LITTLE ROCK — A recent weekday trip to Willow Springs triggered gauzy recollections of the 1993 movie The Sandlot.
I saw it in the theaters when I was nearly the same age as its central characters — a group of neighborhood boys on the cusp of adolescence one summer in the early 1960s. They played endless games of baseball, played hijinks at a local pool and messed with a menacing dog. When I saw it, it struck me as a movie about nostalgia for an age and innocence I was at the time living through, which briefly caused me to become nostalgic about my own present. Although a strange sensation, it was a welcome one. It made me more deeply appreciate my childhood friends before adulthood scattered us to different states.
I experienced a similar sort of vicarious nostalgia on my first visit to Willow Springs, self-proclaimed as Little Rock's oldest water park. Twenty-three other vehicles stood in the parking lot at 5:30 p.m., surrounded by a band of forest in a blue collar neighborhood of south Little Rock. Bob Seger’s "Like a Rock" played on the radio. Everything seemed a little worn. One of the bathroom's circa 1966 wooden signs, labeled "Guys," features a love-struck cartoon wolf in mid-stride. The other, labeled "Dolls," shows "Little" Red Riding Hood sporting a red bikini and cape as she runs away in red heels. Owner David Ratliff, 60, said his brother painted them as a homage to a hit song by the rock band Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.
It's as if every edge in the place has been smoothed by more than 80 summers' worth of visitors.
I had family to meet. My cousins-in-law had brought their children, 4- and 2-year-olds, and I found them splashing around in the kiddy pool.
Zeb Allen, 4, and his 2-year-old sister, Rosalie, eagerly doggie paddled to other parts of the lake, between slides, deflated lake trampolines, concrete platforms and a rolling log. With the adults' help, they attacked each of these with zeal, often crashing into the muddy waters below.
The water comes from different sources: three natural springs which enter under the lake's surrounding walls, Willow Springs itself which enters from the woods and a 300-feet well connected to a large aquifer into which 60-degree water can be pumped at 100 gallons a minute, Ratliff said.
Zeb and Rosalie’s mother, Andrea Allen of Sherwood, said her children had visited the park a couple of years ago, but likely couldn't remember those earlier, less kinetic visits.
I watched Zeb on one of his adventures on the park's piece de resistance, a giant water slide that sends its users ricocheting into a bottom pool with the force of a trebuchet. My wife, Susan, was holding him securely between her legs on a foam mat as they rocketed down 400 feet of slick, zig-zaggy awesomeness. As they emerged onto the slide's stretch run, I gave Zeb the thumbs up sign before he exploded out of Susan's grasp, arms raised, and splashed into the bottom pool, his face careening toward the side concrete wall before he slowed down and emerged, gasping and smiling. He bobbed in his life jacket momentarily before yelling: "I just saved myself!"
Then it was up for round two, me with Zeb, Susan with Rosalie.
As we walked to the slide's top, little man decided to expound on the physics of water sliding.
First off, if you want to go real fast, he explains, you just lay straight back. He clenched his fists and briefly stood up straight to demonstrate. Next, if you really want to have fun rounding one of the slide's curves, you have to get up as high as you can on the slide's rounded edge at the curve. "It's kind of like snowboarding," he added.
Later, Zeb tells me he's never been snowboarding — he just knows how it is.
Mostly, Willow Springs has a laid-back atmosphere. The evening I went, a mother changed her baby's diaper on a picnic cloth on the grass fringing the lake. She later floated that baby in a covered inflatable starfish floatie. Teens played water basketball on a drooping rim. Families gathered at covered picnic areas for hours. And in two hours, I heard the lifeguard whistle once.
For sure, this contrasts nicely with the more frenzied, crowded atmosphere of places like Wild River County and Crystal Falls in Magic Springs. Yes, Willow Springs has drawbacks — its 5-foot-deep, warm water isn't very swimmable, and horseflies can be nuisance (they are especially bad at the top of the giant slide). But I feel the relaxed vibe and budget-friendly prices more than make up for the drawbacks. Because we arrived after 4 p.m., Susan and I got in for $7 each, and we bought a Diet Coke, ice cream sandwich, 20 oz. Gatorade, a surprisingly delicious cheeseburger and a six-pack of peanut butter cheese crackers for $5.50.
If you're single, and on the prowl for a sun-bronzed babe to later take to club Discovery for a drunken night of sloppy dance-floor gyrating, then this may not be the place for you.
"We don't allow immodest dress, we don't allow profanity to be used in the park, we don't allow any alcohol," said Ratliff, who owns the park with his wife Lou Ann. "The things we don't allow attract a lot of people, a lot of families."
Indeed, Ratliff, a regular member of nearby Sandstone Drive Church of Christ, hosts free vacation Bible camps for poor children.
"For us it's not just a job," said Ratliff, who lives across the street from the park he has managed since 2004. "It's also a mission."
In earlier decades, the park included a dance hall, arcade and skating rink. Built in 1928, it originally served as a dance venue for soldiers from what is now Camp Joseph T. Robinson, Ratliff said. He recalled an elderly woman who visited him a few years ago, and said in the early 1930s she and a group of 12 other girls would visit the Gus Blass department store in downtown Little Rock, and buy "outrageously colored dresses" to attract soldiers with whom they'd dance the nights away. He told me of a pair of brothers who regularly rode their bicycles all the way from Jacksonville, and a couple of 85-year-olds who visited the park to celebrate their 65th anniversary. They walked the premises, "laughing and crying," as they revisited where they had shared dates so long ago, Ratliff said.
Willow Springs, naturally, has changed through the years. A fence now prevents locals from emerging from the woods on their ATVs and sauntering into the park for free, as some did in the mid-1980s, said longtime visitor Jennifer Thornton of Little Rock. In the last decade, more Hispanics have frequented the park as their population around 3903 Willow Lake Road grows. Now, roughly 70 percent of customers are white, 15-20 percent are Hispanic and the rest primarily black, Ratliff said.
I met Juan Vidrio, 33, sitting on a wooden picnic table by the lake. Vidrio, who is originally from Mexico but moved to south Little Rock five years ago, said his teenage daughter was working that evening as a life guard. It was his first visit to the park. "It's a nice place," said Vidrio, who works as a cook. "I had fun."
It's a simple concept, one teens slowly twirling on a red top near the middle of the lake had no trouble grasping. Another group standing in nearby water softly batted a tether ball around.
Journey's "Only The Young" poured from a speaker perched in a tree, washing over it all.
Visit the park
Willow Springs Water Park
3903 Willow Lake Road, Little Rock
(501) 888-4148
Hours: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Saturday; noon to 8 p.m. Sunday
www.willowsprings.net