This is Pastime that only cost a dime back in the 1960s, but still lives on today, bucking and kicking while chasing down the imaginary ‘bad guys’ riding along the streets of Warren.
It seemed in the mid-to-late 1960s, and maybe even earlier, there were several kid-sized pay-to-ride horses to climb astride for a dime.
Later, I recall somewhere in town, for at least a little while, there was a silvery spaceship/rocket ship to ride with its own sound effects.
By Maylon Rice
Saline River Chronicle Feature Contributor
But back to the “Ride the Champion,” hydraulic and electric motor pony ride.
The Kroger store had at least one out front, and at times possibly another type of similar ride outside the store in Warren at the north end of Main Street.
The rides were so tempting as you would be entering the store with an adult, who was often in a hurry and needed just a minute or two of peace and quiet (and I was anything at these adolescent times, but examples of peace and quiet.)
If there was no other kid astride the brown or yellow painted pony ride, the adult might let you go and sit on the horse while the quick shopping spree inside the grocery store was being accomplished.
Usually this was after an intense and always whining debate about the spending of a dime, placed in the coin slot, to make the horse move back and forth in some sort of imagined stride as riding the metal steed.
If the answer was “NO” from the adult as to the expenditure of the dime, I remember begging to just sit on the ride and be no trouble while the shopping was being done inside.
Often, I won that intense debate for the alone time, outside the store, alight my mythical steed.
I sat there in constant fear that the next car would pull into the parking lot with a gaggle of kids each with a fistful of dimes would descend upon me – without a dime – but astride that mechanical steed.
But always, I was hoping the store’s change from the adult’s purchase might net out a thin dime for that 5-minute ride once the shopping was complete.
While the adult was in the store, even aboard that unmovable steed, I rode like the wind, chasing down bad guys, just like Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers, and the entire clan on Bonanza – Adam, Hoss, Little Joe and poppa Ben Cartwright.
I envisioned myself just as raw and rough a cow hand as Rowdy Yates (a thin, young Clint Eastwood) on Rawhide.
Or I could be that fearless leader, John McIntire of Wagon Train, but I seriously wanted to be the grizzly and fuzzy face of Frank McGrath, who played the wagon train’s cook, Charlie B. Wooster.
Why Charlie? I guess because he had that fuzzy white and grey beard.
And he rarely got shot at!
But back to the horses and where else in Warren these rides were located.
In the deep recesses of my mind there was one along Main Street, either outside Carl’s Shoes or was it the West Brothers Store down near the U.S. Post Office?
This one was under a business’ awning along Main Street, but out during the day and I guess the business owner rolled it back inside the front door at night.
But maybe not?
But there was also one, but I think it was inside the United Dollar Store on the east side of Main. The long-time cigar chomping manager, Henry Jolly, had a pocket full of dimes, so he could talk with the adults and flirt with the housewives back in the day.
Bob Neel, had a mechanical horse at his grocery store by the Southern Mill. So did Aubert Reynolds Grocery which was out along near the Corral have a riding horse at one time or another.
Again, a dime was the cost of the 4–5-minute gyrations of the pony.
These machines, in the beginning back in1931, came from Otto Hahs, head of the locally known Hahs Machine Works, in Sikeston, Missouri. He built a mechanical horse for his youngsters and their playmates. Hahs immediately, according to legend, saw the possibilities of the horse as a commercial venture, and he soon was working on a unit adaptable for coin-operation.
Some of the horses, over time, lost their bridles and reins. Their colors faded in the sunshine and from every frequent scuff marks of kids, often wearing their best pair of shoes to town to shop for school clothes. I can, at times, recall being barefooted on a quick trip to town, so often the cool metal against my bare feet felt oh, so cool on a hot summer’s day.
The spaceship I recall was at the liveliest small grocery store in town, the Paint Pot, an iconic store with an eclectic owner. The spaceship was there and made these pre-recorded space sounds, or at the time of all the early U.S. Mercury Space program trials, what one envisioned the sounds of rockets in space made.
The silvery container you sat in veered up and down with the nose of the rocket ship pointing up. There were two steering controls with flashing buttons you could push and a “zing, zing, zing,” sound was made.
It would be almost a decade (1966) before the Star Trek came to the snowy TV screens in Bradley County and the sound of that space rocket at the Paint Pot sure sounded like the phasers used in battles on Star Trek.
As with many such items at the Paint Pot, such as pinball machines and other types of riding machines for young kids, it was there today and gone tomorrow.
I spent a U.S. Treasury cloth sack full of dimes in my youth, imagining riding the Western Trails and later transversing the galaxy all the while, safely tethered to a metal contraption my elders’ thought was the biggest waste of coin currency around.
A Pastime today still as vibrant as the first time I climbed aboard that painted metal Champion pony outside the Kroger store in Warren.
