On a history note | The toboggan slide in the 1960s at Regner Park was “phenomenal”

Located in the woods a little northwest of the bathhouse, O’Meara said his days on the slide traced to the late 1940s – 1950s.

“You’d walk up the hill and put your toboggan on a platform, there was just a simple lever and they asked, ‘are you ready’ and they’d pull the lever, and you’d slide out on the iced ramp.”  O’Meara said the sound of the platform dropping was similar to a barn door closing and then “woosh the toboggans flew down the formed run.”

Carl ‘Cracker’ Kircher of West Bend took many a ride on the toboggan slide when he was a kid. He described the mechanism that dropped the toboggan as similar to a teeter totter.

“There were two guys up there to help load and they told you to keep your arms and legs in and you’d come snortin’ down there pretty good at about 25 miles an hour,” said Kircher.

“There was no charge to use the toboggan run and they’d line the whole track with blocks of ice; those probably came from the icehouse behind the brewery.”

Karen Olson, 70, described herself as a 9-year-old tomboy. “The toboggan run looked so high, and it was so scary, but we did it anyway,” she said. “Nobody was as gutsy as my brothers and I.”

Teresa Gruber Miller, 63, tobogganed in the 1960s. “I remember we’d have to lift our sled up and put it up on the platform and then climb a couple stairs to get up on the sled. It was wonderful; it was fast and fun.”

Allen Hron, 77, of Kewaskum was born in 1936 at Tenth Avenue and Cedar Street. “We’d go on top of the Tenth Avenue hill in West Bend in the winter and they’d close the area to traffic and open up the fence area in the park and we’d ride our sleds down,” he said.

Dick Knoebel remembered the hill. “They would remove the ballpark fence in that area, and you could slide onto the baseball field area,” said Knoebel.