“It was bad enough the [Action Park] pavilion concession stand was out of hamburgers, making hot dogs the alternative, but a surcharge for onions? Outrageous.”
Courier-Post (South Jersey), July 26, 1981
As the first Wave Pool season wound to a close, I headed back to the Jersey Shore to stay at my friend Rich Szuch’s house. The gentle waves that lapped over the sand provided a stark contrast to the screaming and mania of my father’s simulation. I felt stress hiss out of my body like someone had found a pressure nozzle.
I had just graduated from high school, but Rich, Benji Bressler, and the others were a year ahead of me and were already coming off a year of college. I heard stories of women and parties, freewheeling dorms and fraternities that were like something out of Caligula. My own looming college experience couldn’t get here fast enough. When I told them I had enrolled at Stanford, Rich sighed.
“Unbelievable women,” he said. “California quality.”
“Actually,” Chuckie Baby said, “nine out of ten women in California are hot. The tenth goes to Stanford.”
We spent many days and nights like this, inflating my expectations of college, bullshitting, and becoming wandering vagrants around the shore. I braced myself for a culture shock of some sort in California, where my experience with the anarchy of the park and the East Coast might make me an odd man out. I otherwise had no real anxiety about college, which, no matter what challenges it presented, would not involve mass near-drownings.
Despite the stress of the job, I felt a lot of pride over what we had accomplished so far. Though we struggled with the overcrowding and general recklessness of visitors, the Wave Pool had claimed no lives and we had managed to avoid any serious calamity. Only one guest had sued us. Dan Giachin had tossed a waterlogged buoy into a man’s face and shattered his teeth. Dan’s position was that the guy should have been thankful we saved his life. That was certainly one way of looking at it, though the man’s lawyer didn’t agree. We wound up paying for the guest’s dental work. The full extent of our legal problems was still unknown to me and to most of our visitors. That would soon change.
I intended to study business at Stanford, but the university didn’t offer an undergrad business degree, so I settled for political science. I was not yet sure what would happen after that. Julie, who had been head of Water World, had just graduated from college and was going into marketing full-time for both the ski area and the summer operations. It felt like she would be a lifer. Splinter and Pete were not. Splinter would soon wed Eloise, a park attendant, and move into electrical engineering. Pete was in graduate school. Our father never pushed us to pursue a career under any of his various business umbrellas. Of the two possible paths, I didn’t know which one I would follow.
“Hey, look at that,” Rich said, nudging my arm. We were sitting on his porch, which overlooked the ocean. I saw something bobbing and then another. Rich and I climbed over the railing and moved through the sand. There, washed up on the beach, were three inner tubes. All bore the Action Park logo.
“I guess people are taking souvenirs,” Rich said.
I picked up a sand-encrusted tube, which had traveled an untold distance, like a message in a bottle, to find me.
It felt like the perfect time to move across the country.
I was conscious of the fact that the relocation meant a new window onto the world. The park, for all its charms, presented a very narrow selection of humanity, one that sought out ways to destroy, not nourish, brain cells. That world had given me a calloused exterior. It made me wary of people who acted first and thought never. Being park-smart had made me street-smart. It had also cultivated a sense of abandon, a freedom from structure. Stanford promised a different, cerebral perspective, one that might save me from Gene logic and return me to a normal outlook on life.
When I arrived, my freshman advisor told me there was a job opening on campus.
“Okay,” I said, eager for the spending money my mother would never give me. She had demanded receipts for the food budget she was allotting. “Where?”
“Lifeguard at the pool,” he said.
I braced for a repeat of the summer but it didn’t come. The campus pool was meant to sharpen the skills of students who might one day become Olympic hopefuls. They dutifully signed in, then deftly glided into the water, barely displacing any chlorine-scented liquid upon entering or exiting. They were obnoxiously excellent. I wondered how they would fare with sentient and malevolent waves dragging them under.
