When the Winnipesaukee Gardens was the place to be

LACONIA — John P. “Jack” Irwin sat in his family’s boat dealership on Union Avenue recently and remembered how his father, Jim Irwin Sr., put him to work at an early age.

The younger Irwin had a stapler he would use to put up posters from Franklin to Plymouth for his father’s music hall and ballroom, the Winnipesaukee Gardens, which opened on the pier at Weirs Beach in 1925.

Driving a 1935 “woody” station wagon, Jack Irwin picked up a friend in Plymouth one day to join him on his stapling rounds.

“I used to be bored with that job,” he recalled. “My friend said we ought to go up to Mount Washington. I said, ‘Good idea.’

“So we got to the top and stapled one of those things on the building. I didn’t get home until 10 o’clock and my father, says, ‘Where were you?’

“I told him we had a flat tire.

“Two weeks later, The Citizen newspaper had a headline, ‘Jim Irwin advertises at the top of Mount Washington.’”

The younger Irwin started his working life at 7 years old, running a spotlight at the dance hall, where up to 2,200 people would gather in the ballroom to listen to the Big Band sounds of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Harry James.

There was also a movie screen.

“People would come in and could either listen to music or watch a movie,” he said.

On the pier outside, people sat on benches, eating caramel corn and watching the sharp-dressed men and pretty ladies saunter by.

It was Jack Irwin’s job to clean up the popcorn boxes that would litter the pier.

Also, people were known to throw beer mugs, adorned with a mermaid, off the deck of the pier and into the water. Somebody had the job of fishing the handsome glasses out of the water so they could be used again.

“We had a guy go swimming with a big net and he'd put the mugs in the net,” Irwin said. “They survived the fall. They’d hit the water and go to the bottom.”

The century-old pier Weirs Pier lost some of its cachet and its entertainment when Elvis Presley ushered in the rock 'n' roll era and the bands that once played there went out of style.

The supports for the wooden pier eventually will be replaced with modern steel construction.

Ryan Cardella of East Coast Flightcraft Inc., the boat company that now owns the structure, said historic value is taken into account in any work done to improve the pier.

The ballroom where people once danced, music played and beer flowed, is now an arcade.

“People walk in and say, ‘This is where I came when I was a kid,’” Cardella said.

“This has been in people’s history forever, and we are not about to change it," he said. "Every single day I’m amazed at the craftsmanship that went into it.”

A gold curtain from the 1930s is still there, as is an old antique safe where cash from the ballroom business was once kept.

Jack Irwin recalled his father used to keep the safe’s combination on a nearby wall, reasoning “that’s the last place anybody would look for it.”