Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 8, 1993 TAG: 9308050130
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By PETER GILSTRAP THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
When did this whole thing begin? This whole dinosaur thing? Definitely long before the billboards with the familiar flayed skeleton and below it only the words "Coming June 13." They didn't even have to put the name on it.
Not that you could miss it. It was everywhere. You could wear it, suck it, potty-train your schnauzer on it. There were Jurassic Park Jaw Breakers the size of a midget's fist, McDonald's plastic dinosaur cups, wild-cherry-flavored Raptor Bites, T-shirts, hats and enough newsprint to wallpaper the Kremlin.
I'm no more pagan than the next guy, but I'd like to think that all those prehistoric behemoths had something that doesn't show up in any fossil: a soul.
The big lizards had it. Spielberg sold it. And that gets me where I live. Or maybe where a young kid used to live, someplace where a small, black-and-white TV showed grainy images of a scaly monster having Tokyo for an appetizer. That monster was cheap and awkward, as believable as Santa Claus. And that was fine by me.
Was everything that mattered today based on an advertising budget and promotional tie-ins? Has innocence and simplicity gone the way of the scaly beast?
The best way to find out was to get in a car and start looking. So I did. I followed the little chrome hood ornament of my Chrysler Le Baron west, all the way to the intersection of Patsy Cline Memorial Highway and Route 340, 90 minutes out of Washington, a point in the green state of Virginia called Double Toll Gate.
There I found the Greenway Baptist Church, a rib joint, a gas station and a brontosaurus.
Actually two brontosauruses and a tyrannosaurus rex, a dinosaur trio baking there in the sun in a tangle of traffic lights and telephone wires.
They looked good, huge concrete slabs of things left over from a time long ago, a time when dinosaurs ruled the roadside-attraction business. Back when sights like this caused people to stop their cars and get out, which is exactly what I did.
The sign caught my eye. Standing grandly between a fake waterfall gushing something brownish and frothy, a 7-foot beaver and a grinning octopus the size of a hook and ladder, it said simply, "Dinosaur Land."
What's a land without gifts? There was an adjoining store with its very own billboard, offering simple items from a vanishing America: belts, music boxes, leather goods, knives, toys, jewelry and this message: "Educational Prehistoric Forest."
The place looked sweet, pure and cheesy all at once, and there was ample parking. Who was behind all of this? What manner of folk could keep a business going that consisted of a couple acres of cement and fiberglass monsters? This is 1993, after all, and the modern public demands big, glossy, moving attractions. Rides where you get wet. But I wasn't going to find out anything standing in the parking lot.
In the gift shop, back behind the rows of moccasins, ashtrays, T-shirts, beer and wine-making gear and a full complement of Harley-Davidson accouterments is a woman named Barbara Seldon. She is a friendly lady who smokes. She and her three sisters run Dinosaur Land 10 months a year, seven days a week, and they have since their father died in '87.
His name was Joseph Geraci, and this place is his vision - Geraci Park.
It all began back in 1960 as the "Rebel Corner gift shop," she tells me. Then in '62 he and the missus took a little trip to Florida. They saw some dinosaurs down there and "happened to run into the man who made them at a miniature golf course," she says. The man was Jim Sidwell. His laboratory was in Pigeon Forge, Tenn.
Geraci "decided to get a couple big dinosaurs to put out front to draw attention," she says. "Over the years he kept adding and adding, then he opened up the park and moved them all in."
They've got 35 of them now, enough to draw about 30,000 people each year, Seldon says, particularly on Sundays. "Usually after church we get a big crowd."
There is a door at the rear of the gift shop, and for $3 American I can walk through it. It doesn't look like much; it might lead to a storage area or a porch, but then I think: Who would pay $3 to get to a storage area or a porch? It leads directly to Dinosaur Land, as it has for the last 31 years.
Seldon has graciously offered to act as tour guide on my trip through the Land. We enter a primeval fiberglass tunnel of brown and white stripes that takes us to three dark tree trunks. They all have faces - red noses, blue eyes and gaping mouths, one of which I step through.
A sign points to the "photo room." I don't know what to expect, but it's a good thing I didn't expect to see dinosaurs. There is a small wooden sign leaning against the wall that says, "Authentic Reproductions Of The Prehistoric Past." It is next to a life-size replica of the Mummy, and on the other side of the room is Frankenstein's monster.
"Dad was the type of person who always wanted to try something different," Seldon says with a shrug. But Hollywood monsters in the Cretaceous period? "He just thought that would go big. But they didn't go anywhere near as big as the dinosaurs."
After viewing a cave couple and a Winnebago-long shark, we turn on Stegosaurus Drive, and finally I see why they call this place Dinosaur Land. A full view of its inhabitants stretches out before me. Amid trees only as old as the park itself are the silent images of yester-millennium.
A weather-beaten mammoth stands near a large cactus that looks like a pickle. A real live sparrow flies into the mouth of a pteranodon ("winged without teeth," informs the educational sign) that is the color of a headache.
In a clearing, a silent, motionless "Epic Battle" is taking place - has been for a while now - between a titanosaur and a tyrannosaur. The tyran looks to have the edge - a gash the size of a trash can lid is open on the side of the titan - revealing plenty of gore and rib cage.
There are pine cones in the mouth of the tylosaurus - "the Sea Lizard" - as it sits in what would be called a pond if it had water in it. "It's the kids that did it." The beast looks dazed and dehydrated, and its tongue is sticking out; hell, the thing looks sad. "This is a pretty good attraction if we keep water in it," Seldon says with a sigh. "But the kids would dive right in."
But the tylosaurus can't compare to the mighty King Kong. So what if he wasn't around a few million years ago? His massive countenance dwarfs most everything else here, and you can even sit in his mighty outstretched palm.
Kong is not the only questionable period piece. We move on to a King Cobra all reared up and inflated - "he's way out of proportion, but we like him. Who knows how big these things were?" No less strange is the 9-foot praying mantis that, well, no one's here for a history lesson, right?
The mylodon is up next and quickly becomes my personal favorite. With a name that sounds like a bad '60s fabric, and a large red tongue poking out, the upright figure looks basically like a sloth from a Marlin Perkins nightmare.
He's missing a claw.
"Kids," says Seldon.
Maybe this place proves you can play by your own rules, or make them up as you go along. So what if some of the dinosaurs of Dinosaur Land aren't the right size, or the right color, or if some of them aren't, technically, dinosaurs?
This place doesn't do what it's supposed to do; it does what it wants to do and makes you respect it. You aren't being entertained. You're entertaining yourself.
by CNB