The Origin of Idaho’s Magic Potato Fun Village

~  In the Land of the Blind, the Man with One Eyedaho Still Wants to Move to Another State.  ~       

                It doesn’t have quite as much spiritual reward as Jerusalem or Mecca.  It doesn’t have nearly as many rabid pilgrims as Graceland.  And it’s not as zanily mysterious a Stonehenge…but it does taste better. 

                Hersheypark, the chocolate themed theme park in Hershey, Pennsylvania (a couple hours outside of Philly) had been a smashing success for decades.  People love chocolate.  Kids love chocolate.  Women love chocolate.  People love chocolate.  And America enjoys promoting less fun mild stimulants. 

                Billy Shipland grew up in Delaware, not technically a suburb of Philadelphia, but almost.  His childhood visits to Hersheypark were shimmering high points in an otherwise dreary and repetitive youth.  He remembered fondly the various choco-delights: the Wonkaesque chocolate river, the huge chocolate creations in interesting shapes, the rides, and, mainly, the gooey feel of being surrounded by simply the best stuff on Earth.  When Billy daydreamed while manning his call station at a technology help line, he usually wound up back at Hersheypark. 

                Working at a help line is bad for your blood pressure.  First off, we all use computers but, for the most part, we don’t know shit about them.  Secondly, if you work at one of these you, presumably, do know quite a bit about computers.  Third, the people who call in usually ask questions in the borderline retard range (So, if I pour grapefruit juice into my USB port I don’t get the internet?).  All of this adds up to a pretty well inevitable perfect storm wherein a helper reams out some senior citizen in Iowa for asking a simple, innocuous, ridiculously obvious question.  Generally, the caller loses self-esteem and the helper loses his job.  This is exactly what happened to Billy Shipland.  He didn’t plan on telling the kindly geriatric woman that she should’ve been aborted and left in a dumpster, but that’s what happened when she asked Billy how that world wide web effects her spice garden. 

                So Billy Shipland was out of work.  He floundered for a few weeks while searching for a new direction in life.  He even tried a few different jobs—haberdasher, cooper, Dodo hunter, anachronologist—but nothing really fit, nothing captured the imagination and gave him a reason to get out of bed in the morning.  Standing in line at the grocery store, however, he saw it.  In between the tabloid revelation about teenage pop star, Jenny O’Roarke’s, latest rant about how old men are gross and how she’s got a crush on God, and the five pack of disposable lighters, there it was.  It was so simple.  It was from Pennsylvania.  It was chocotasticexpealidocious.  It was just a simple Hershey bar, but it was enough to give Billy Shipman a whole new plan in life.  And, after exiting the line, he spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the aisles of the Piggly Wiggly, figuring out his plan.

                 Remembering how much he’d loved Hersheypark as a tot, Billy set to work mentally designing other food themed fun parks and where they might logically be located geographically in order to produce the Hershey magnetic migratory effect.  Sure, it was going to be hard, if not impossible, to top chocolate as a food theme.  I mean, it’s chocolate.  People love it, crave it, and secretly want to bathe in it.  It was going to be difficult, but they say that most of what’s worth doing is. 

 FRUIT---fruit is a natural.  The good thing about fruit is that certain areas are often already associated with a particular fruit.  A Florida or California-based orange fun land could be easy.  The Sun Kist Miss has been telling people to be on time for Cali for years.  Unfortunately, no one wants to bathe in a vat of orange juice, except Gerald Wookowski of Alba, Georgia, and he probably belongs in jail. 

                Billy could do something with grapes and California.  People could come and stomp their own grapes, make their own wine, and have some hazy great memories, but wine is pretty much an adult thing, so it didn’t have the happy kiddy memory angle to it. 

 MEAT---This aisle was just an orgy of bad ideas.  The poultry fun land idea quickly fizzled when Billy realized that chickens are both mean and stupid.  And any cow fun land would most likely be, you know, not fun, and most likely already thought of by Gary Larson.  While the North Carolina wacky pig land had possibilities (who doesn’t kind of want to ride a big pig?), nobody wants to see those “lagoons” full of pig shit, and, besides Gerald, no one wants to bathe in it or row his best girl down it in a paddleboat while reciting poetry.

                 Billy was getting disheartened and was about to give up when he saw it.  It was the perfect match of foody fun and geographic magnetism.  It was a tuber.  It was the potato.  This was the exact moment that Billy, later to be affectionately known as “Granpa Billy”, came up with the idea for the Idaho Magic Potato Fun Village.  Ahh, the Village was a glorious place.  Children could romp for hours in the potato maze.  They could ride the potato slides (both the slide and the vehicle are made of potatoes).  They could test their wits against the world’s smartest potato.  They could taste-test potatoes from all over the world (they kind of all taste the same).  They could see displays of famous potatoes throughout history (including Churchill’s pettato and the potato that really started World War I).  Yes, Idaho Magic Potato Fun Village was a magical place. Both of the visitors had a really good time.

<< This short story is also included in my book, A Look to the Future Through the Eyes of an Eighty-Year-Old Pirate, available in some places where books are sold and not in others.    >>