Summer as it ever was

Shirley Giulianelli and her husband, Fred, have enjoyed dinner on summer evenings in Salem since their first date in 1991. (Boston.com Photo / Scott LaPierre)

SALEM - Summer came to Salem Willows this week.

On Monday afternoon, little kids bobbed up and down on the horses at the Kiddieland carousel, waving delightedly at their grown-ups.

A 4-year-old on a rickety wooden boat slowly circled the water ride. "All aboard!" she yelled, her shrieking little brother spinning the steering wheel into a blur beside her.

Teenagers massed in the Willows Arcade, laughing too loudly and eyeing each other with studied disregard. Retro video game devotees stood before hooded Space Invaders and Pac-Man machines. Others sat at games with distressingly lifelike animation, inflicting bloody injuries with giant automatic weapons.

A man and his son wandered around, selling chocolate hearts on sticks to save a church he declined to name.

"Mom, I saved a church!" said a 'tween who had just handed over her dollar.

"Don't eat that chocolate," her mother said. "You don't know who made it!"

Salem Willows, the waterfront park and the nearby strip of amusement arcades and food purveyors, has been around since the late 1800s.

There are precious few places like this left around here and fewer still that have resisted the impulse to gussy themselves up into shiny replicas of their former selves. But here, where generations of families helped by generations of summer workers have sold generations of locals ice cream, amusements, and memories each summer, everybody is invested in keeping the place the same as it has been for decades. They patch the old wooden rides, keep the restaurants down-at-the-heel, hang onto the old recipes. Nobody messes with the brand.

The Salem Lowe restaurant introduced Chinese food to Willows enthusiasts in the '60s, and the menu looks as if hasn't changed since. Over the weekend, servers took orders and slammed down their window screens like guillotines. Tattooed bikers and neat suburbanites stood 12-deep on the sidewalk, waiting for their chop suey sandwiches: gray, $1.71 heaps of gooey bean sprouts and chicken piled into hamburger buns.

"That's what you want to stick to; that's the deal," said Bill Busta, 51, who lives in Manchester-by-the-Sea, spent his youth at Salem Willows, and still comes for the sandwiches he can find only here.

"Our business here is nostalgia," said Charlie Hobbs.

His great-grandfather, Ernest Hobbs, opened his popcorn and ice cream store at the end of Fort Street in 1897. A carousel once stood where the Hobbs pavilion is now. Charlie, 38, makes 300 gallons of ice cream a week using a 60-year-old machine and 100-year-old recipes in the basement where, he says, a mule once dragged the ride round.

Kimberlee Cromwell, 29, has been coming to the Salem Willows annual Black Picnic, held the third Saturday in July, since she was a baby. More than a century old, the picnic draws about 1,000 revelers from churches in Boston and nearby towns each year.

There are so many different types of people here, Cromwell says, and they all seem so comfortable around each other, that she makes the trip from Mattapan with her family all the time.

She is going to have more company than usual this year, owners say, because high gas prices will mean families looking for fun closer to home. Already, a few days into the season, they're busier than they've been in years, Charlie Hobbs said.

Shirley Giulianelli sat on a bench as a chill came into the air Monday afternoon, watching an army of cranky, sticky kids walk by with their spent parents. Her husband, Fred, was getting dinner, "from the Chinaman," she said.

Shirley is 83. Fred is 87. They fell in love in senior housing in Beverly.

Fred thought he'd never get married, Shirley said, "but he'd never found anything like me."

They came here on their first date, in 1991. They've come back for the same dinner - pepper steak, chicken fingers, and Pepsi colas - just about every summer weekend since.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com.