Amusement Park tales

i remember going there as a kid, the summer before. I was six and it may have been the scariest place I had ever been. That story brought back some serious repressed memories.

 

Four pages and nothing about Action Park?

https://www.history.com/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-action-park-new-jerseys-most-dangerous-water-park

 

Most of my recollections are lost to 12 concussions but I spent no fewer than 30 Saturdays wandering around Opryland during my tween years with my friend Chucky. I was partial to the Wabash Cannonball (damn were those lines long!) and the Flume Zoom, although the slow and silly Tin Lizzies were fun for a pre-teen wannabe driver, too. But really the big reason I went so often (thanks for the annual pass, mother and daddy!) was to play the video games...the arcade was the only one in town for a couple of years. My Missile Command technique was perfected at such great expense, I suspect American General paid the park's mortgage in quarters. Oh, I also enjoyed the ice-cream treats on a stick, shaped like a walking upright bass fiddle.

 

I worked seasonally at Disneyland for four years. I was an “attractions host” in Fantasyland. I worked on the Matterhorn, the carousel, Mr. Toad and Peter Pan.

There’s a sudden drop in the Matterhorn track known to employees as Dick Hill. Everyone who is new on the ride soon learns that the “imagineers” supposedly hid a dick in the design there.

Every night at closing someone has to run the track. You climb to the top and literally run down alongside the track, collecting all of the hats and sunglasses that fly off throughout the day. One night a group of us who were new on the ride all did the run together so we could look for the dick.

We get to the spot where it’s supposed to be and we’re befuddled. Don’t see anything. There’s a fake crack in the side of the mountain that looks almost vaguely phallic but it ain’t much.

Then a guy mutters “holy shit” and points behind us.

There is a giant concrete dick with two dangling appendages sticking into a crevasse in the side of the mountain. The dick is a few feet in diameter. It may be 20 feet long. It is behind and above you as you pass by on the ride and cannot be seen from anywhere else. You pretty much have to be standing on the track and facing the wrong way to see it. It was majestic.

I once got a photo of it while riding the ride, but god knows where it is.

By the way... kids, wear your seat belts. That sudden drop at Dick Hill is the same spot where a woman named Dolly undid her belt and sat up. She flew out of the sled, hitting her head on a bridge. The ride shut down. A worker had to run to that section to see what was wrong and found Dolly’s legs sticking out from under the next sled that came through, much like the Wicked Witch. The sled got wedged on her and shut the ride down.

Dolly was no more. I knew the guy who found her. He didn’t like to talk about it.

 

We did the same thing on my ride, except we tried to do it several times a day. There was a negative-G heartline spin on the ride that basically turned it into a giant shakedown machine. Hats, sunglasses, and lots and lots of spare change got freed from people's pockets. When someone would come and ask about a hat or sunglasses, if we had a person to spare we'd send them out into the track area to look for it. I always volunteered. Besides the lost item, I usually found a couple of bucks in nickels, dimes and quarters.
People would get up out of the ride and have change fall out of their pockets as well. They rarely realized it, so whoever was working the unload station could grab it before they moved the train forward. Sometimes it'd be a couple of dimes or nickels, sometimes it might be a few quarters.
It all added up pretty quickly. I don't know exactly how much I made in "tips" that summer, but it was enough that when we hit the Wawa up the road after work I hardly ever paid for anything out of my own pocket.

 

Of all the rides on which someone died, the most Darwinian story that I’ve read is the death on the Disney Fantasyland People Mover. That thing is completely horizontal, no dips, but someone found a way to hit Game Over.

 

Almost all of the deaths on amusement park rides are Darwinian in nature. The Schlitterbahn decapitation is very rare in that regard. There are some design flaws that might contribute to someone's death on a ride, or that amplify bad behavior, but about 99 percent of them are people doing something they should never have been doing. Like the guy in Georgia who jumped a fence on a suspension coaster and got kicked in the head by a foot going 50 mph. Or the girl who jumped an air gate and got on a rollercoaster as it was starting, then fell out when it went through a loop.

I almost had one of those once.
Our ride had many, many design flaws. One of them was that the train unloaded at the back of the station and then was advanced to the front loading area, which left an empty section of track until the next train came in a few moments later. Below that empty section of track -- which was about 12 feet wide -- was a 25-foot drop to the ground under the station. If the track was empty, you waited for the next train to come through and signaled the operator before crossing through the train.
That was design flaw No. 1. Design flaw No. 2 was that riders had to exit to the right to go down the exit ramp. If they went left, there was an unsecured staircase that led under the station. If you had "countless" for the number of guests who exited left, no matter how loud you yelled "Exit to the RIGHT!" you win a stuffed frog.
The problem came when the guests exited to the left, couldn't figure out where they were, and started to panic. Some of them, you could quickly calm them down and tell them to just hang on for a minute. Others were like animals in a trap ready to gnaw their own leg off to get out.
So one night, we get a 20-something guy who goes left and is hopped up on adrenaline and ignorance. The train gets advanced before we realize he's there, so the track is empty. We try to tell him just hang on, but he's not waiting. The stupid son of a bitch takes one step and jumps across the 12-foot gap in the track. I tried to grab him, but only got a wisp of sleeve. Probably a good thing, because it might have blunted his momentum if I'd gotten more than that. He somehow made it across and shot me a dirty look while telling his buddy, "That dude tried to grab me!"
Well, yeah, asshole. I was trying to save your life.

 

Amusement parks are one thing. Mechanical issues are rare if properly maintained.

But those traveling carnival rides for state and county fairs? Constantly being set up, taken apart, set up again. Fuck them.

 

I sat in the middle of one of those once and got some great photos of nieces and nephews while the thing was spinning. After it stopped spinning, I yelled for someone to stop spinning it. It was not a fun experience. Pictures were worth it.

 

This is absolutely correct. I know what goes into the maintenance of the rides at Disneyland. I will not get on a fair ride.

 

You're also putting your life in the hands of a 40-something carnie who might’ve been on this third oxy of the morning or stoned out of his mind when he was putting in that last bolt.