The blaze that sparked either late Thursday night, May 22 or in the earliest hours of Friday, May 23 brought volunteer fire companies from the city of Latrobe and the Ligonier Township communities of Darlington and Waterford, who used water from their booster tanks and the Loyalhanna Creek to douse the flames.xvi The late Harry Frye, a renowned former staff photographer for the Latrobe Bulletin and the Beaver County Times, remembered the Rumpus fire, as he was one of volunteer firefighters who answered the emergency call that night. He served on the Latrobe department. By the time Frye arrived on scene, the Rumpus was beyond saving. The fire had rapidly consumed the wooden building and the dark ride inside.

“When we got there, the thing was in total – engulfed – and there was actually no hope
of saving it because it had gone pretty fast. All the fire departments were there:
Ligonier, Darlington and the whole group.”
“I was at the fire and it was, I mean, it was beyond saving. By the time the firemen got there and everything. Almost everything in that place was wooden, you know, no metal beam or anything.”
“ Everything burnt. It was really a hot fire.” – Harry Frye xvii

C.C. Macdonald even stepped in to help control the blaze with fire extinguishers before the companies arrived. Because of his actions, the fire did not attack the park’s nearby Caterpillar ride, a $16,000 investment added for that season. Although the flames did not spread far, they damaged a nearby ticket booth, some trees and a fence for the live Pony Track located along the creek behind the Rumpus building.xvii

After letting the incident cool down for a few weeks, C.C. Macdonald described the loss in a June 11, 1947 letter to Ligonier Valley Rail Road general superintendent Joseph P. Gochnour. Police initially believed the cause of the fire to be defective wiring,xix but Macdonald’s letter revealed another suspected source: Idlewild’s night watchman, Fred Clawson. Investigators first presumed that Clawson was killed in the fire, as he was nowhere to be found on the grounds after punching the time clock near the park’s entrance and his watch was discovered among the charred rubble of the Rumpus building.xx However, the state police eventually apprehended Clawson at home, “intoxicated,” according to Macdonald.

Clawson was detained at the Pennsylvania State Police barracks in Greensburg for a week and questioned about his activities the night of the fire. According to Macdonald’s letter, Clawson was eventually released without charges, but police determined that if he did not set the fire intentionally, he was at the very least careless in leaving his post that night.
“It is the opinion of the Investigator that he might have had something to do with this fire. However, nothing has been proven. We do know that he was negligent. If he had been on the job,
he would have detected the fire in time for us to hold our loss at a minimum.”
-Letter from C.C. Macdonald to J.P. Gochnour, June 11, 1947
Courtesy of the Ligonier Valley Rail Road Association
The Rumpus fire dealt Idlewild Park a financial blow, after beginning “an especially busy season” with around 70 school picnics booked through the opening weeks alone. Macdonald admitted to Gochnour that the Idlewild Management Company chose not to have the ride insured due to the high cost of insurance. Newspapers reported that the park took a $24,000 loss between the Rumpus ride building and all the equipment and materials in storage.xxi The entire building was leveled and the eight cars of the Rumpus were lost, along with all of the ride’s spooky stunts.

Sadly, the fire caused one death: Laffing Sal.

The Idlewild Management Company’s plan to open the new restaurant later that year was pushed back until the 1948 season. The fire also consumed not only the equipment that was being stored temporarily in the Rumpus building (valued at $761.77),xxiii but, according to the late Dick Macdonald, also the park’s entire supply of sugar, a rationed commodity for soft drinks (otherwise known as “pop” for western Pennsylvanians reading this article!) at that time.xxiv Other materials stored in the building were also lost, including a $600 air compressor and some undefined equipment from Rock Springs Park (valued at $1,593.00).xxv

The Rumpus fire was also a historic loss. As mentioned earlier, the building previously housed the park’s Skee-Ball machines and, before that, served as a circa 1880s dining room, one of Idlewild’s oldest existing buildings at the time.

Jack Macdonald told the media that it “would be impossible to rebuild the Rumpus” for that season.xxvi He was right. Idlewild never replaced its dark ride. In 1951, the IMC relocated its Kiddie Land to a new dedicated area along the Loyalhanna Creek near the Pony Track, overlapping the former Rumpus site. Management looked toward Idlewild Park’s future, leaving the Rumpus ride in the past.