For decades, she has haunted San Franciscans’ dreams. Her smile never fades; her spastic movements never still. Her laugh — a piercing caterwaul, equal parts delight and terror — echoes in the minds of everyone who encountered her at Playland by the Beach, the amusement park near Ocean Beach that closed in 1972.
Her name is Laffing Sal.
“As kids, we used to cover our ears as we passed Sal,” wrote Herb Caen, the city’s most legendary chronicler, in 1972. In the 1995 KQED documentary San Francisco: The Way It Was, Caen was still thinking about Sal, calling her “a kind of hideous creature with a horrible, manic laugh.”
Sal is still laughing, greeting guests at Musee Mecanique where you can activate her hulking figure and set off the hidden phonograph in her pedestal that plays her persistent guffaws.
Sal was a topic of discussion last month at San Francisco’s 4-Star Theater on Clement St., where former Western Neighborhoods Project executive director Stephen “Woody” LeBounty gave an afternoon presentation entitled “The Birth and Death of San Francisco’s Playland by the Beach.”
LeBounty’s succinct summation of Sal: “You either loved her, or you were scared of her.”
The sold-out crowd, which largely consisted of people old enough to remember Sal from their childhood days at Playland, murmured in agreement. Of course, it wasn’t only that she sounds terrifying — she looks pretty terrifying too.
Festooned with a hat perched above a red wig, Sal measures a mighty 6’10” if you include her pedestal. Constructed out of paper mâché, her spring-loaded inside allows Sal to wave her arms and lean both forward and backwards. Further recognizable by her trademark missing upper tooth (an incisor), Sal is a singular, if eerie, presence even in our much more jaded age.
Originally located on the second floor of Playland’s infamous Fun House, Sal was moved in the 1950s to a prized corner of the ground floor. With Playland often staying open until midnight, Sal’s laughter became a steady, unsettling background beat to a place that also once featured water chutes, a wooden rollercoaster, and a fascinating, if largely unpopular, ride known as the Diving Bell.
Sal appeared in several films set partially at Playland like Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and Woman on the Run (1950). Then there’s 2001’s The Princess Diaries, which found Playland’s Sal in her current home at Musee Mecanique.
Despite her inseparable connection to Playland, Sal was actually one of an estimated 500 nearly identical dolls produced by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company: a prominent amusement park ride manufacturer operating out of Germantown, PA. An ad for the company in a December 1, 1945 issue of Billboard described Sal and her fellow automata, Blackie the Barker and Laffing Sam, as needing no introduction, “Their popularity as a Ballyhoo is a proven Natural.”
Playland chose to play it safe by purchasing two Laffing Sal dolls: one to display and a stand-by replacement. Following the park’s final day of operation on September 4, 1972, both of Playland’s Sals were sold at an auction. One would take a winding path to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk; the other still haunts the city.
Located at Pier 45, the Musee’s inventory includes an array of rare, antique machines initially sourced from the personal collection of Ed Zelinsky (1922-2004). Founded in 1933 and previously located below San Francisco’s Cliff House, this treasure trove of turn-of-the-century games and demonstrations is today overseen by Ed’s son, Dan Zelinsky.
During a recent phone interview, Zelinsky confirmed that Sal continues to deliver an “adverse effect” to many of the little kids who come across her. “She creeps people out all the time,” he said proudly.
“I saw this mom come in with her 10-year-old-daughter,” Zelinsky said. “She was telling her daughter how great Sal was, but once Sal started laughing, the little girl slowly hid behind her mom and asked, 'Mom, are you sure this is fun?' It was great.”
How Sal found her way to the Musee is a tortuous tale that feels almost like a legend. “One day,” Zelinsky recalled, “I got a call from a guy who said he had an original Laffing Sal from Playland and that he wanted to sell it. He lived in a Victorian on Fell Street, so I went down there, looked at it, and there she was. It was fantastic.”
Zelinsky immediately agreed to the man’s desired price (he can’t recall the figure), then went home to write a check. When he returned the following day, check in hand, the seller had already changed his mind.
“He told me he'd decided not to sell it,” Zelinsky said, “and I told him to let me know if he ever changes his mind. Then, about ten years later, he passed away, and his parents put it up for auction with Butterfields & Butterfields.”
Assuming they’d have “no chance” of winning thanks to Sal’s lasting local popularity, the Zelinskys settled for making a silent bid of $3,000, fully assuming they’d be outbid.
“But about three weeks later,” Zelinsky continued, “we got a phone call saying she was ours and to come get her. Apparently not a single other person had bid on her, presumably because nobody thought they'd have a chance.”
$3,000 is a small price to pay for a lifetime of laughter. The nightmares that come with it: priceless.
