Why I mourn the loss of Roadside America
I am a few days behind the news but needed to get my head around the closing of one of the Pennsylvania’s oldest and most beloved attractions, Roadside America.
Of course, time marches on and things change. I understand that. The gracious family that had inherited and ran Roadside America made Herculean efforts to keep it going despite the twofold deterioration of both the building and its younger audience’s attention span.
I literally raised my family within those walls. Rarely was there a trip home to the Lehigh Valley when we did not take Grace and Buster on the short drive to Shartlesville to see the magic of this miniature world. Heck, I could have found a door jam and memorialized the kids’ growing height on it, wewere there so much.
I am truly at a loss that the state could not have helped this extremely unique and completely Pennsylvanian experience. Granted it may not be considered “art” to all, but it was certainly art to many.
That one single person, Laurence Gieringer, created every original building in there is mind blowing. Beyond that, the show he created has played continuously from the time the building was finished in 1953 till recently. It is simply astounding.
That show began with all of the lights dimming and a nighttime view of the display, and ended with Kate Smith
singing “God Bless America” while nearly 70-year-old slides of angels, Jesus and classic images of America were displayed. It always choked me up — and I wasn’t the only one based on the other sniffles and covering “coughs” one heard in the dark.
Howlucky were we that we were able to film part of “Getting Grace” at Roadside America? It’s simply another reminder that the work we are doing in the Lehigh Valley, through A Channel
of Peace, serves an important purpose beyond making faith-filled family entertainment.
Roadside America, seen in my first film, is now the fourth place we memorialized that is either vastly different or gone altogether. It sadly joins an ever-growing list that also includes Martin Tower, the Moravian Book Shop and the Fun House facade at Bushkill Park. Although our Valley landscape continues to change, I am hopeful that our film will last for many generations.
Even after the kids were grown, my great friend John Lamana and I continued our pilgrimages to Roadside America, drawn there still by the celebration of all that is great about our wonderful country.
If you looked at Roadside as simply a collection of trains, you missed the 70-year-old message of community, faith and exceptionalism. If you thought it was just a pile of tiny buildings, you missed the fact that each of those buildings (there were hundreds) represented 40 to 50 hours of one extraordinary man’s life.
If you breezed through the gift shop, you never met the wonderful extended family and friends who saw to it that Mr. Gieringer’s vision was disseminated correctly and consistently for seven decades. If you drove past the building as you traveled elsewhere and thought it was just another tourist trap, you missed one of the last and greatest opportunities to experience something tangible and entertaining that remained exactly the same for an entire lifetime.
It never bowed to the demands of popular culture (as every other amusement and theme park does) and was never swayed from its original mission of entertainment and education and appreciation for the great nation of America and all that it stands for.
That Roadside America will no longer be there, to me, isn’t just the closing of a building. It’s another clang in the ongoing death knell of a time worth saving. Each peal of the bell reminds us that if we do not, collectively, do all wecanto preserve our past, the future won’t ever remember just how exceptional it truly was.
Actor Daniel Roebuck, a Bethlehem Catholic High School graduate, has been in many movies including “The Fugitive” and TV shows such as “Lost,” “Matlock” and “Law & Order.” He is also the director of faith-based movies shot in the Lehigh Valley.