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The amusement park, across the street from the ocean, started as a traveling carnival that would set up on a dirt lot each summer. The Burroughses later bought the rides and hired a man named Earl Husted to manage them.

"We just knew it as 'the beach carnival,' " said Jim Wertz, who grew up in South Carolina in the 1950s and, in his retirement, now gets paid to greet visitors as they come into the amusement park. "That's what everybody called it, and the night before we would come to the beach was like the night before Christmas. I remember my brother and I wouldn't be able to go to sleep, we would be so excited."

Egerton Burroughs came to the Pavilion several times each summer as a child. His first job was bagging groceries in Conway, S.C., where his family lived, but as soon as he got his first driving permit, he came back to the Pavilion to work.

"I started out cleaning restrooms and refilling the BB shot in the shooting gallery," he recalled. He also was considered an errand boy who could be sent to fetch a tool from one side of the park and deliver it to another.

And the music played

In the '50s, a jukebox outside the arcade building played for hours each evening, and hundreds of people would come to dance the shag or watch other people do so. At night, the jukebox was unplugged, and crowds were encouraged to buy tickets to the club upstairs, where the music was live and the drinks were nonalcoholic. The Catalinas, the Embers, the Villagers, Harry Deal and the Galaxies -- all headlined at the Magic Attic back then. Parents would drop off their kids at the amusement park, give them $20 to spend, then go upstairs to hear the band.

Tastes changed, and the Pavilion constantly needed to adapt. The bathhouse where day-trippers once paid for a fresh towel and a shower was torn down and replaced by a go-kart race track. The Magic Attic -- now called just The Attic -- began playing recorded music and catering to teenagers. Computerized, interactive games were added to the Skee-Ball and baseball machines in the arcade. And new rides such as a log flume were added to the amusement park, though it kept its 1912 hand-carved carousel and the early 1900s Wurlitzer band organ with mechanical figures that seem to hypnotize parents waiting for their children to get tired enough to go back to the hotel and sleep.

A few years ago, the owners fenced in the amusement park and installed gates. Myrtle Beach has one of the worst crime rates of any mid-sized city in the nation, and company officials wanted parents to feel their children would be safe as long as they were at the Pavilion.

The saltwater taffy shop is now gone, and so is the shark-tooth jewelry stand. But the hot dogs are as good as ever, thanks to that mustard recipe that Earl Husted left behind when he died. Burroughs sneaks his across the street to a diner where he can enjoy it with a beer.

Burroughs, who loves to travel, says that for months, everywhere he has gone across the nation, people have asked him, "How can you do that, closing the Pavilion?"

"I look every one of them in the eye and ask them, 'When was the last time you were there?' " Burroughs said. " 'Did you bring your kids? Your grandkids?' "

Fourteen million people came to Myrtle Beach last year, most of them from South and North Carolina. Fewer than a million of them came to the Pavilion, where the money they would have spent on food and rides might have helped offset the costs of labor, insurance, utilities or the multimillion-dollar expense of a new ride.

By contrast, more than 12 million people went to Broadway at the Beach, a huge, village-style complex of boutiques, restaurants and entertainment venues Burroughs & Chapin built on the U.S. 17 Bypass a few miles west of the beach 11 years ago. Last year, the company also opened the million-square-foot Myrtle Grand Mall, a mile or so from Broadway at the Beach.

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