Amusement Park tales

I never worked at one, but I stashed a pint of whiskey in my sock on our eighth-grade trip to Six Flags. Of course, I also took along a pint on my Catholic school's eighth-grade retreat at a town park.

 

Didn't work there, but I almost got kicked out of Disneyland. I was with three buddies in our early 20s and we were on Pirates of the Caribbean. It was late in the evening and not too crowded so we were placed strategically in the boat to balance out the weight. At one point, two boats stopped and we got the bright idea to switch from our back boat to the front boat. One friend warned that there are cameras all over but we ignored him. As soon as we stepped out of the boat three workers jumped from behind the set and nabbed us. They told us we were being ejected and started walking us out, the whole time lecturing about the high pressured jets in the ride and how we could be killed. Since it was in the last hour or so of the park being opened, we were taken toward the front and then told we could stay, but not to return to Adventureland.

 

My girlfriend spent a few summers working at Cedar Point. They threw a bunch of kids in their teens and their 20s into a dorm and hoped for the best. The stories are interesting.

 

Two friends of mine worked at Disney in Orlando. They said the underground tunnels to get around the theme park are pretty crazy but fun.

 

In 1973-74 I worked as Yogi Bear, Charlotte the Pig and Fred Flintstone in appearances for Kings Dominion, an amusement park that was being built in Doswell, Va., just north of Richmond. We'd go to grade schools, did the Manassas Christmas parade, etc.

Yogi was the best character because he had shoes and fingers (Charlotte the Pig did not), and could sign autographs. A lot of kids in Virginia got autographs from Yogi Bear signed, "Impeach Nixon, Yogi Bear." Never got caught.

 

I worked at Six Flags for three summers in high school and college (two in food service and one in rides).
I think I've told this story before, but the summer I was in rides I worked on a rollercoaster. One particular day we had a real problem with line cutters. I got to work at 3, and by 6 we had had three or four complaints about people cutting in line. The policy was to eject them from the park, but unless you caught them in the act or got a guest to fill out a complaint there wasn't any way to enforce it. We weren't able to do either, so there was nothing we could do.
Finally, I went on break around 7 and saw these two assholes we had just had some complaints about jumping back into the queue about 3/4 of the way through a 30-minute line. I went back to the platform and called security while they were coming through the line. They made it through before security got there, so I told the attendants to let them ride and hatched a plan.
Our coaster had a mechanism where you could manually release each seat's restraints without unlocking the whole train. So the train comes back in and me and one of the attendants start going from front to back. You're good, you're good, you're good ... NOPE! ... you're good ...
I let everyone else off the train except those two guys and held them there until security was walking up the exit ramp.
Few times in my life have I felt like a cool, calculating badass as much as I did that day.

 

Grew up in Long Beach and went to Disneyland dozens of times.

At the age of 18 got a job there doing ... I don't even remember ... but the big perk of working at Disneyland was free admission with your name tag.

The big thing then, 1989, 1990, was to get a job there JUST FOR the free admission then quit in a week or two because it usually took several months before they realized you weren't coming back and to cancel the perks. Enjoyed the perk several times till the jig was up.

 

Six Flags had the same thing, plus reciprocal agreements where you could show your work ID and get free admission to all of the other Six Flags parks. We always talked about doing that, but we didn't live close enough to the other parks to make it an easy road trip.

 

Not a fan of riding rollercoasters. I think I can handle the drops and hard-g turns and such if I had some semblance of control of the situation. Anyway, just out of college, my then-roommate’s mom visits Cincinnati and they drag me to King’s Island just north of the ‘Nati.

“Go on the coaster,” they said. “It’s fun,” they said.

Later, the mom, who stayed on the ground, said all she could hear for the five-minute ride was me yelling “FFFFF*****CCCCCKKKK!” over and over again while parents covered their children’s ears.

 

The "Comet" roller coaster at Crystal Beach, Ontario, was a classic, and something everyone growing up in WNY had to ride and share tales of. It's now at Lake George, N.Y.