The pool was my closest brush with elite collegiate athletics, which were serious business there. The easiest way to go from feeling reasonably fit and brimming with confidence after a summer spent saving lives to feeling socially inadequate is to step foot on the Stanford campus. All around me, students on sports scholarships mingled with one another. The swimmers were six foot four and had giant wingspans, forcing them to turn sideways to walk through classroom doors. The football players seemed to be molded out of concrete, their thick necks offering no slack for their shirt collars. In high school, I was one of the bigger guys at any given gathering. Here, I felt like a Keebler Elf.
Though Stanford was not one of the marquee football schools back then, its gridiron program was solid, with future NFL star John Elway as starting quarterback. A guy in my freshman dorm named Fred Buckley was Elway’s heir apparent. Fred’s father worked as a sports tout, someone who would advise gamblers on the best bets of the week. Making a living on sports betting while your son is a Division I quarterback struck me as odd, but there was never any hint of impropriety. Mr. Buckley’s business was apparently cash only, though. He sent Fred Federal Express envelopes stuffed with bills on a regular basis.
It was Fred who first made me aware of the List.
“Hey, man,” he said. “You heard about the List?”
I had not and told him as much.
“It’s a list of classes for the players that are easy as shit,” he said. As he explained it, the players were “dumber than a box of hammers” and needed these dubious courses in order for the football team to remain intact.
He had my attention now.
“There’s this class called ‘The Man and the Sea,’” Fred said. “It’s just an old fisherman telling stories.” There was a class on public speaking and another that spent the entire semester on just one question: Should Northern Ireland be part of Ireland or should it remain part of the United Kingdom? I had already signed up for a number of challenging classes in history, political science, and sociology. It was clear that many of my classmates were borderline geniuses, while I had barely squeaked in on good, but not incredible, academic accomplishments. If I could round out my schedule with courses meant for athletes with room-temperature IQs, I was not going to turn the opportunity down. (The vaunted List thrived until 2011, when the San Francisco Chronicle exposed the school for coddling its athletes academically. I was shocked it went undiscovered for that long.)
The straight classes made up for the scam courses. I attended psychology lectures by Philip Zimbardo, who devised the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment that cast students in the roles of inmates and guards at a fictional prison in the school’s basement and then watched them devolve into animals. Zimbardo would have found the park fascinating. The political science class was taught by Condoleezza Rice, the future Secretary of State. I thought she was sensational, smart, and charismatic. I took as many classes from her as I could. Later, when I was told I needed an advisor in my major, I picked Professor Rice—long before George Bush Senior or Junior did.
I also took a journalism class from Professor Kendall Jackson, who lived below the freshman dorm as a kind of den father. One night, in anticipation of a Rolling Stones concert the following day, I decided to stay up all night with two East Coast guys I had met there, Adam Tracy and Eric Weintz. Adam was best known for having gotten wasted out of his mind the night before a major test for an advanced math course and somehow getting the highest grade of any student. The handful of classes he bothered attending must have made an impression.
The plan was to arrive at the concert at six o’clock in the morning to get good seats, which were first come, first served. We stayed up, drank, and blasted Stones music. After about a half an hour, there was a pounding on the door. It was Professor Jackson in a pair of pajamas, berating us for being boorish. I offered to turn the music down, acknowledging it was rude.
Prepared for a fight, he seemed disarmed when I capitulated. “You know what you are?” he asked me, pointing at my chest. “You are an elite thug.”
This prompted Adam to burst into laughter, but I didn’t quite get it. Was I supposed to be some kind of privileged kid? My entire high school experience consisted of homework during the school year and toiling from dawn until dusk in the summer. I had just bought a run-down Chevy Nova that might not last the semester. No girls would even look at me because I didn’t have a varsity jacket. My mother wanted milk receipts.
I soon realized some of the blowback was from the culture clash. Stanford’s student body was predominantly made up of incredibly smart people, with a small selection of super jocks. The geniuses were largely introverted. Athletes got a hall pass for acting out. I was neither, so my ability to cut loose and have a little fun seemed odd. I decided to lean into it. On Halloween, I walked a motorcycle up to the second floor and rode it through the hallways like in Animal House. To me, it was utterly harmless, but to the other kids, I was some kind of untamed New Jersey savage. They couldn’t stop talking about it. At least not until a bunch of football players set a couch on fire and tossed it from a third-story window.
