These FunTime USA icons survived Katrina. Did they make it through Cristobal?
It wasn’t that bad as storms go in South Mississippi, said Rafe O’Neal, but Tropical Storm Cristobal almost crushed his dreams for bringing back the once-popular amusement park Funtime USA.
O’Neal was on the phone during the storm when he heard a bang. He discovered a huge oak tree had fallen on a storage building where the carousel from FunTime USA was packed away since it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
“It sounded just like thunder when it came down,” he said. The base of the massive tree is on a neighboring property, and O’Neal said it is hard to see what damage might have been done to the carousel.
“There’s so much tree there,” he said.
The merry-go-round — a 36-horse Allan Herschell — had operated at the old Biloxi Park before it was moved to FunTime USA on the beach in Gulfport, O’Neal said. There it delighted families for more than 25 years, from 1980 until 2005.
“The winter of 2004, before Katrina, we restored it,” he said. “Those horses still look great,” he said, with just a few scars from Katrina. He recently used one as a prop in a theatrical production.
The Statue of Liberty and other parts of the park were destroyed 15 years ago, but the trademark Humpty Dumpty survived along with the classic merry-go-round, created by the most famous carousel maker in the U.S.
It took weeks to gather up all the parts and pack the carousel base and horses away, he said, with plans to see it spin again one day.
Setbacks and the egg
O’Neal said he has an investor who was ready to proceed with construction of the amusement park this spring. The family owns the lot, which they purchased in Biloxi after plans to rebuild in Gulfport were shot down by zoning challenges and neighbors.
“Can you imagine how beautiful this place is going to be?” O’Neal remarked in a 2018 interview as he stood near the center of the new Biloxi site, shaded, ironically, by oak trees.
The 8-acre property is about twice the size of the original and just off the beach in west Biloxi, off Walmart Road and U.S. 90, near IHOP, Edgewater Village and Beau View condominiums.
The park is designed to capture the nostalgia of the original FunTime, complete with some of the surviving sculptures his uncle Ray O’Neal, who owned FunTime USA and worked on amusement parks worldwide, built for the miniature golf course.
And they have Humpty Dumpty, who sat on the wall at the original park.
“Humpty’s just fine,” Rafe O’Neal said, undamaged by Cristobal. “He’s well-hidden,” he said, in another storage building. Over the years they caught several people trying to steal the roly-poly sculpture at the entrance to the park, especially during the 1980s, he said, when scavenger hunts were the rage. People thought they could just walk away with the egg, but it never happened.
“It took a crane to hoist him up there,” O’Neal said.
Perseverance
With a site plan, city approval for an amusement park and an investor ready to go, construction finally was set to begin this spring — until the coronavirus pandemic shutdown came in March and put everything on hold.
Nobody knows how soon families will feel comfortable going to an amusement park, said O’Neal, whose job as technical director at The Mary C. O’Keefe Cultural Center of Arts & Education in Ocean Springs also is on hold until the public is ready to safely return.
“It’s been 10 years in earnest,” he said he’s been working on the FunTime comeback.
“I haven’t given up yet,” he declared.
Despite an injured foot, O’Neal hobbled out to the storage building Tuesday to see if he could determine the fate of the carousel and how badly it might be damaged by the fallen tree.
The building is structurally compromised with a tree on top of it, so he can’t go inside, but he’s been able to look into the building and O’Neal said from what he can see the carousel survived another storm.
“It looks like all the horses are OK,” he reported. They were packed away on the side of the storage building that had the most damage. “The other parts appear to be OK as well,” he said.
“Now we’re going to find a way to get this monster tree off it and move it somewhere else,” he said.
