All Keyed Up

By C.J. Hirschfield

“I’m a sane person,” Lela McKenna assures me. “I just have a singular obsession with Fairyland’s Magic Key.”

No kidding.

Lela – one of Fairyland’s most active volunteers – still has her very first key, which she believes she acquired in 1968. “It’s yellow, and it has the original tag,” she says.

Children’s Fairyland’s iconic Magic Key made its debut a decade earlier, in 1958. It unlocks the many storybook boxes in our park, releasing musical stories tied to our fanciful sets. For generations of Bay Area kids, the Magic Key has represented positive memories of time spent with loved ones in our little urban oasis.

Lela McKenna, volunteer extraordinaire.

A Teddy Bear's Tattoo

By C.J. Hirschfield

Oakland resident Phil Wong, 27, is an actor, educator, musician, and comic. He’s also a featured performer in Fairyland’s latest Theatre for the Very Young (TVY) production, “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” Until the show opened, Phil hadn’t been at Fairyland since he was very young himself. So we were surprised to notice that he sports a tattoo of our Magic Key on his arm.

Clearly, he had come home.

Phil Wong's Magic Key tattoo.

Permanent Superfan

Chris Kelley has fond memories of spending time at his grandma’s house in the 1970s. Young Chris and his two sisters loved going fishing near her house in Alameda and visiting locomotives at the Harrison Railroad Park on 7th Street in Oakland (now long gone).

But Chris's very favorite thing to do was to open her utility drawer, grab a Children’s Fairyland Magic Key (she had many) and persuade her to take him to his favorite place, where the key unlocked much more than just a talking Storybook Box.

Chris moved to Texas in 1994, when he was 24. His grandmother is gone now. But the memories they shared live on, and part of his heart always remained in Oakland. At Fairyland.

Last week he returned to Fairyland with his entire family: his wife, their four kids (ages 10 to 19) and his son’s girlfriend. Also along for the visit was a stunning tattooed image on one of Chris's arms. It depicts our iconic Willie the Whale figure biting at a fishhook shaped like a Magic Key.

Fairyland superfan Chris Kelley shows off the tattoo that celebrates his lifelong love of the park.