That Halloween was when I first met Cammie Buchanan. I was at a party on fraternity row and ran into her and a few of her friends. She was a high school senior, eighteen, and beautiful in a classic Californian way, with blond hair and a bright, bubbly personality. We spent the night talking, and she told me she went skiing with her parents in Aspen during winter break. I mentioned that my family also went there and that maybe we’d run into each other. She asked if I was seeing anyone back home. I wasn’t. Ginette, my summer crush, had been a seasonal romance, the sort of fleeting bond that often developed between park employees. As Cammie and I talked, I grew more and more smitten. At Stanford, there was no way of competing with guys like Elway. But Cammie seemed interested. We dated the rest of the school year.
“By the way,” she said. “What are you dressed as?”
I had on a leather jacket, boots, and a kerchief. I went as an elite thug.
Because Stanford started later than most schools, it let out later. This was unacceptable, as my father demanded I be on duty when the park opened for the season. As a result, I tried to take classes in the spring semester that allowed me to turn my final-exam papers in early. Thankfully, the same schedule that accommodated slow-witted jocks also catered to amusement park employees.
When I returned to the park, the place appeared to be busier than ever. Julie and her assistant, the former lifeguard Kip Merritt, had gotten to work setting up promotions with established brands like Subway, Burger King, McDonald’s, and Pepsi. Now, when you went into a fast-food restaurant, there’d be Action Park displays on the counter and offers for discounted admission. If you bought Pepsi, there were similar offers on the side of the can. At the time, this kind of tie-in was reserved for the bigger parks, but Julie convinced their marketing teams that our swelling attendance and growing reputation would make it a mutually beneficial relationship. Coupled with the television spots, awareness of Action Park was at an all-time high. Traffic to the entrance was sometimes backed up for miles, honking horns and screaming drivers putting the parking attendants under siege.
This marked increase in the park’s population was not the only adjustment I had to cope with upon my return. Now that I was a college student, my father declared me overqualified for corralling guests in the Wave Pool. This was upsetting. Despite my Stanford affiliation, the thing that most impressed people back home was still my Wave Patrol jacket. I insisted on keeping it.
With Julie having transitioned into marketing, her position as head of Water World was open. I got the promotion and immediately asked Julie for advice. Foremost on my mind was finding out what the head of Water World did. I had no idea.
“A lot of everything,” she said. “It’s the slides, the pool, and the new attractions. You’re going to be busy.” Then she cackled, the way someone does when they know something you don’t.
There was no training for any of these roles. My father expected us to figure things out as we went along. I got to the park early to work on the schedule and make sure the water rides were ready for opening. To get around the property, I had a dirt bike. Immediately, guests started waving me down.
“Is everything okay?” I would ask, bracing for an emergency.
“Can I get a ride to Motor World?” they would respond.
“Take the Transmobile,” I would say, exasperated. I pointed to the cart overhead, which ambled along in a jerky, halting motion, kids dangling precariously from its seats.
I also had a walkie-talkie, which crackled to life with activity from all over. “There’s a car in Lot B driving erratically,” someone said. “They are impaired.” A pause. Then: “We need a stretcher.”
“We’re out of inner tubes.”
“The air compressor doesn’t work.”
“There’s a chlorine smell over here.”
“A customer punched an employee.”
“An employee punched a customer.”
You could spend the whole day responding. I quickly learned to prioritize. I had no bandwidth to escort people to the nearest funnel-cake stand. Patrons who were not visibly wounded went ignored.
Maybe it was college and the feeling that I had one foot in adulthood. Maybe it was just a natural progression. Either way, I wanted to do something to contribute to the underlying fabric of the property and help address its operational issues. Julie was too good at her job. Her marketing was leading an increasing number of people to the park and to the Wave Pool. The lifeguards were struggling with an enormous number of saves per day, unable to keep up with the surge of bodies wading into the water from every direction. I decided to make a major executive decision in my new role, one that would make a bold statement about my commitment to quality and safety.
We would mandate that people take showers.
