The Pink Pig | A Christmas Tradition

If you were a Boomer and grew up in Atlanta, at Christmas you rode the Pink Pig Flyer at Rich’s Downtown.  I’m not sure what salmon colored swine have to do with Christmas, but it was a tradition just like decorating the tree, school plays and the Sears Wish Book.

Rich’s Downtown on Broad Street was the epicenter of shopping in Atlanta.  Not just during the Christmas season, but year round.  There was a bus stop at the end of our driveway in Gresham Park.  I remember getting on the bus with my mother, riding downtown to Rich’s for shopping and lunch at The Magnolia Room, and the bus dropping us off right in front of our house.  This was in the days before Wal-Mart, online shopping, gang warfare and muggings.  My friend Terri Johnson lived around the corner.  She and Sherry Thompson once told me that in high school, they would get on the bus, ride down to Rich’s to shop and their parents never thought twice about it.  As I said, these were different times.

We had our Senior pictures taken at Rich’s downtown.  You were mailed a card telling you a date and time to be at the photo department.  I’m not sure about the girls, but the only thing they specified for the boys was to wear a white shirt.  They had a rack full of different size black jackets. They put one on you that fit, stuck on a bow tie and Presto!  You’re wearing a tux in your picture.  I had a little bit of fuzz on my upper lip I was quite proud of, and the photographer told me it would show up in the picture.  He told me to take the elevator down to the men’s department and ask to borrow an electric razor.  So here I am walking through Rich’s wearing a bow tie, tux jacket, white shirt and blue jeans.  People kept coming up to me and asking me for information and I would have to inform them I did not work in the store.  I explained the situation to the gentleman at the men’s counter.  He gave me an electric razor, and I plugged it into an outlet on a support pole.  I groomed myself, with people walking by gawking and snickering, then went back upstairs and got my picture snapped.  

The lighting of The Great Tree on Thanksgiving Night kicked off the beginning of The Christmas Season in Atlanta.  A huge fir was brought in and mounted atop the four-story “Crystal Bridge” which connected the two Rich’s stores across Forsyth Street.  The video to the right shows the lighting of the tree in 1989.  Thousands would brave the elements to experience the spectacle.  The video obviously does not do it justice.

As a kid, you would go to Rich’s with your parents, visit Santa Claus and ride the Pink Pig Flyer.  The Pink Pig Flyer was introduced in 1953.  It was a train that ran on monorail that left from the building, went out atop the Crystal Bridge and around The Great Tree, back inside and and over the “Wonderland Of Toys” toy department.  You would get a cloth sticker to place on your overcoat confirming you had ridden The Pink Pig,  and that sticker would stay on your coat for the remainder of the winter.  

I read somewhere once that the Yuletide Porkers were purchased from a carnival.  There were two trains, one named Priscilla and the other Percival.  Priscilla had eyelashes and Percival did not, although today that would not mean anything.  They weren’t anatomically correct from the bottom, either.  I still remember being in the store and them rumbling by overhead.  Even then, it was novel to see a train with the smiling countenance of a pig running on the ceiling.  On the back of the Flyer was a big curly-cue tail.  Oink, Oink.  

It was also not unusual to run into someone you knew in The Wonderland of Toys.  When I was ten or eleven, I was there with my parents and as Priscilla passed overhead I heard someone call, “Jimmy!”  I looked up and it was my friend Richard from school, waving at me from the window seat.

I actually rode the Pink Pig Flyer again as an adult.  At some point in the eighties, The Flyers were moved out of the building altogether and onto the roof.  They went around the Great Tree, and I took my daughter to ride it.  I squeezed in with her, as did the dad with his daughter in front of us.  The train lumbered across the roof and around the tree.  About halfway through the ride, I tapped Dad in front of me on the shoulder and said, “Is it me, or was this thing was a lot bigger when I was a kid?”  He couldn’t even turn around because his head was wedged against the window, but he said “Yes, it was a lot bigger then.  Much bigger, actually.”  My daughter wasn’t disappointed, but I have to say I was.  We rode it during the day.  It just wasn’t the same as going out onto the Crystal Bridge at night, back inside and over The Wonderland of Toys.

Rich’s Downtown closed in 1991.  The Flyers were moved to the Festival of Trees at the Atlanta World Congress Center, another wonderful Christmas experience gone by the wayside.  The monorail was installed on the ceiling, and Priscilla and Percival made a grand loop above the trees of the world.  My daughter and her friend got to ride the Flyers there several times, so I am happy that she got to enjoy a similar experience we knew as children. 

After the Festival of Trees was discontinued, the original Pink Pig Flyers were donated to the Atlanta History Center.  A new ride featuring a little train that runs on tracks on the ground was opened up under a tent in the parking lot of Macy’s at Lenox Square.  The train is shaped and painted like a pink pig.  I have never seen it, nor do I care to.  It is not The Pink Pig.  It never will be.  I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel… Still Cruisin’!  –J.