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BROOKLYN (CBS/AP) ― On a tranquil Coney Island morning, redolent with salt water and last night's cotton candy, the silence is interrupted by the rapid-fire bursts of twin hammers beating against steel track.

Tucked 85 feet below, beneath the twists and turns of the Cyclone roller coaster, Gerry Menditto listens to the pounding with the intensity of a violin virtuoso tuning strings on a Stradivarius. "That hammer," he says evenly. "That will tell you what's happening."

The white-haired Menditto, as he has for 33 years, is ensuring the venerable wood-and-steel coaster is running like a world-class sprinter before opening the attraction to hordes of screaming riders. On Tuesday, the legendary Cyclone -- a paradise once nearly turned into a parking lot -- celebrates its 80th birthday.

Menditto, 64, celebrated its 50th, 60th and 75th birthdays, too.

His tenure began when Democrat Abe Beame sat behind a desk in City Hall and New York Met Joe Torre sat on the bench in Shea Stadium. He has evolved into the Rembrandt of the roller coaster, an amusement park artiste responsible for maintaining the national landmark.

"He's like an orchestra conductor," says Carol Albert, whose family has run the Cyclone since 1975. "He has such a sense of feel for that machine and what it's doing."

In the hours before the Cyclone rattles to life, Menditto and his staff give the red, white and blue coaster a complete once-over -- from the wheels spinning beneath its vintage wooden cars to the tracks soaring above the Atlantic Ocean.

It's a routine going back generations, passed down among the coaster's blue-collar cognoscenti.

Menditto and his half-dozen workers arrive around 7 a.m. for their daily rounds, moving briskly before the beach and the boardwalk come to life. Broken bolts are removed and replaced, cracked wood quickly supplanted, fresh coats of paint smoothly applied.

But the work begins with the echoing hammers, wielded by two workers moving to the peculiar rhythms of their tools -- step, swing, thwack!

Step, swing, thwack!

A less-than-robust response to the hammer means instant repair work.

"If it sounds a little tiny and hollow, we've got a problem," Menditto says. Track workers mark trouble spots with anything from a wiggly scratch in the steel to a baseball cap dropped beside a bad bolt.

Underneath the tracks, another worker tunes up the 100-horsepower motor that drives the Cyclone -- the same one used on June 26, 1927, when the coaster debuted.

The ride cost a quarter then, when trans-Atlantic pilot Charles Lindbergh rode the Cyclone and proclaimed it was "greater than flying an airplane at top speed." And while a spin on the coaster left many speechless, it had the opposite effect on Emilio Franco.

Mute since birth, Franco uttered his first words after one ride on the Cyclone: "I'm sick!" The West Virginia coal miner, stunned by the sound of his own voice, then reportedly fainted.

With reviews like those, it was no surprise when the Cyclone reigned for years as the city's No. 1 tourist attraction.

But the coaster, like the surrounding neighborhood, was in decline when Menditto first arrived. He worked in Coney Island as an electrician before answering the Cyclone's siren song in summer 1975.

"I came to refurbish the roller coaster for two weeks," he says. "By the third week, I was the manager."

Menditto is genial and soft-spoken with a dry wit, totally at ease on his home turf. Growing up in Coney Island, his lullabies came from the speakers blaring atop the long-gone Atlantis nightclub: "I used to go to sleep to cowboys singing on the boardwalk," he says with a half-smile.

That Coney Island is long gone, soon to be followed by its current incarnation. The neighboring Astroland amusement park is into its last season, and several other blocks are targeted for a $1.5 billion makeover aimed at turning the once-seedy strip into a glitzy year-round tourist attraction.

The Cyclone, thanks to its landmark status, will endure. Menditto recalled when that wasn't always the case, when workers would spent six hours a day trying to repair the coaster on the cheap, with no guarantee that the Cyclone would not be derailed for good.

"If this wasn't a landmark, I believe by now it would be a parking lot," he says. "You know the old saying: `You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone."'

The 60 mph ride sounds almost quaint compared to new coasters, like the breathtaking Kingda Ka, which goes zero to 128 mph in 3.5 seconds and rises 45 stories up. But Menditto, whose license plate sits in a custom-made frame declaring him "Mr. Cyclone," knows his ride offers more than any 21st-century scream machines.

"It's a legend in its own time," he says. "Everybody knows about it."

Which explains one of its more endearing attributes: the sign above the coaster's loading platform, encouraging riders to "Please Secure All Valuables," is written in English, Russian, Chinese and Spanish.

Not that anybody pays attention.

"I have a box full of cell phones, wallets," he says. "I have a passport down there now that needs to be returned. False teeth, wigs. One year, we found an artificial finger.

"I think it was a pinky."

The cost of a ride this summer is $6, not that Menditto cares. Although he's spent half his life with the Cyclone, he has never spent one second aboard the ride -- and doesn't intend to.

"I've never been on the Cyclone in my life," Menditto says. "When I was a kid, there was a small roller coaster across the street where Luna Park was -- it was called the L.A. Thompson. I went on it once, and never again.

"I'm not afraid of heights. I just don't like the drop."

(© 2007 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)