I initiated a new policy that required that people entering the pool area stop for a rinse. We installed a spigot and showerhead adjacent to the pool and directed guests to take a quick, prison-style wash. This served two purposes. It would slow their entrance into the water to something resembling an orderly fashion, and it would clean their bodies of the grime accumulated elsewhere in the park or, worse, at home. Less filth meant clearer water and less of a need for eye-scorching levels of chlorine.
While I was proud of the innovation, the shower did not have the desired effect. Unlike the water on slides and in the Wave Pool, which was warmed by the sun, the plumbed water was tapped from the mountain lakes and came out freezing. People yelped and jumped out of the way of the spray, shooting themselves into the pool even faster than before.
“Chaos,” said Smoke, who was still a lifeguard. (The pump room now had a decorative throw rug.) “This is chaos.”
I did not want to report this misstep to my father. I wanted to bring only good news. So I made another executive decision, one that Julie approved. I decided to bring in consultants.
I called Jeff Ellis & Associates, a nationally renowned “lifeguard firm” that offered training for lifeguards everywhere from oceans to public pools. They were a well-respected operation and full of Red Cross–trained and certified professionals that were among the best in the world. Dorney Park used them. If we could not limit the influx of people, then we had to learn a manageable way to ensure their safety.
Jeff Ellis was a blandly handsome man in his early thirties who wore the stern expression of a cop issuing a ticket. He was all business and suggested I call a meeting of all the lifeguards in the park. We met at the Wave Pool early one Saturday.
“Good morning,” Ellis said, strolling back and forth along the edge of the pool like General Patton. “Today, we’re here to talk about safety.” He paused for dramatic effect. “First rule: You guys need to wear shirts at all times.” Many of those assembled were topless, brandishing chiseled torsos.
“Why?” Smoke asked.
“Because people need to know that you are lifeguards,” Ellis said.
“Uh,” Smoke said. “The problem with that is people are just going to grab the shirts and use them to drag us down into the water with them. This place is full of panic swimmers. Some of us will die if we have to wear shirts. Not doing it.” The other lifeguards nodded in assent. We were off to a contentious start. I hoped it would get better.
“What would you do,” Chuck Kilby asked, “if there are five people drowning in the Death Zone?”
Ellis’s frozen expression seemed to twitch a little. “I’m sorry, the Death Zone?”
We had continued to refer to the right side of the pool as the Death Zone because it was habitually overflowing with guests who jumped in and immediately found themselves underwater and in mortal distress. The designated seat next to it was known as the Death Chair. I didn’t feel this was a detail we needed to mention to Ellis.
“What would you do,” Chuck said, “if you saw multiple people going under, all at the same time?”
“That happens?” Ellis said. The guards sighed and shuffled their feet.
“How many saves have you made, man?” Smoke asked. “In total. How many saves?”
Ellis paused. “Most lifeguards don’t make many.”
“How many?” Smoke pressed.
“None,” Ellis said. Smoke and the others broke into laughter.
“All right,” I said. “That’s enough for today.”
The lifeguards began doing their laps in the pool. Ellis waited for the area to open to the public. When he saw the migration of people from the admission window to the water, his jaw grew slack. I could see the whites of his corneas through his amber sunglasses. There was nothing resembling a line. Patrons seemed to come from everywhere, spilling into the water so quickly and with such abandon that the stragglers had to circle the edge looking for even a single square foot of free space to occupy. The waves came on with a thrrrrom, knocking them over like figures in a foosball table.
Ellis swallowed hard. He scribbled on a piece of paper and then handed it to me. It was a list of guidelines. He said he would be back soon. I took the suggestions to my father’s office, where we held my first official meeting as head of Water World.
“The first thing Ellis wants to do is make sure we tell people they can’t jump in from the side,” I said.
“Screw that,” my father said, biting into a tomato sandwich. He grew beefsteak tomatoes as a hobby and considered them a food group unto themselves. Little seeds plopped on his paper plate. “We’re not telling anyone what to do or how to get into the water.”
“Okay,” I said, writing a tiny note next to the item: screw that. “Second, we should limit the number of patrons in the pool so—”
“Screw that,” my father said. “Don’t you see? The minute you start putting limitations on how people choose to experience this place, you’ve lost them. When you go to a lake, is there a sign saying ‘Enter Here Only’? Is there a sign saying ‘Only Fifty People Allowed’?”
