By Peggy Townsend of the Santa Cruz Sentinel
Santa Cruz, Calif.
– Little kids run laughing past Jan Fencl. Holding dripping ice
cream cones and sugary brown churro sticks, they don’t even notice
Fencl as he walks among the crowds at the Boardwalk on a summer
day.
By Peggy Townsend of the Santa Cruz Sentinel
Santa Cruz, Calif. – Little kids run laughing past Jan Fencl. Holding dripping ice cream cones and sugary brown churro sticks, they don’t even notice Fencl as he walks among the crowds at the Boardwalk on a summer day.
Fencl is 72 with a grizzled chin and a barrel chest, and he wears dark blue coveralls so splattered with paint they could almost be mistaken for a piece of modern art.
The patch on his uniform says “maintenance,” but Fencl is much more than that.
Here at the seaside amusement park, Fencl is an artist. The man who created the hollow-eyed skulls scattered next to the swinging pirate ship. The man who filled the Haunted Castle with ghouls and giant spiders.
Fencl doesn’t mind that the tourists and workers who come every summer don’t know what a part of the Boardwalk he’s been for almost two decades.
All most know is that at the Boardwalk everything makes you feel young again. For Fencl, that’s enough.
“This is my life,” he says.
Fencl moves along the Boardwalk with the speed of a much younger man. His back is straight, his shoulders squared, his rough, workingman’s hands thrust into his pockets.
It’s easy to coax stories out of Fencl as he walks. Stories about about how kids are always stealing heads and arms out of the Haunted Castle; stories about the miniature Scottish fishing village he created at the Remote-A-Boats attraction.
It’s harder to get him to tell the story about how he and two friends tried to escape from Czechoslovakia in a homemade submarine. The communists took over the country in 1948, when Fencl was 15.
“You have to do what they tell you. Even if you don’t like it, you better be quiet.”
It was no way to live for a boy who was studying to be an artist, so Fencl and two friends decided to escape. During the day, Fencl and a friend would work at the uranium mines. In the evening, they would build their submarine in a barn.
They made it out of metal with bicycle pedals and a paddle wheel for steering and power. They had a tube for breathing and a periscope for navigating.
That submarine was 3.5 meters long and about 3 feet high, Fencl says.
“We were like sardines in there,” he says.
The boys and one girl hoped to make it to Hamburg, about 300 miles away. The Elbe River flowed at about six miles per hour, and they figured the trip would take a month or more.
They set off in Dec. 1951. They traveled at night, their periscope cutting a line through the water. When dawn broke, Fencl says, they would hide the submarine and sleep.
The trio lasted two weeks, making it to Dresden, East Germany, 73 miles away, before running into a parked cargo ship, Fencl says.
The impact opened a leak in the hull and the submarine began to sink. The German captain let them stay for a few days and then the friends decided to walk back home.
Sixteen years later Fencl was finally able to get a visa for a brief visit to the United States. He never went back.
Fencl’s workshop lies under the rumbling Giant Dipper roller coaster, in the bowels of the Boardwalk.
It is a windowless place that smells sharply of resin. Molded heads of cavemen, zombies and even a giant rat hang from wires strung across the ceiling.
On the workbench is a big, boney-fingered, rubber arm that someone tore off one of the figures in the Haunted Castle, Fencl says. It’s one of the hazards of amusement park art. People are always stealing his fiberglass skulls or trying to sneak out of a ride with a ghoul’s head.
“Every day, they tell me what to fix,” he says without any resentment. “These are the things I have to take care of.”
The rest of the time is set aside for new creations.
Fencl, who trained in the Academy of Fine Art in Prague and honed his skills in places like Universal Studios, Paramount’s Great America, Winchester Mystery House and the defunct Frontier Village in San Jose before coming here, uses high-density foam, rubber, paint and fiberglass to make most of his figures.
He can give a foam gargoyle the look of tarnished copper and make flames seem to dance on rock walls. Right now, he is working with a kind of fluorescent glitter that he mixes into paint so that it looks like molten lava in the sunlight.
He pushes open one of the concealed maintenance doors and steps into the noisy chaos of rides and music.
He points out the pretzel stand he designed, the nonchalant cave man sitting above the fabled Cave Train that he crafted, and a sign that won him first place in national amusement park competition.
