SCHUYLKILL HAVEN, PA — The Tilt-A-Whirl at the 112th Schuylkill County Fair has been roped off with two layers of caution tape since approximately 4:15 p.m. Saturday, and the only person on the grounds willing to discuss what happened is a twelve-year-old from Tamaqua who was reportedly the ride’s final passenger and is not returning calls placed to his mother’s cell phone.
Carnival staff have given essentially the same response to all thirty-one inquiries logged at the fair information booth: that the ride is “down for maintenance,” a phrase Mrs. Janelle Voss, who has manned the booth since 2003, delivers in what she herself described as “the tone I usually save for Thanksgiving.”
Dale Sturgis, 54, a Wade Shows employee who has run Tilt-A-Whirls at thirteen separate state and county fairs over a nineteen-year career, declined to answer questions Sunday afternoon. “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” Sturgis said, before returning to a folding chair behind the ride, where he was observed drinking a 32-ounce bottle of Diet Mountain Dew straight through, without setting it down once.
A handwritten sign affixed to the queue gate originally read “BACK SOON.” By Sunday morning, the word “SOON” had been crossed out and replaced, in a different hand, with “EVENTUALLY.” By Sunday evening, “EVENTUALLY” had also been crossed out, and beneath it, in what appears to be a third person’s handwriting, someone has written “WE’LL SEE.”
Speculation at the nearby Pulaski Hose Company funnel cake stand has ranged from a dropped cell phone wedged in the central drive shaft, to a structural issue with one of the cars, to “something the Fields girl said,” though no fair employee or longtime attendee has been able to identify any Fields girl, and the woman frying the funnel cakes now refuses to repeat the original comment, citing only that she “shouldn’t have brought it up.”
Reached at his office Sunday, fair general manager Roy Knepp would say only that “no one was hurt on Saturday, no one is going to be hurt, and frankly if people would just enjoy the Zipper or the Sea Dragon we would not be having this conversation in the first place.” Asked a follow-up question, Knepp said “I’m going to lunch” and hung up.
A small but consistent line has formed at the still-roped-off Tilt-A-Whirl each evening since Saturday, composed almost entirely of high schoolers from the Blue Mountain district who told a reporter they are not waiting for the ride to reopen, but rather to be present in the event that staff eventually open the door of one of the cars and something falls out.
As of Sunday at dusk, fair organizers had quietly added two additional performances of the racing pigs and moved the schedule of the bluegrass stage one row east, away from the ride entirely.