Wildwood N.J.'s Wipe Out Slide sent into oblivion

SINCE 1969, more backside has massaged the Wipe Out Slide than a toilet seat at a chili cook-off. But now - sob! - it's being pulled apart, piece by piece, on its way to the Big Midway in the Sky.

The Wildwood, N.J., boardwalk amusement rides of my childhood are heading toward the same graveyard as my parents' "There used to be a pay phone on that corner" rambling reminiscences of the good old days.

On Oct. 10, the Giant Slide on Morey's Surfside Pier (aka the Wipe Out) hosted the last group of backside riders lucky enough to glide down its 15 lanes before it's put out to pasture and a new thrill ride takes its place.

Rumor has it that a roller-coaster from Morey's Pier to the old Hunt's Pier is in the works. (Probably some upside-down, boy-you-turn-me coaster, or a you-spin-me-round-round-baby-round ride that tends to make you think about upchucking.)

This summer, I bribed my preteen niece and nephew to go on the Giant Slide, and they looked at me like I'd asked them listen to Menudo on a Walkman.

The Giant Slide didn't have the wow factor anymore - or maybe it was because I wouldn't put even more cash on their Morey's Pier E-Z Rider credit card that turned them off. (Whatever happened to the little paper tickets? But that's a whole other sob story.)

It was 1968 when brothers Bill and Will Morey spotted a giant 12-lane fiberglass slide operating near a shopping center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Inspired, the brothers, then builders of motels in Wildwood, bought a similar ride, called it The Wipe Out and bought two piers on the Wildwood oceanfront and officially commenced their lifelong passion for the amusement business.

The Giant Slide was the first skyscraper of the Wildwood skyline. It looked like a pant leg of a seersucker suit, 15 rows of white and sky blue, flapping in the breeze - 40 feet high and 200 feet long of waving drops and hills.

After a stair-climb into the sky, you reached the top and looked out at the entire Jersey shoreline. If you squinted, you could see the casinos in Atlantic City and the lighthouse at Cape May Point.

You sat down on a smelly burlap sack and were given last rites before the attendant gave you a "Good luck, kid" shove and sent you back down to earth. You raced to the bottom with the smells of Sam's Pizza, Kohr Brothers Custard and Curly's Fries rocketing up your nostrils.

If you were lucky, your sister was in the lane next to you and you raced each other, sliding and smacking into the tumbling-mat padded wall at the bottom with a loud thump, causing some dad to yell, "You're safe!" in his best Major League umpire voice.

Kids would try to get up but found their underwear tangled in their ribcages, or swallowed by their backsides, giving them the mother of all wedgies before they ever experienced it in the schoolyard or on college fraternity pledge night.

My sisters and I lost more skin from our thighs from the Giant Slide than any liposuction procedure could have done, and we used up plenty of Silvadene cream to cool the burns.

I rode the Giant Slide every year from probably 1976 until I was too cool and too old to go on family vacations. (So what's that, 2009?)

Every year without fail, Carmella and Big Pat would taken their three Polish-Italian mongrels to Wildwood for the last week of July and stay at the Avalon Motel, still standing at the corner of 26th and Surf. (Don't ask me how the Avalon survived the buy-demolish-and-build-into-$300,000-condos scenario that so many classic Wildwood motels succumbed to. Remember the Packard? The Thunderbird? Moore's Inlet?)

We'd leave Port Richmond at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning, in a 1974 orange Monte Carlo that was fit for the Fonz but not a family of five. By the time we hit the Garden State it was the cue for Carm's carsickness to kick in, due to Big Pat riding the brake for 85 miles, and she would throw up in a baggie and toss it out the window into the New Jersey Pinelands for the deer and Jersey Devil.

WE'D HOLD our breath and our bladders until we hit the rickety wooden bridge into North Wildwood and the panoramic view of King Kong, the Jumbo Coaster, the Golden Nugget Mine Ride and Hunt's Pier Flyer - and, of course, the Wipe Out Slide would fill up our windshield.

And, by the way, all those rides and attractions of our childhoods are now extinct, gone from the boardwalk to make room for bigger, better rides for thrill-seekers and those with stronger bladders and bowels.

So what's left for those of us who pine for the Wildwood boardwalk rides that don't break the speed of light and crack the sound barrier? I have 5.3 words for you: Wat-Wat-Watch the Tram Car, Please.

Patty-Pat Kozlowski knows that every day's a holiday and every night is a Saturday night.