeased by a circular ride to nowhere, gently bobbing up and down, seems ridiculous. But as “one manufacturer of kiddie rides” [said for his industry in 1953]: “Our business depends on the kid’s imagination. Do you think the little ones will ever run out of it?”.

Maybe, maybe not. But let’s suspend some of our 21st century cynicism, fire up the old imagination, and take our own trip to nowhere except in our minds, into the memory palace and down the rabbit hole of kiddie rides.

I could produce plenty of primary and secondary sources about the kiddie ride industry and the larger field of “mechanical amusements”, but I’ll leave exploration of the vast depths of that material to those who may have a serious interest in “cheap” amusements, consumer culture and the history of technology. For everyone else, you can simply head to one of the best secondary sources that reported on the American entertainment industry – The Billboard (otherwise known simply as Billboard). That’s right, the same Billboard that later drilled itself into our heads via Casey Kasem’s weekly run down of the top 40 from Billboard‘s Hot 100 weekly chart.

As it turns out, The Billboard was founded in 1894 and lo and behold back then it was actually about billboards. Advertising, that is. For the majority of its epic run as a publication, Billboard devoted pages and pages to documenting the business of amusing and influencing the public. Over time, this coverage encompassed everything as prosaic as billboards and signs, to all manner of coin-operated concessions, carnivals, circuses, and of course records and jukeboxes.

 

For example, if you have ever wondered if anyone had developed the concept of putting chewing gum vending machines on public buses, Billboard is the source that answers that question.  By the way, this silly idea – selling chewing gum on buses when everyone knows that all the gum you want is available for free under every seat – from nearly 75 years ago is still percolating somewhere in Europe. Turns out that someone is continuing to market bus vending machines. I’ll let you go explore that rabbit hole on your own.

We’ll be here when/if you get back.

Billboard ran a special supplement on Kiddie Rides in its January 31, 1953 issue. The supplement is really something you need to read in detail, and fortunately the entire archive of Billboard is available online and is easily searchable.  This is the type of Internet treasure that totally makes me glad to be living in the future. You can access the entire searchable Billboard library here.

 

Billboard‘s January, 1953 special insert consists of 17 pages of articles, vendor profiles, and ad upon ad for kiddie rides. The overall thrust of the copy is to convince the reader that kiddie rides offer big profit to retail business. There are no less than two different stories discussing how a JJ Newberry store in Brooklyn, NY replaced their unprofitable soda fountain with a row of 14 kiddie rides that “now” pull in nearly $400/week. Double that during the peak retail month of December (“Kiddie Rides Replace Fountain at Brooklyn Newbury Store”. The Billboard, 1/31/1953. Page 71). Apparently that’s good money; and in a foreshadowing from 72 years ago of 2025’s AI-related employment trends, that $400 could be made without the waste and bother of hiring humans to jerk soda (or whatever a soda jerk does). Nope, where once there was a counter where people could sit and talk and interact with the employees, Newberry’s now had a row of 14 jiggling children, each lost in their own fantasies.

While mom and dad were free to leisurely shop – and spend money – in peace.

It’s All About The Horses (‘Tis Said They Eat Each Other)

What interests me the most about the insert’s 17 pages is the insight provided into what the best-selling, most popular, kiddie rides were in 1953. I was particularly surprised to find out that these were the three items shown in the above photo — horses, space ships/rockets and boats. Curiously, cars seldom figured into any of the lists of popular kiddie ride attractions.

 

I say “seldom”, but there was one ad. Note that this ad leads with the bullet that the Hot Rod car was the “perfect companion” to the kiddie ride horse and cost half the price of the horse.  Seems that somewhat extraordinary measures were necessary to convince operators to deviate from the horse/rocket/boat sure shots.

