The new owners of the Flagstaff Park property straddling the Jim Thorpe Borough/Mahoning Township line recently proposed the addition of a Ferris wheel as they try to revitalize the once-popular local destination.

After a Jim Thorpe Borough meeting during which council approved a zoning ordinance amendment that would allow for the attraction and other amusements at Flagstaff, I asked Council President Greg Strubinger about the project and, after some comments for the article, our discussion turned to some of the past events there.

One of the first events I brought up was professional wrestling. While I grew up a World Wrestling Federation guy who trained, ate my vitamins and said my prayers just like Hulk Hogan told me to, Flagstaff staff was a popular stop for the Extreme Championship Wrestling circuit. Names a lot of wrestling fans from the 80s and 90s would know, including the Dudleys, Chris Jericho, Tommy Dreamer, Taz, Rob Van Dam and others, cut their teeth, and numerous other body parts, at Flagstaff.

“We have a custodian at the high school who really followed that and he can give you a blow by blow account of those events,” Strubinger said. “Those guys used to come flying into the parking lot and they’d get out of the car and beer cans were spilling all over the place. They used bats with nails sticking out of them and barbed wire wrapped around it. It was crazy.”

That account described a typical ECW event at Flagstaff. It also brought back memories of the many trips I would take with my dad down to Ag Hall in Allentown to see what was then the WWF.

I learned at an early age that the wrestling results were staged when the Undertaker would be scheduled to wrestle Yokozuna and they’d both pull up outside Ag Hall and get out of the same vehicle.

Hulk Hogan wrestled his first WWF matches in Allentown in 1979.

Ag Hall was also the site of the famous “Piper’s Pit” incident, when Roddy Piper smashed a coconut over Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka’s head. Many years later, in 2011, I had the chance to meet Piper while covering a horror movie convention for The Gettysburg Times. Hot Rod was as charismatic then as he was in the 1980s. He unfortunately passed away just four years later due to cardiopulmonary arrest.

While the days of convincing your parents to take you to one of 160 closed circuit locations across North America showing Wrestlemania III so you could see Hulk Hogan finally slam Andre the Giant are over, news like the potential return of Flagstaff gives you hope to regain some of your childhood.

You won’t see Frank Sinatra or the Dorsey Brothers walking through the door, and you won’t see ECW’s Sandman jumping through a table that has been set on fire, but any progress up on the mountain is a positive step in the right direction.

Write to Jarrad Hedes at jmhedes@tnonline.com.