FRIDAY THE 13TH - by John Herrington

FRIDAY THE 13TH
by John Herrington
WMV Web News Cleveland
Story filed June 12, 1997

Clevelanders; former Clevelanders; welcome guests: Lend me your ears.

I come to honor Friday the 13th...not to bury it!

I come to acknowledge triskaidekaphobia, not to hide it under the bushel (and a bushel probably would be needed to hold that many letters).

Is that an opening shot, or what!

Somewhere, sometime, a statistician said, "Due to the mathematics of the calendar, the 13th of the month is more likely to fall on a Friday than on any other day of the week."

Be that as it may, in this year, only one month has a Friday the 13th. Yep! You got it: this is the month!

(And never mind asking about the statistician mentioned above, or when he or she said that, because whoever researched that bit of information doesn't know--and the researcher admits it--anymore about it than you now know.)

Whatever...

This is the double-whammy month of Friday the 13th.

Triskaidekaphobia would be enough by itself. (One would hope so! Good grief; an at-your-side dictionary is needed just to check the spelling every time the word is used.)

A fear of the number 13, so sayeth the soothsayers (or whatever group sayeth such things).

And a Friday on top of that!

		(Footnote too high up to be a footnote:
		There are so many comments and conjecture
		on the origin of concern over the date, 
		Friday the 13th, that it hardly behooves any 
		of us to go into it at the moment.)

Let us just say that Friday the 13th is not the favorite day of many folks.

And with this Friday the

13th in June, a part of Cleveland's "near-in" history ends. (No; we're not talking about the passing of Cleveland Stadium; that Grand Old Lady was around for .... well .... lots of years longer than the subjects at hand.)

At hand are Tom Haley and Del Donahoo.

What's it been: 17 years or more? I think so...that Del and Tom and eleventymillion other folks have gotten together around the breakfast table (Hah! Table? It's a studio set "bar." Not in the "let's party" sense...in the kitchen breakfast bar sense.....and never mind, anyway).

After--(oh, swell, when the statistician mentioned earlier in this bit is needed, where is he/she to sort out the number of shows in so many years?)--a continuing caloric catastrophe of cakes and cookies, and breads and sticky rolls and other gorgeous stuff at the breakfast table (along with "Martha's Coffee"), the door to that kitchen in the neverneverland of television is closed on Friday the 13th.

The "run" (they say that in the business) was a good one.

Del and Tom are an odd couple of sorts who have this seeming love/hate relationship with the world around us: Del "loves" it and Tom, well, has a rather acerb cynicism about it. It never really comes even close to "hate". They have survived...survived each other, as well as that very fickle industry in which they work.

Those who live here, and those who have lived here probably have been part of the Del/Tom breakfast table performance at one time or another.

Visitors well might have come upon these chaps on their hotel room televisions, and perhaps thought that there was an almost-out-of-date quaintness to the half-hour of grain prices and "terrible jokes" and calendar- of-events and ringing bells and traffic reports and baseball caps and some news and some weather.

Quaint, perhaps, but it was real. That was it, folks.

A lot of people didn't want the show to end (the names of 600 of those people were on just one set of petitions protesting the cancellation), but the ratings were slipping and other stations had newscasts at that hour of the morning, and the "Today in Cleveland" station decided it should do that sort of thing, too.

Del stays on with the station news department, continuing his feature reports on people and food. Tom leaves after 50 years (there are a lot of Friday the 13ths in half-a-century) with the station, under various call-letters.

So, just a personal note (in Tom's signature close): "Lots of love (you two) and some peace."

Earlier, there was mention of the Cleveland Stadium: they're still having trouble putting up a new one on the lakefront. Bids came in $15-million higher than estimated for the foundation and superstructure of the new home of the Cleveland Browns that is to be finished ("on time and on budget," Mayor Michael White keeps emphasizing) by August, 1999. So, that's another stadium item that goes back to the drawing board.

Coming off the drawing boards for its first full season in two years is Conneaut Lake Park, that 105 year old amusement park just west of Meadville, Pa., about 100 miles from Cleveland. Friday the 13th is the opening date of its 1997 season on a daily basis, after some special events in late May and earlier this month.

Conneaut Lake had a short season last year, not opening until the Independence Day weekend. It was closed in 1995 because of financial problems.

The new owner has put more than a quarter-million dollars into rehabilitating the park's famous Blue Streak roller coaster, a classic out-and-back wooden coaster built in 1937.

Two trains have been restored to their original streamlined appearance (and the headlights work now). Miniature antique cars have been added to shuttle people through the grounds and a Fairytale Forest Zoo is now where the long-closed Jungle Cruise ride used to be.

The first 100 years of that park are highlighted in a book written by two Greater Clevelanders, Lee O. Bush and Richard F. Hershey: "Conneaut Lake Park...the First 100 Years of Fun." It's one of several books offered by "Amusement Park Books." (http://www.apbooks.com)

Bush and Hershey still are trying to put together information on the old Puritas Springs Park that was built on Cleveland's west side in 1898. Fire forced the closing of the park in 1958.

From the right angle, one still can see part of the superstructure of the park's famous (and some said, dangerous) Cyclone roller coaster that careened in and out of the Rocky River valley ravine.

The amusement-park-roller-coaster-devotees-cum-authors want to include Puritas Springs in another book, but say getting information on the old park is difficult.

So, if anyone knows anything about Puritas Springs and has aspirations of being part of a piece of the area's written history, the writers can be contacted at Amusement Park Books, (216) 331-6429.

And, with new stuff at Cedar Point, Geauga Lake, Sea World and the rest, the new amusement park season is well underway.

And coming up?

Well, a wealthy businessman is talking about turning the 1969 Woodstock Festival site (he bought it) into a theme park...

And there is talk that a "Dilbert" theme park might be in the works! The super-popular, anti-management cartoon characters of the "Dilbert" strip are in 1,500 newspapers and draw more than 100,000 visitors a day to the internet web site.

If "Dilbertland" were to be built, it is said there would be boss-shooting-galleries.

Hmmmmm.