“But it’s not a lake,” I said. “It’s a giant washing machine that’s overflowing with people.”
He shook his head no in two cycles, almost as though one rotation was to warm up for the second, far-more-violent shake. “Crazy. No way. What else?”
In the face of certain defeat, I threw one last Hail Mary. “It would be nice to have an office,” I said.
“Yeah, you can have an office,” he said. It was the first thing he had agreed to in the entire conversation.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Sure,” he said, and then picked up the phone to begin yelling at Charlie.
The office was in a building the size of a work shed in the middle of the park. In fact, it had once been a work shed, one meant to store snowmaking equipment. It was better than the first location he proposed, one of the pump houses at the bottom of the Green Water Slide. To make it more welcoming, I set up a folding table and two folding chairs.
“Hey, college boy,” Charlie said, his giant face looming in the window. “How much is the lemonade?”
I wasn’t about to let the spartan accommodations get me down. A large part of my duties was sifting through job applications and conducting interviews to fill positions in Water World. I wanted more lifeguards to rotate in and out of the Wave Pool to avoid the rescue fatigue that afflicted those stationed there. Many of the guards worked seven days in a row. It was grueling, and new recruits had to be operating at peak performance mentally and physically to endure it. A few shifts at a public pool wasn’t sufficient preparation. EMT experience was good. So was military service, especially if they had seen combat.
Many slots had opened up as a result of the new ride the park was pushing that summer, the result of my father seeing a Slip ’N Slide in a neighbor’s backyard. The Slip ’N Slide was a popular outdoor toy composed of a thirty-foot-long plastic sheet, which people would wet down with a garden hose then slide across. Wham-O, the makers of the Slip ’N Slide, believed they were mass-producing innocent fun for families. Mostly, they were. But they did not account for variables like body mass, slopes, or the possibility that someone might lay out the slide near a tree or a rock. And while there was a recommended age limit, they neglected to mention that it could prove catastrophic for adults. Throughout the 1970s, the Slip ’N Slide caused several broken necks and paralysis, a surefire way to stop family fun right in its tracks. The manufacturers of the set took it off the market, began putting warning labels on the boxes, then pulled it from shelves again in light of the continued carnage.
“You know what we should do?” my father said. “Build a giant Slip ’N Slide.”
He called it Surf Hill, and it was a sight to behold. It was as though someone had taken a slick Slip ’N Slide mat that was thirty yards wide and one hundred and fifty yards long and spread it out over a hill. The ten lanes all had a decline that leveled out until your momentum slowed at the bottom and landed you in a shallow pool. It was possible, however, to achieve uncontrolled speed, shooting down so fast you skipped like a stone over the water and crashed right into a padded wall, like the kind found in insane asylums, at the opposite end. There were eight standard lanes and two expert lanes, which provided a precipitous jump with an impressive hang time. Like many of my father’s rides, it encouraged racing and competition and discouraged a sense of self-preservation.
He had designed it in conjunction with Dick Croul, the man who had invented the concept of the water slide as a public attraction. Naturally, Croul became a perennial source of innovation for my father’s needs. He was a master with foam, which was then relatively new to the industry. Unlike steel or concrete, foam granted greater flexibility in ride design and safety. It allowed riders to get altitude and not crash into a hard surface. To build Surf Hill, Croul covered the side of the mountain with the foam, laying large rolls of it directly over the untreated dirt then coating it in a slippery vinyl paint. When gravity intervened and you fell, there was virtually no potential for injury. The three to four inches of foam absorbed almost all the impact. If we could not pad guests, then at least we could pad where they landed.
Foam’s only downside was that it was easily damaged, tearing or flaking off like dandruff, and required constant repair. Rather than give it up as most other parks did, my father embraced it, using its malleability to craft unique rides.
Of course, foam could not account for the devious ride tweaking that had been perfected by our staff. Quickly, employees figured out that they could modify the two expert lanes by stuffing a garbage can under the wooden ramp at the end, which was on a hinge and could be adjusted. When you hit the elevated jump, you could fly up to thirty feet in the air. Like the modified Alpine carts, it was for employees only. I marveled at how nothing in the park remained impervious to tinkering. If something was safe, someone felt compelled to amplify the risk.