The kiddie ride horse was invented in 1931 and patented by James Otto Hahs of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Initial copies were made in Mr. Hahs’ home workshop, and eventually at his company – Hahs Machine Works in Sikeston, Missouri. Amazingly, Hahs Machine Works still seems to be in existence as a family-owned company (doing exactly what, I cannot quite figure out). Hahs called his invention the “Hahs Gaited Mechanical Horse” and produced it at the Machine Works through WWII. He had been fortunate to be able to position his invention at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and later at the 1939 New York World’s Fair where it was reportedly very popular. After the war, Hahs teamed up with the Exhibit Supply Company of Chicago that bought the rights to the Gaited Mechanical Horse and soon realized the tremendous potential of a coin-operated, kid-occupying, machine in the explosive postwar retail expansion. Think, shopping centers, suburban self-serve grocery stores… malls. From that point, the kiddie ride business, with horses at its forefront was off to the races.

Post-WWII, these new child entertainment devices were perfectly positioned to cash in on the national baby boom and in particular the Boomer generation’s overall enthrallment with horses. This mania for horses was certainly a product of the popularity of Westerns on the then new and wildly popular medium of television. This boom in Westerns really kicked off in the early 1950s; and by 1959, there were over 30 Western-themed shows running on prime-time television.  That’s of course in addition to the constant daytime (after-school) broadcasting of Western films from the 1930s and 1940s. These plentiful and inexpensive films filled hours of daytime programming and stared the likes of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, etc. and of course their horses (e.g., Trigger, the model for one of the most popular horse-based kiddie rides). So, in the 1950s, well into the 1960s, Westerns were everywhere, firing the imaginations of a vast generation of American kids.

 

The aforementioned Trigger, also produced by Chicago’s Exhibit Supply Corporation, was naturally popular due to its tie-in to the marketing prowess of Roy Rogers. The 1953 Billboard issue devotes an entire article to discussing how Roy and Dale (Evans, Roy’s movie/tv/real life wife) leveraged Double-R-Bar merch (“Trigger Proves Merchandise Tie-Ins Pay Off In Extra Volume, More Sales” Page 75. Nothing subtle there.).

Without a doubt, competition among the manufacturers of horse-based kiddie rides was intense.

 

Perhaps even more popular than kiddie ride Trigger was Champion, Gene Autry‘s horse. It may have helped that Bally, the producer of the Champion ride, was the General Motors of amusement machines for most of the 20th century. Bally had the Midas touch in what seems to have been a rather cut-throat, horse eating horse, competitive business. No doubt the power of Bally managed to put a lot of mid-century youth into Champion’s saddle.

Some of those kids may have had as good a time up there as did Miss Yvonne (“The Most Beautiful Woman in Puppet Land”) on the Playhouse’s well-restored Champion. Let’s hope so.

And Cows

 

As a general point, it does seem that first wave of Baby Boomers were simply all about riding on animals. As we’ve seen, horses of all sorts were favored, but there were also lions, rabbits, ducks, reindeer, and cows. Of course, if you’re talking cow, you really need to be talking about mid-century America’s favorite talking cow, Elsie.

Maybe I was just born a bit too late – by the time I came around in 1961 the post-WWII baby boom had pretty much petered out – but I’ve never understood the attraction of Elsie the Cow and her bovine nuclear family consisting of daughter Buleah, son Beauregard, and of course husband/bull Elmer. In fact, I found her essential physiology – a cow’s head on a human female’s torso plus hooves as “hands” – tremendously creepy.

My point exactly.

Nevertheless, Elsie (the advertising cow-woman) was another product of the 1939 New York World’s fair, and if that’s not enough for you, her “husband” Elmer (the advertising bull-man) invented Elmer’s Glue.  Really, I kid you not.

 

Originally called “Cascorez” glue, Elmer’s Glue-All was invented by the chemical products division of Borden’s. I think that all dairies should have chemical products divisions. It contained the milk protein casein, but hopefully no other cow-derived substances. Anyway, after coming up with a catchy new name for the former Cascorez, Borden’s gave Elsie a husband, and her husband a job at the glue factory in 1953.  Elmer’s glue was born.

I don’t believe that Elmer ever received his own namesake kiddie ride, but the Elsie ride was apparently quite popular and may have been the most popular cow-ride except for the one that Debra Winger rode in that movie (Here or even better, here. “She’s alright, I guess. I’ve seen better.”).

 

Elsie is still bringing in good money if you can find one. This one was offered at Barrett-Jackson several years ago.

