Lehigh Valley readers who remember the Dorney Park of the 1960s and '70s -- when it was still "The Natural Spot" -- are already familiar with the carnival stylings of Bill Tracy. He was responsible for renovating the park's Old Mill in 1962, turning it into the Journey to the Center of the Earth, whose marquee was dominated by a great, green dragon with piercing spotlights for eyes -- until 1993 when the whole structure was dismantled. (For a nostalgic view of this ride, check out John Waters' 1988 film Hairspray). Also in 1962, Tracy fashioned a Wacky Shack fun house out of the park's unsuccessful skating rink.

Subsequent projects for Dorney Park included constructing the large head of Alfundo the Clown that decorated the park's lower entrance, converting an unused storage shed into the Gold Mine (a dark walk-through), and retheming the Devil's Cave dark ride into the Pirate's Cove (later renamed the Bucket O' Blood). The Bucket O' Blood was destroyed accidentally by a fire in 1983, and the remaining vestiges of Tracy's work were removed by the early 1990s.

Tracy spent the early years of his career crafting window displays for New York City department stores. He also worked on floats for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Then in 1952, while a resident of Cape May, in southern New Jersey, Tracy established Amusement Display Associates. Largely a one-man operation, A.D.A. built and renovated dark rides and other original attractions for amusement parks and East Coast amusement piers until Tracy's death in the early 1970s. In addition to work at Dorney Park, he designed attractions for parks as far north as Canandaigua, N.Y., and as far south as Rossville, Ga. His distinctive style -- carnival gaudiness -- is marked by rakish angles, flowing curves and vibrant colors.

Though little is known about his personal life, Tracy is generally credited as one of the amusement industry's greatest artists and innovators. Tracy concocted tableaus and optical illusions of mechanical ingenuity and was the first carnival artist to incorporate blacklight for a supernatural glow. His gimmicks are viewed now as schlock, but they were innovative in their time, an early popularization of psychedelia. Robert Ott, the former president of Dorney Park, says fondly that Bill Tracy "could take a piece of copper and a couple pieces of wire and a coat hanger and little bit of fabric and some fiberglass, and he could make the most beautiful figure of the most hideous monster that you ever saw. He was truly gifted."

In Bill Tracy's world of ghost towns and pirate ships, painted-up saloon whores open their ruffled, Victorian blouses to expose a cobwebbed ribcage, and goggle-eyed sailors sit with luscious mermaids perched on their knees. Skeletal sea captains descend into the maelstrom, and ghostly gold miners, left to perish in empty veins, blow us all to kingdom come with a bundle of dynamite. All of America's romantic delusions about its history, realized in paper maché and fiberglass and stored behind a screen of chicken wire, come back to haunt us as unnerving distortions of femmes fatales and lowlife apparitions. We may be damned but we are also saved by one man's sense of humor.