Do you have a special place that inspires nostalgia? Somewhere you absolutely must go when you revisit your hometown?

One of mine is Bay Beach Amusement Park in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I’ve been thinking about it this week because during my childhood, Bay Beach was the place to go for Fourth of July fireworks.

The park has been a recreation area for 120 years. In 1892, Mitchell Nejedlo purchased the land and built a dance hall, bar, and bathhouse. He hoped to sell summer cottage sites, but the road was impassable to horse-drawn buggies when it rained. In 1902, Nejedlo teamed with Captain John Cusick, who ran a steamboat down the Fox River to the bay. Cusick bought out Nejedlo in 1908. Frank Murphy and Fred Rahr acquired the park from Cusick in 1910. In 1920 they donated it to the city.

By the 1930s, Bay Beach featured swimming (soon phased out due to pollution), a roller coaster, shoot-the-chutes, a merry-go-round, baseball games, and dances. President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the park as part of Green Bay’s tercentennial in 1934.

Judy’s father, Russ Widoe, held onto his engineer image and became a popular children’s TV host, Colonel Caboose. Until a few years ago, I had never realized that Russ was manager of Bay Beach until 1954. I simply knew him as Judy’s daddy, who drove the train. I did know that Russ put on a lavish outdoor production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at the park. I was achingly jealous when Judy got to play a small part in the show.

My favorite attraction was the pony ride. I still have home movies of a tiny me, circling the ring on one of those ponies. As an adult, I felt sorry when I remembered the ponies, plodding monotonously in the sun. I assumed animal activists had done away with them. But the ponies are still there, operated by the third generation of the Van Bellinger family. I’m delighted that they evidently have been well-treated all along.

Fireworks displays began at Bay Beach in 1936, but moved downtown in 1988. Bay Beach was not only the first place I watched fireworks on the Fourth, it was also the safest. The showers of pink, green and gold sparks arced high over the bay and plummeted to extinguish themselves in its chilly, indigo waters. (Local joke: Explorer Jean Nicolet, who named La Baie Verte, caught it on an off-day. The water is normally blue. But Nicolet saved us from having to follow Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, in the atlas.)

Today the park is still a destination for locals and tourists, with forty-five acres, sixteen rides, seven shelters, a dance hall, picnic grounds, playground, and fields for softball and volleyball. A new roller coaster, the Zippin Pippin, was added in 2011. Happy Fourth, Bay Beach—I’ll see you soon!

Going to Green Bay? Want to know more about Bay Beach? Visit their website at www.baybeach.org/