More Driving, More Fury, But Ultimately Still Rather Circular

The dearth of kiddie-rides modeled on actual motor vehicles (versus cows and horses) shouldn’t get in the way of discussion of the bumper car, or as it was originally known, the “Dodgem” ride. Dodgems aren’t precisely kiddie rides, but are rather amusement rides. While they weren’t as conveniently located in front of the grocery store or at Woolworth’s/Newberry’s – Dodgems were always my go-to amusement, preferred much over the slow go-nowhere jiggle ride.  Because, you know, they’re about actually driving something, even if you really don’t go anywhere aside from (maybe) around in a circle.

 

The supposed idea behind a Dodgem car, as expressed in its 1921 patent application was that these devices were intended to be driven, but through the addition of “novel instrumentalities to render their manipulation and control difficult and uncertain by the occupant-operator” fun would ensue. (Paragraph 10 in the application. I added the part about “fun”.)

Not unlike a Tesla Cybertruck or a Dodge Hellcat.

It seems that the Stoehrer family, that invented the Dodgem, expected occupant-operators to try to drive the things, but acknowledged that “dodging” other drivers would be challenging (i.e., fun) given the complications built into the user interface. The first Dodgem ride was installed on the Salisbury (Massachusetts) Beach boardwalk; and apparently riders quickly learned that the fun to be had came from slamming into other drivers while attempting to make forward progress.

 

The rest of course was history. Over the course of the next 100 years, subsequent generations of Dodgem “drivers” learned to forego making forward progress and to just slam into stuff. For fun.

This fun of course proved to be such that soon the Stoehrer and Pratt Dodgem Corporation quickly faced competition, notably from the Lusse Auto-Scooter company that produced the now-iconic Auto Skooter “bumper car”.

 

The pages of Billboard in the 1920s and 1930s were filled with ads from Stoehrer and Pratt slamming and threatening potential competitors. Apparently things got rather nasty, and the Stoehrers seemed to be a pretty litigious bunch. One of my favorite Stoehrer lawsuits (it’s all out there on the Internet…) was when Stoehrer sued Glen Echo Park (in Maryland, I lived a short bike ride from there) trying to prevent the park from operating Auto Scooters that used the chicken wire ceiling conductor that Stoehrer had originally installed on the park’s Dodgem ride. The courts sided with Lusse and Glen Echo by noting that Stoehrer and Pratt didn’t invent chicken wire and if the park wanted to run electricity through it to power another manufacturer’s vehicles, that was fine.

Curses! Foiled again by the ubiquity of chicken wire.

 

Stoehrer and Pratt must have had quite the reputation, since they somehow managed to sufficiently tick off the courts such that the memorable line of “the interveners [Lusse] had the right in respect to the articles before the court to require the plaintiff [Stoehrer and Pratt] to leave their customers alone and it was the plaintiff’s duty to leave them alone.” appears in the appeals court decision. In other words, Stoehrer needed to stop harassing other amusement parks for adding Lusse Auto Scooters to their Bumper Car/Dodgem pavilions. Or at least to find another argument than the one about the chicken wire.

Should anyone feel badly for Stoehrer and Pratt, their headquarters in the Bay State Building in Lawrence, Massachusetts (pictured above) still stands despite the company going out of business in the 1970s. Today, you could rent an apartment in that building as it’s been converted to residential real estate. That’s assuming you want to live in Lawrence, which as someone who has had an office in Lawrence, I’ll just say that you may want to think hard about that before committing to anything.

Lusse may still be in business. They have a website, although I suspect that this is mostly a tribute site to an officially departed company.  Both Stoehrer and Pratt and Lusse likely succumbed to competition from Italy, which seems to have taken over the bumper car market. Those are Italian bumper cars in the picture above of me and the kid at the wheel.

For what it’s worth, in addition to auctioning kiddie rides, Barrett-Jackson has also sold vintage Auto Skooter cars. Ironically, the Auto Skooters are the bumper cars that seem to have taken over the pop culture imagery of what  bumper car should look like. Even the Dodgem cars eventually found their way to looking pretty much like the Auto Skooter. Perhaps Lusse in the end got the last laugh on the folks from Lawrence.

