Written by Kent Learned, 1 February 2018, originally posted to the Wonderland History Facebook group.
When the Park was first built, they had wanted to use Paramount Sound GS-2 ground speakers from the states. I actually worked on an earlier prototype version of this speaker, the GS-1, when I worked at Paramount Sound for several years in the late 1970’s. Anyway, they couldn’t get them for some reason, and they took the one sample they had to a local fibreglass fabricator and the guy there copied them very well. They made about 60 of them. The biggest weakness in the first lot was the sides weren’t thick enough. The gardeners and their whipper snippers went through the sides of them when they trimmed “too vigorously” during the grass trimming.
Another problem with the original mushrooms was the actual loudspeaker inside it. From my days at Paramount & Disney, I knew just how poorly your average $30 loudspeaker held up living outside. (One of my jobs at Disney was to submerge “waterproof speakers” in a bucket of water for a week, dry it out, and then measure how its sound quality had changed.) The moisture in the air when it rained, or direct water spray when they were washed down by the gardeners’ hose, caused the ordinary speaker cone to soften. After all, your average speaker cone is only made of compressed paper fibres, all held together with some form of weak glue that has nice sounding acoustic properties. Well, over time, the cone softens, tears, or has holes eaten in it by a number of paper-eating insects or rodents. Then there were the black ants. They’d sometimes take up residence in a mushroom, and their excretions of formic acid would destroy all the metal parts of the speakers.
By the time The Beach was put in a few years later, they used the Paramount GS-2’s, as they were readily available again. When I got there in ’89, it was very obvious that some very large “Guests” had been sitting on the speakers at The Beach and the tops of them were caving in. On several of them the ABS Plastic case had shattered, leaving razor sharp edges to cut people with. While replacing them, I was usually cut on the back of my hands while working on them.
By then no one at the park knew the name of the fibreglass fabricator. After calling all the fabricators in the area I was able to find them, and they still had one of the moulds! We ordered about 20 mushrooms and replaced all the ABS plastic ones in the beach that off season. We later ordered more and replaced all the damaged ones around the park. We ordered still more and used them when the Wild Life Park was built. I still have a complete set of the moulds in my shed gathering a lovely patina of dust.
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