Beech Bend Owes Longevity To Almighty Dime

...Dickey spoke with the Herald-Leader about his book, Charles Garvin's Dynasty of Dimes, on the history of the park, its dime admission price and lovingly eccentric owner, Garvin. Among Dickey's favorite anecdotes from the book is the enduring legend of buried treasure at Beech Bend...."Some of the folks today could take a lesson from Garvin," Dickey adds. "In the early development of the park, he never bought, let's say, a merry-go-round, unless he could pay cash for it."

"He got his best price that way," and, of course, avoided credit problems, too, Dickey says....

http://www.kentucky.com/lexgo/books/story/823066.html

Robert Dickey '54 has written Dynasty of Dimes (St. Margaret Publishers, 2009), the story of the eccentric entrepreneur Charles Garvin and his Beech Bend Park, an amusement park in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Throughout the almost 40 years of the Garvin era, the price of admission remained a dime, and Garvin remained in complete control of his fiefdom, even controlling the time of day—regardless of what clocks indicated beyond the park boundaries. Some of the characters in the book and their families have close Centre connections. The author, a Bowling Green native, grew up attending Beech Bend Park and later moonlighted as its publicist, before starting a law practice. His first client was park owner Charles Garvin.