"There's a park near the city, yeah all the kids dig it Lagoon now" — The Beach Boys, from "Salt Lake City," 1965
FARMINGTON — And a happy birthday to the place in Utah I loved as a kid and that now makes me sick.
Lagoon.
The iconic amusement park/Utah institution turns 125 years old today.
Many happy re-rides.
Pretty much anybody who has a history with Utah has a history with Lagoon — the park were people have been congregating since it first opened its gates in 1886 and incredibly has never gone out of style. Lagoon was cool before saying cool was cool.
My personal history with Lagoon dates to when I saw Herman's Hermits there when I was in high school, back when they had concerts on weekends and I could ride the roller coaster without throwing up.
Of even greater significance, Lagoon is the place where my grandfather met my grandmother.
Adolph Bengtsson — who changed his last name to Benson for spelling and pronunciation purposes but didn't change his first name because it was before World War II — came to America from Sweden as a teenager around the same time Lydia Wistadt was born in Nebraska to parents who had just barely emigrated from Sweden.
Both Adolph and Lydia eventually wound up in Utah, but they never laid eyes on each other until one summer day when they went to an annual event called Swede Day at Lagoon.
Sometime during all the Swede mingling and reminiscing about how great the winters in Stockholm were, Adolph and Lydia hooked up, said, "Hur st? det til" and the rest, as they say, is history — including mine.
No Lagoon, no column today, or any day.
I drove to Lagoon this week to see it anyone there might have any idea where Adolph and Lydia might have met. Did anyone remember Swede Day?
Dick Andrew said he did. Dick is vice president of marketing for Lagoon, and while he doesn't go all the way back, he goes back as far as 1956, when he was a 16-year-old student at Davis High School and Lagoon hired him to work the Cat Toss game on the midway.
In 1956 they still held Swede Day, and Dick took me to the spot where he remembered the Swedish people used to come in native costume and do some sort of dance around a kind of May pole. Only today the pole is no longer there, or the gathering spot, because it's been taken over by the Jumping Dragon, a ride that goes backward, forward and around in a circle and looks to me a lot like waterboarding.
"We used to have quite a few ethnic groups come and we still have some," said Dick, "but over the years I guess they assimilate into American culture and run out of gas."
A big part of Lagoon's remarkable endurance, Dick suggested, is its own ability to change and evolve with the times. Swede Day isn't all that's come and gone. Take the big concerts for instance. Virtually every top musical group of the 1950s and early 1960s used to play Lagoon. The Beach Boys, for example, came so often in the '60s that they put the park in the lyrics of their song "Salt Lake City."
But two things happened over time, said Dick. One, the venue, which seated around 3,500, became too small for the musical acts and their expanding stage demands. And two, the musical acts veered away from the mood Lagoon wanted.
"It dawned on the management that Janis Joplin didn't fit with a family friendly atmosphere," said Dick.
So the concerts, like Swede Day, faded away.
But not Lagoon. One way or another, for 125 years now, it has always continued to pull in the crowds.
"You know what's great about this place?" said Dick. "It's a place where the entire objective is to make people happy."
And all the kids dig it.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Monday and Friday.