If I Had A Boat

As long as we’ve diverged from our primarly topic of coin-operated kiddie rides and instead dived head first down the Dodgem/bumper car rabbit hole, it’s worth mentioning another bumper ride.  This is one that’s proven quite successful in my area (due to a local arcade/picnic venue/corporate retreat/ice cream place)…bumper boats.

You probably get the idea of what these things are all about. Historically (if anyone is applying the term “historically” to bumper boats, and I may be the first person to do that), these devices bridge the gap between the popularity of kiddie ride watercraft and bumper cars.  What I like about them is that due to the fact that they cannot employ electrified chicken wire – because…water – for power they instead rely on actual ICE motors.  You sit in a thing where you are steering an outboard motor with handlebars and bashing into people.

Ok, bashing into people in a kind of fetid pond, surrounded by exhaust; but hey, it’s a totally hands-on authentic experience with all of the aesthetics of paying to sit at nose level to your lawn mower. In water.

 

Well, perhaps you have to be there.  Or perhaps if you were/are there, you’d get seasick and exhaust-inhaling sick just like I do whenever I’m pressed to go to Bumper Boats. Usually, I try to bail out early and head for the associated mini-golf.  As much as I hate golf of any sort, it generally beats the nausea of Bumper Boats.

Back to kiddie rides, I haven’t seen a boat-based kiddie ride in quite some time. I recall them from various jiggling locations – grocery stores, Woolworth’s and the like – as a kid. Honestly, I have never cared much for horses whether they were fiberglass or real, so perhaps for that reason I gravitated to the boat rides. I particularly like the steering wheel and probably would have chosen a car ride, if there had been any; but true to what Billboard reported, most jiggling locations had a horse, a boat, and maybe a rocket ship. Take your pick.

I recently found a somewhat more contemporary version of the kiddie ride rocket ship. I may have liked to ride in this thing if it had been available at a location near me in say 1966.

What of course I don’t get is why whoever produced this ride – or at least whoever operated it  – didn’t change the name.  Leaving a kiddie ride space shuttle named “Columbia” is a bit morbid. But maybe that’s just me. Or maybe it did get pulled out of rotation after the tragedy in 2003 and that’s why it is now residing at the barbecue restaurant in New Mexico where I found it.

All Our Yesterdays

This in a way brings us full circle in the kiddie ride discussion. While it’s unclear just how often modern children ride these things, they still hold tremendous nostalgia – and perhaps a degree of longing – for many adults. I can’t remember the last time I saw a kid jiggling on  one of the grocery store horses like the one in our lede photo. In fact, I’m kind of surprised that my go-to grocery chain continues to maintains kiddie rides in front of all of its stores. And yet, they do still turn up not just at my grocery, but other places as well. This Cat In The Hat ride is a bit worse for wear, but it appears to be functional, at that barbecue restaurant in New Mexico. Likely this is quite entertaining (much more than can be said for the movie that inspired it) for the children and keeps them occupied while the parents relax with beers in this restaurant’s outdoor seating. Keeping kids occupied while parents consume…a mission as valid today as when Otto Hahs developed his horse in 1931 and as Billboard proclaimed it an amusement phenomenon in 1953.

 

This particular ride was produced by a British company called “Jolly Roger” in 2004. Its method of action is the basic slow jiggling accompanied by “music”. Most of the examples I’ve found online have absolutely awful, barely audible, sound tracks. Fortunately there’s one video that offers just the soundtrack. The Cat’s tune sounds remarkably like the the opening theme to the Simpsons.

The Simpsons, by the way, apparently declined to take a page from Roy and Dale’s playbook and have yet to license their intellectual property for kiddie rides.  Although I’m told that there is currently a Simpsons amusement ride at Universal Studios.

Kind of too bad. I could imagine a Homer/Apu ride placed in front of, say, Trader Joe’s (aka “Swapper Jack’s“). Manjula’s exhortation of “Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!” could be the soundtrack.

While we’re waiting for that ride concept to be developed, there’s still an empty seat next to the Cat in Hatch, New Mexico.

Or on Sénior Horse, who seems to be regularly repainted, and ready to be ridden if not today, then certainly tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.