Dragon Slide Pioneer: How one boy got to test drive it first

by C.J. Hirschfield

A trip down Children’s Fairyland’s 32 feet high Dragon Slide has been an exciting rite of passage for millions of Bay Area kids for over half a century. You need to be at least four years old to go down, and it’s fast and fun.

Then-Oakland Park Commissioner Frank Ogawa is one of the first to go down Fairyland’s Dragon Slide when it opened in 1963. No adult is currently allowed to use the kids-only attraction.

I recently received an email from a man who claims to be the first kid to ever test drive the slide — even before it was installed at the park. It didn’t go well, but let’s start at the beginning. 

In 1962, then-five-year-old Sil Krevocheza loved to spend time with his dad at his workplace, Macri Iron Works on Eighth Street in West Oakland. Originally from Russia, Silvester Krevocheza was forcibly conscripted by the Germans in WWII, later escaping to fight for the British. After the war, he met his wife and worked in London as a blacksmith. Sponsored by a local couple, he and his family immigrated to Oakland in 1957, where he joined Macri as an ironworker. Macri may be better known for fabricating the “Mid-Century Monster” sculpture that is currently being refurbished on the beach at Lake Merritt, but in 1962, they were hired to work on the Happy Dragon Slide.

William Everritt’s 1962 designs for Children’s Fairyland’s 32 feet high Dragon Slide.

The slide was underwritten by the Shoong Foundation, both to honor Joe Shoong, creator of the National Dollar Stores, and to celebrate Chinese heritage and the beauty and grace of Chinese folklore. It was the last, and greatest, set designed by William Russell Everritt, who is responsible for most of the earliest park sets. The only way to access the tall slide is by way of a floating pathway past a fierce guardian dragon — in whose mouth kids go for a giant slide down. R.H. Cooley was chosen as structural engineer, and Macri for steel fabrication. Thirteen tons of cement and many tons of steel were used for this treetop-height marvel.

Young Sil got to see the steel frame come together, up-close. “I would jump out of our Hudson (automobile) and run into the shop to see what was going on,” he recalls. “It was one of the most exciting things in the world, watching this thing being built.”

Sil's vintage home photos of the Dragon Slide in progress.

His father would show him the drawings, and demonstrate how things were going to come together. At one point they decided to hoist up and test drive the slide at the shop, tacking it together on a flatbed truck, prior to the plaster being applied. Young Sil happily volunteered to be the first to slide down. Unfortunately, a rivet had not been removed, and Sil soon required 18 stitches.

Did this setback change Sil’s love of the slide and/or deter him from future rides? “Heck, no, I wasn’t scared,” he says. The stitches came out in a week, and were forgotten.

Once the slide had been moved to Fairyland and his dad was doing the installation, he and his siblings “were always there. Watching him weld in the park was the bees’ knees,” he says.

“Back then, things were so simple,” he recalls. “Everybody we knew went there.”

Sil also loved the puppet shows, and our Magic Keys. None of his four grandkids have ever visited the park (Sil was last here with his four kids in the eighties), but he intends to gather them all together here this summer, and he’ll be sure to tell the story about how their great-grandfather built an Oakland icon.

“My dad didn’t leave the best mark on this earth,” says Sil, referring to the tough life of his immigrant father. “The best things he left were his kids and the Dragon Slide.”

We can’t wait to welcome Sil and family back to “his” magnificent slide.

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C.J. Hirschfield has served for 17 years as executive director of Children’s Fairyland, where she is charged with the overall operation of the nation’s oldest storybook theme park.