To the editor:

I am originally from Pennsylvania. In the summer, we’d vacation in Atlantic City, N.J., where they had rickshaws on the boardwalk and they were lots of fun to ride! Of course, there were no cars allowed on the boardwalk other than emergency vehicles.

But what I longed for more than riding rickshaws was a chance to ride in a “one-horse open sleigh.” I’d seen many Amish folks riding in horse-drawn sleighs. How I envied them.

When I was 7 years old, my family and I moved to Riverside, Calif., in 1963. That year for Christmas, instead of presents, my parents took my brother, sister and I to Disneyland. We rode the horse-drawn buggies up Main Street U.S.A., and I immediately fell in love with it! My father liked Disneyland’s electric trolleys because they reminded him of the trolleys he rode growing up in Philadelphia.

I attended a college for individuals with hearing impairments in Washington, D.C., where I met my wife, a Lawrence native. When I saw my first Downtown Lawrence Old-Fashioned Christmas Parade, I exclaimed to my wife how it reminded me of Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland — except there’s no electric trolleys here — not yet anyway. Could you imagine the response Lawrence would get if it remodeled its downtown to be more like Downtown U.S.A. at Disneyland? If somehow rickshaws, electric trolleys, carriages and sleighs could all be utilized, not just at Christmas, but year-round? Well, personally, I’d look around to see if I could catch a glimpse of Mickey Mouse!