When some of the lifeguards and I became proficient on the ride, gathering speed and sailing upward, my father began summoning us. “Quick, quick,” he’d say, directing us to perform like aerialists to impress potential investors he’d gathered. A few of us could even do flips in midair. We became something of a demonstration squad, showing off the potential of his vision.
Like the Kamikaze, Surf Hill also involved what I had come to regard as the physics of inadvertent nudity. Because people shot down the slide at high speed, the water acted as a power washer, stripping them of bathing suit tops and bottoms. Sometimes they’d even get back in line, or even all the way to the exit, without realizing they were at least partially naked. With ten lanes of people going down at once, it became a startling display of synchronized stripping.
One day I arrived at the bottom of Surf Hill and saw the snowmakers hovering over wooden planks, erecting something near the lanes.
“What are you doing?” I asked Charlie.
“Work order from your dad,” he said.
“For what?”
“He wants a spectator platform,” Charlie said.
By the next day, large crowds gathered in the bleachers. They had come to watch and cheer as guests flew through the air, reaching incredible heights. It was undeniably spectacular, but it was also clear that word had spread about the nudity. Soon, the snowmakers and other workers began taking their lunches there, using the wooden railing as a makeshift table.
A new and lurid phrase soon entered the park’s vocabulary: Titty Hill.
Titty Hill joined the Wave Pool as a signature attraction. I fielded applications for both in my hobbit-sized office.
This was how I first met Laurie Zickler.
Laurie was a college student who wanted to make money before returning to school in the fall. Her long, dark hair framed stunning green eyes. She laughed easily and often. She was wearing a blue bathing suit that revealed a runner’s figure. I tried my best to maintain a professional composure even though I was smitten, my knee nervously bouncing up and down underneath the folding table. Even the penmanship on her application was endearing. Cammie and I were no longer an item, which meant I was free to entertain a future with Laurie. The first five minutes had gone amazingly well.
“How do you like the place so far?” I said.
“I think it’s possible to have too much fun here,” she said, laughing. “Surf Hill is something else. Your dad owns this place, right?”
My father just built bleachers so construction workers could stare at underage boobs. I paused. “Uh, yes,” I said.
“Well, it’s great,” she said. “The whole place. Like the Magic Kingdom or something.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty magical.”
Shortly thereafter, I observed a guest shitting on a bathroom floor for the first time.
Julie had pumped the advertising to the max. The park had commercials in heavy rotation, newspaper ads throughout three states, radio spots in both English and Spanish, and the fast-food promotions. There was a heavy emphasis on Surf Hill, and the lines ran long. My hopes of loitering with Laurie, whom I had hired, were out the window. I waved at her as she ushered people through the ride, smiling and shrugging at me.
The park had an overpopulation problem. My father had built it around the existing ski-resort infrastructure. That meant, for example, the bathrooms were located in the lodge, far from Water World or Motor World. As the park grew, he invested the profits in more rides, not more amenities. A new ride was fun. A new toilet or trash bin was not.
Garbage spilled out of receptacles, bees buzzing around the sticky puddles of spilled soda. People approaching the bins would see the swarm and panic, tossing their drink or half-eaten hot dog on the ground. By the time the maintenance workers collected the trash bags, they were so congested with concession food and drinks that they dripped slime. Employees had a name for this goo: “garbage juice.” It leaked from the cheap bags as carts hauled them off, leaving a trail of sludge that would remain until it rained or someone hosed it away.
