Humpty Dumpty Falls as Globalization Marches On

The fairy tale that has unfolded for 55 summers in the shadow of Mount Washington is over. StoryLand, the Glen, N.H. tourist attraction that Bob and Ruth Morrell built as a thriving family business, is now just another piece of a foreign portfolio.

Fabulously low-tech and notably devoid of mass media icons – no Disney characters here – StoryLand has always been fundamentally frozen in the year of its founding. Bob and Ruth Morrell started the place in 1954 with Humpty Dumpty, the Old Woman in the Shoe, the Three Little Pigs, Heidi's Grandfather, and the Red Schoolhouse. They are all still there.

Now, however, Humpty Dumpty is at least distantly related to Ontex Hygienic Disposables, the U.K’s Gala online casinos, and the Berlin-based publisher of a book entitled Nuclear Energy: Principles, Practices and Prospects. All are related to Candover Investments plc, the British takeover firm that in 2007 bought out an international chain of amusement parks, based in Madrid and called Parques Reunidos.

Meanwhile, like so many family businesses, StoryLand ran out of family. Bob and Ruth passed away in the 1990s and their son and successor, Stoney Morrell, died in 2006. Thus, according to the StoryLand web site, Stoney’s sister Nancy “guided the park into a storybook marriage into the Kennywood Entertainment Company family of theme parks in 2007.”

The Pittsburgh-based Kennywood theme park chain must have seemed like a logical choice because its two founding families had been in charge for a whole century. But, just as Kennywood was closing on its purchase of StoryLand, it was also selling out to Parques Reunidos, which had just been taken over by Candover. Though not strictly speaking a fairy tale, the familiar cartoon drawing of a big fish swallowing a somewhat smaller fish which is busy eating a medium-sized fish which in turn is gulping down a small fish seems particularly applicable here.

It is not to trash the Morrell family to suggest that the StoryLand story should have been different.

The economic advantages of local ownership, to any given local community, are beyond dispute. A distant owner, whether it is in Pittsburgh or Pamplona, will strive to extract wealth. Local owners do otherwise, not just to line their own pockets (with funds likely to be reinvested in the community) but, data suggests, to the direct benefit of their employees and their neighbors with whom they do business. For details, see Michael Shuman’s book The Small-Mart Revolution.

Yet the Morrell family is blameless because, in essence, it had no alternatives. Rather than focusing on providing lavish subsidies, in exchange for no promises, to faraway firms that might come to northern New England, it is time to develop innovative financing and entity-creation schemes so that we can invest our energies and our resources in our neighbors. Imagine a worker-owned, or a community-owned, StoryLand! Imagine if it were some kind of cooperative!

By all appearances, at least from the visiting politicians pictured in the history section of the StoryLand web site, Bob and Ruth Morrill were old-fashioned New England Republicans. Their ingrained conservatism has its embodiment in what would, in other contexts, be deemed a theme park. At StoryLand, the glitz is missing and the licensed characters, be they SpongeBob or Ariel the Mermaid, are nowhere to be found. “Throwback,” an oft-used term in relation to StoryLand, doesn’t quite capture the essence of the place, which is grounded in a kind of simplicity and humility – an understanding that, while StoryLand is a nice place to take the kids, it is not the real reason to travel to a place as remarkable as the White Mountains.

Contrast that with Disney World, plunked in the midst of a barren nowhereville. The faux victorian Main Street USA is designed to capture the feel of a real place so that people who live in fake places (the real real places having long since been bulldozed) can wallow in the yearning to escape their banal and charmless everyday surroundings. Even worse is the pretend ruins of a southeast Asian palace, where tigers prowl amid artfully distressed structures – a patronizing and sanitizing celebration of third world poverty and decrepitude.

The point here is that the cooperative principles stand in stark contrast to that kind of exploitative approach to travel and tourism – as did the Morrell Family. If only they could have found each other before it was too late.