An Ocean City Icon Faces Turn in Economic Tide

Some boardwalk amusement parks are surviving. In nearby Rehoboth Beach, Del., the Funland park has entered its 46th summer with children riding the bumper cars, touring the Haunted Mansion and holding on for the Sea Dragon free fall.

In Ocean City, Trimper's is a fixture. There are the arcade with rows of Skee-Ball lanes, the pipe-organ carousel with hand-painted horses, the haunted house and the mirror maze.

"When you think of the boardwalk, you think of Trimper's Rides," Mayor Richard W. Meehan said.

The Trimpers themselves are fixtures. Granville Trimper, a former mayor and City Council president, is a gregarious and portly man known to hold court and talk politics on the benches outside the Pirate's Cove amusement.

The park was founded in 1890 by Granville's German immigrant grandparents. Today, the park is controlled by 14 family members, who are divided over whether to sell the property. Granville Trimper owns the most shares -- a third -- and he wants to keep the business.

Joyce Foreacre Trimper, 66, whose late husband ran the park before Granville, owns the second largest number of shares, about a quarter. She said she wants to sell because the business is no longer economically feasible.

"I think it's time to move forward," she said in a telephone interview from her home in Vero Beach, Fla. "If you own something and it can't produce the income to make it worthwhile, then anybody with a good business sense would look to do something different."

Discussions of selling the property have strained relations within the family.

"There's a definite difference of opinion," Joyce Foreacre Trimper said. "I could lay it all out for you, but I don't know that that's the thing to do."

Even loyal customers are torn.

As the sun was setting Friday, Henry and Joan Brisker brought their 5-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, for a ride on the carousel. Joan, 62, a native Washingtonian, remembers the rides at Trimper's from her childhood. She took her son, Sophie's father, when he was young.

"You always come to Trimper's Rides," said Joan, a former pharmaceutical executive who retired with Henry in nearby Ocean Pines, Md.