Page 16 • Warren & Frederick County Report • Late April, 2016
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DINOSAURS, from 15 miles or 22 minutes away on Stonewall Jackson Highway. “I bet your son is really loving the dinosaurs.� “Oh, yeah,� Cari said. “But really, she’s the one. She walks up to each one of them and starts roaring.� Maeley, who was wearing a pink jump suit with a hood adorned by cat ears, was trying to either scare or impress these cousins of Barney, all as she continued to perfect the skill of walking. And it was an impressive sight, every bit as epic as the nearby Titanosaurus versus Tyrannosaurus rout. That encounter alone made the $6 admission seem like the deal of the Cenozoic era. The daughter remembers Geraci’s youngest daughter, JoAnn Leight, sent me this e-mail, which is as good an account as you’re going to read anywhere on the making of Dinosaur Land: “My dad, Joseph C. Geraci, opened a small gift shop around 1962-63 and called it Rebel Korner, now the present location of our shop. Every winter, he and my mom would go to Florida for four to six weeks. One day while he was in Florida, he noticed some dinosaurs at a putt-putt golf attraction. He met the man who made them, Jim Sidwell, and thought they would be something to draw attention to his gift shop. So he ordered five and Jim made them and brought them to White Post the following fall. At first he only had them out to the side of the shop, but vandals kept stealing parts off them. So he decided to put them inside a fence and make a “park.� He named the park Dinosaur Land. He ordered a couple more and every few years added more. The dinosaurs are made of fiberglass and are pretty sturdy, except for the toes, fingers, etc. Jim Sidwell died a few years after my mom and dad did, and we did not buy any more dinosaurs. My dad was a man who could do
One of the violent encounters out back: Mama Triceratops protects the baby against T. rex almost anything - plumbing, wiring, laying brick, etc. So he did most of the work building and designing the park. He had many interests and later in the late Seventies, he became interested in growing grapes and making wine. My mom worked the shop while my dad was building a winery business in Middletown. In 1981, my mom passed away and Dad was trying to work and run both the winery business and Dinosaur Land. My dad passed away in 1987 and my three sisters and I took over the business. We have many visitors who came here as a child and they are bringing their children. They are surprised we are still here. Forty-five years for a roadside attraction is almost unheard of these days. The business is run by my two sisters - Barbara Seldon and Grace Newman - and myself. My oldest sister, Gloria, died in 2001. We have great people work for us and each summer we have school kids work.� Dino-might? I wonder if all of the great dinosaur movies – from the Jurassic Park series to Dinotopia - in recent times have helped or hurt Dinosaur Land. Are people just too spoiled by computer-generated imagery, high-defi-
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nition screens and 3-D IMAX? Or do all of the technological and artistic advances just add to the never-ending fascination? I wondered that as I walked through the collection before saying to myself: “What are people talking about? This isn’t bad at all. It’s, it’s ‌ cool ‌ and charming ‌ and refreshingly unreal.â€? These Dinosaur Land replicas don’t deserve the bad reputation they get from some of the snarky reviewers on the Internet. Many of the older ones were designed by the man Leight refers to as “Jim,â€? also known as James Q. Sidwell, a renowned dinosaur replica designer at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Many of the newer, vivid and violent ones were created by noted Virginia fiberglass guru Mark Cline, a Dinosaur Land devotee as a kid, who works out of Natural Bridge. (Cline is famous, or infamous depending on who you to speak to in the Lexington area, for Foamhenge, a full-size replica of Stonehenge made of styrofoam that stands in Natural Bridge, with the pieces in astronomically correct positions unless the wind has blown some over recently. Cline is known for a lot of other things, too. His work from Enchanted Castle Studio can be seen around Virginia and the rest of the country outside various dining
This version of King Kong, inspired by a trip to the movie theater in 1976 by Dinosaur Land creator Joseph Geraci, stands strong despite some blemishes spots, gas stations and car lots.) Leight provided insight on the dinosaurs: “In the past 25 years, we have added 18 more dinosaurs. These were made by a man from Lexington named Mark Cline. The dinosaurs he makes seem to be interacting with the environment and not just a statue. A Triceratops is sticking its horns into a T. rex. A Megalosaurus is taking a bite out of an Apatosaurus, etc. It is very noticeable which ones Mark made and which were the original ones from Jim Sidwell.� Well, it wasn’t that noticeable to me. The Spinosauras and Velociraptor appeared to me to be Cline productions, but an employee at the front desk corrected me and explained that they were “made by a
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company.� Whatever their origin, the newer ones are impressive, vividly colored, and would appeal to visitors who prefer their dinosaur replicas to be paleontologically-correct. But the other creations – the Stegosauras, the Megalosauras, the Coelophysis, the Gigantosauras, the Triceratops, even the four different designs of the Tyrannosauras rex – also work well within the preposterous, fantastical, hilarious and ultimately forgiving confines of the Prehistoric Forest. As for King Kong, it appears that his right cheekbone has been gouged, perhaps from a fight with one of the carnivores after the forest had closed for the night. More likely, however, in this case, ’twas the elements that injured the beast. The tiny bi-plane he snared and once held in his right hand is gone, stolen so many times that it’s probably pointless to replace it. (They even reportedly stole a miniature Cessna!) Despite all of those indignities, Kong is still a big draw, especially for people who want a photo of themselves or loved ones perched in his left hand. A woman on TripAdvisor said that she was proposed to in that left hand. The gift shop After walking among the fiberglass for around an hour, I did what most people, especially people with kids in tow, do: hit the gift shop. A lighthearted excursion started absolutely floating as I checked out an impressive array of action figures, toys, accessories, apparel and just about anything else you could think of related to dinosaurs. I mean, these people have the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods covered! There was much, much more than just dinosaur stuff on display in the