The Snow Day Project: Honoring Wild Windy Bill McKay

The snow is blowing sideways.  I can barely see the nose in front of my face.  It’s snowing so much, I could swear I see snowflakes on my blog page.

And you know what?  It’s a great day to work on a “snowy-day” art project.  And in doing so, I’m paying tribute to a legend from my childhood.

Yesterday, as I drove home from the day job, I made a few artistic “pit stops” before I reached my home in the Town and Village.  My first stop was at Silver Fox Salvage, where I wanted to purchase some frames for future Dream Window projects.  Jamie and Camille, the owners and operators of Silver Fox, were there.  And while I was looking through Silver Fox’s collection of antiques and salvage and bric-a-brac, Jamie told me a “small world” story – that when he had to bring a Silver Fox-constructed custom-built table to one of his customers, he noticed that the customer had on display, in their home, Dream Window #8: The Last Sermon.  Awesome.

I looked around, and yes indeed there was a transom window that would definitely work well as a Dream Window project.  I also purchased a rudimentary “shadow box” frame that currently housed what looked like a girls’ vintage grade school athletic uniform.  Pfft.  I wanted the frame, not the eww-cree-pee old athletic jumper.  After purchasing the frame and the transom window, Jamie helped load the items into the back seat of my car.

I then stopped at Hobby Lobby, and purchased a backing board to replace the backing board in the shadow-box frame.  A quick jaunt over to Lowe’s to purchase a 17″x35″ plastic window panel.  Because, to tell you the truth, the old backing board looked like it was sheared off of a cardboard shipping box; and the glass pane in the frame had about twenty-seven levels of grungy on it.

You want to see what the original looked like?

Here it is.

Yeah, it looks like it’s seen better days.  I must have passed this thing at Silver Fox ten or fifteen times and skipped over it in search of window frames.  But today… I felt inspired.

And with the snow falling down all over the Capital District, I needed a nice “snowy day” project.  Something to stay home with and work on while the snowflakes fell outside.

And I came up with one.

Background.

As a kid, when I went with my family to Storytown (what we now know as the Great Escape amusement park), I always visited the Old West part of the park, the area known as Ghost Town U.S.A.  There, I saw the Wild West show as hosted by the Sheriff of Ghost Town, Wild Windy Bill McKay.  I watched the Wild West show as the sheriff stopped the rustlers and the spoilers and the bank robbers, and the kids would point our fingers at the bad guys and pretend to shoot them, and after we put the bad guys in the Ghost Town jail, Sheriff McKay would give each of us our own deputy badge.

It was a treasured souvenir, let me tell you.  And after Dan Claps (the man who played Sheriff Wild Windy Bill McKay) passed away, it was as if a legend from my childhood got on his horse and rode off toward the sunset.  A couple of years ago, I visited the Great Escape and deposited one of my old souvenir badges at the Ghost Town jail as an impromptu tribute.

But even after that day, I somehow kept acquiring memorabilia from Wild Windy Bill McKay’s time as Ghost Town’s marshal.  I found more badges on eBay, including both the first badges from the 1950’s and a 50th-anniversary badge from the mid-2000’s.  I found old Storytown ticket stubs.  There was a six-song phonograph record of old Western songs, as sung by Wild Windy Bill McKay; I snagged that.  The crown jewel?  One of Wild Windy Bill McKay’s marshal costume shirts, complete with a “MARSHAL” patch on the sleeve.

I saved these talismans as memories of visiting that Lake George amusement park.  As an adult, I revisited Ghost Town it as part of an article I wrote for RoadKing magazine on the 50th anniversary of the Great Escape’s opening (Sheriff McKay was there, I interviewed him for the article).  I went back to the Great Escape a few more times, visiting the park most recently last year on a date with my girlfriend Nicole.

So what do I do with all these treasures?  Let’s see… old picture frame with some vintage athletic uniform in it.  Okay, out goes the athletic uniform.  Out goes the cardboard backing.  Out goes the cruddy old glass.

And then I started arranging the Storytown souvenirs.  Badges.  Coins.  Tickets.  Pictures.  Everything.  And after I felt that the arrangements were suitable and tasteful and satisfactory… I used Velcro and double-stick adhesives and creative alignments.

An hour or so later… I applied frame to backing, and wired it up for hanging.

On the wall it goes.

And on the blog it goes.  Take a look.

And there it is.

You know what?  I’m going to keep this for as long as I wish.  Because when I look at it, it reminds me of a time when going to the amusement park was also a place of joy and fun, more than just rides and a petting zoo.   It was a chance to learn right and wrong, all taught several times a day by the lawman of Ghost Town.  50 years at his job, not one successful escape by any of those varmints.   Because if they even tried to escape, us kids would most assuredly make mashed potatoes out of those criminals.

Plus, it was a fun “snowy-day” project for me.  Some new artwork for my wall.

This is the fun of being creative.