Charles r wood foundation
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About
Growing up in Lockport, near Buffalo, NY, Charley was blessed with loving, hardworking parents. Even as a child, he was ambitious, focused and alert to opportunity. In his early teens – and in the depths of the Great Depression — he purchased a stately home for his family, converted the carriage house into rental property and restored his own Model T. Charley preferred the real world to the academic world, and after a year at the University of Michigan, eagerly entered the workforce, as a mechanic for General Motors and Curtiss Wright Aircraft. During World War II, he supervised hundreds of airplane mechanics for the Royal Air Force in the Pacific, then for Douglas Aircraft in Egypt.
After the war – and always alert to opportunity — Charley visited Knotts Berry Farm in California, where clever attractions, like a manmade volcano, ignited his imagination. “I came home full of beans,” Charley remembered, “and I wanted to get into the amusement park business.”
Back in Lockport, he scoured the classified sections of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. While prospect
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Charles Wood (businessman)
Charles R. Wood (1914 – September 30, 2004) was an American amusement park developer and philanthropist in Upstate New York.
Biography
Wood was born in Lockport, New York, in 1914.
After seeing the amusement parkKnott's Berry Farm in southern California he was inspired in 1954 to open his own park in Queensbury, New York, which he named Storytown USA. In order to do this, he needed some loans from local banks. With $500 in his pocket at the time, he walked into a bank, applied for the necessary loans, and was denied. To this, he replied to the bank manager "One day sir, I will be able to buy and sell you." Success followed this Mother Goose themed park and in 1959 he opened a second amusement park in the village of Lake George, New York, this one named Gaslight Village, which closed in 1989. Storytown USA changed its name to The Great Escape in 1983 and was eventually sold to new owners in 1996, finally winding up under the Six Flags park umbrella. Wood purchased Fantasy Island in 1983 and owned it until 1989. He would later own the par
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Good Time Charley: The Life of Theme Park Patriarch Charles R. Wood
photograph courtesy of Bobbie Wages Wood
Once upon a time, there was a larger-than-life man named Charles R. Wood—better known to all as Charley—who dedicated his life to fun. He strode onto the North Country’s mid-century scene with little more than a smile and a hammer, but managed to build an entertainment empire from scratch.
Charley, who was born to a middle-class family near Buffalo in 1914, was a natural entrepreneur. Like any typical youngster, he started earning nickels and dimes with a paper route, but his schemes soon outgrew the typical. By the time he was in high school, he had the wherewithal to buy a home for his family and convert its carriage house to a rental apartment.
But it wasn’t all about dollars and cents. Charley was a dreamer who’d tinker around with extravagant ideas until they became reality. His daughter, Bobbie Wood Wages, says he built a Model T in the basement when he was 12 years old. He didn’t have a plan for getting the vehicle out after he’d put it together, but t
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