Where Fairytales Came to Life on a Civil War Battlefield (Part 1)

           It was a place where families made happy memories, and now it only exists as happy family memories. Fantasyland in Gettysburg, Pa., entertained tens of thousands of youngsters and the young at heart from 1959 to 1980. Kenneth and Thelma Dick took their family to the shore for a vacation in 1957. On their way home, they stopped at Storybook Land near Atlantic City, N.J. It was a small park, planned to entertain young children like the three Dick girls. “My mother kept saying the whole time, ‘I could do better than this. This is so okay, but I could do something so cute,’” Jacqueline White said. She is the middle child of the three Dick girls between her sisters, Stephanie and Cynthia. White’s parents spent the four hours of the drive home, planning the Read more…

Monkey hunting in Gettysburg

At first, Gettysburg policemen and firemen thought the call they received around 8 p.m. on June 17, 1960, was a crank call. However, more than one person called in to report the same thing. According to the Gettysburg Times, “… residents there insisted there was a monkey swinging through the trees…” Both the Gettysburg Police and Fire Department responded to the call, which took them out to Hillcrest Place, where they discovered that a squirrel monkey was indeed playing in the trees. Squirrel monkeys are small, growing to roughly a foot and weighing less than three pounds. Their fur is short and usually colored black at the shoulders and yellow-orange on their back and legs. A squirrel monkey named Miss Baker had become famous the previous year as one of the first two animals launched into space by the United States Read more…