At the peak of the park’s bloated capacity, Julie solicited and collected comment cards from guests to see where we might be able to improve our service. Many of them were laudatory, but others were not. Once assembled, they read like a haiku of criticism. Under “What Didn’t You Like,” they wrote:
Rides are scary
Bitch in paddleboats
Lost my teeth
Bees
Lewd bathing suits
Almost drowned and lifeguards laughed
When it came to complaints about lackadaisical employees, concession attendants were usually the prime targets. Park employees considered food workers a rung below the ride attendants, and the quality of the workforce often showed it. Lines for a slice of pizza could stretch for an hour. The concessions people brushed food crumbs from the counter onto the ground and let garbage pile up in the back until it attracted flies. Ketchup and mustard packets were everywhere, squirting all over the pavement when people stepped on them. The workers sometimes opened cheese packets with their teeth in front of guests. When supervisors asked them to maintain the area better, they protested. In their northwestern Jersey dialects, it sounded like, “It’s naat my jawb.”
We had no tolerance for such apathy, but my father had painted himself into a corner. He had tried to acquire some farmland near the park to facilitate expansion but didn’t have the cash on hand to pay the asking price. Instead, he told the landowner, a sideburn-sporting farmer named Bud Kelley, that he could run the food and beverage operation at the park. Bud Kelley knew as much about food and beverage operation as he did about piloting a 747. He was a surly man, infectiously grumpy, and turned food handlers into glowering misers with bad attitudes who took no pride in their work. Our sausage and peppers had no sausage. Grease trays overflowed or caught fire. We constantly ran out of napkins, straws, and cups. It all overwhelmed Bud, who was used to caring for farm animals, not humans.
Ellen, who was now Pete’s fiancée, had moved on from Motor World to all ride operations and general services, which was responsible for making sure the place was clean. In my father’s world, being a relative or near-relative held no guarantee of preferential treatment. It was usually the opposite. It was impossible to keep up with the tidal wave of garbage, and her days were spent bravely attempting to stem the cascade of slop from completely overtaking the grounds. She carried a walkie-talkie to communicate with foot soldiers charged with rounding up trash. In need of assistance somewhere, she radioed her college roommate, Nicole Molina.
“What’s your 20?” Ellen said. This meant, “What’s your location?” When Nicole didn’t respond, Ellen radioed again, this time a little more impatient. “What’s your 20?”
“Signal C,” Nicole said, meaning Ellen should switch to a private channel. Of course, every employee knew what this meant and also switched over so they could eavesdrop.
“What’s your 20?” Ellen repeated on the private channel.
“I’M UP TO MY EYEBALLS IN SHIT,” Nicole said. “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
We found out that Nicole had been in a bathroom snaking out an unspeakable mess of backed-up human feces when the door locked behind her. She had to climb out through a roof hatch.
My own confrontation with this level of biohazard came when I entered a restroom and saw a father standing over his child, who was defecating on the floor.
“What the . . . what the fuck are you doing?” I said, temporarily forgetting the Snow White approach to guest interaction.
He pointed to the stalls. “They’re all clogged,” he said. “And I don’t see any other bathrooms.”
The kid finished and pulled up his pants without wiping. Other people apparently had the same idea, as several turds dotted the linoleum floor. I gagged and ran out, radioing Ellen to come and put a lock on the door until the bathroom could be cleaned up.
At the next all-hands meeting with my father and the other supervisors, I joined a queue of people with problems. One complaint was that the women’s changing rooms were poorly lit, which forced guests to get dressed in the dark. Another was that the keys to the lockers for personal items kept falling off the bands intended to secure them to wrists or ankles, prompting people to hide them under rocks.
I patiently waited my turn and then tried to explain the situation, slightly embarrassed at the nature of my complaint. “People are shitting on the floor,” I said. “We need more bathrooms.”
I proposed shutting down the roller rink pavilion—by now a quaint and outdated activity—and turning it into a massive restroom area with enough facilities for everyone. It would be like a highway rest stop, with a devoted maintenance crew instead of overtaxed employees like Nicole. More important, we could build it in such a way that the maintenance crew could take a high-pressure hose to the walls and floor to power-blast any fecal matter off. As I described this, Ellen nodded so hard I thought she was going to break her neck.
I also told my father I had been to the other rest areas. In one, stall doors were missing. In another, sanitary napkins from the wall-mounted dispenser were scattered everywhere. It looked like the opening scene in Carrie. It all needed to be cleaned up and expanded. I made my case and then braced myself for the reasons why it wouldn’t happen.
“Okay,” my father said.
“Really?” I said.
“The Disney parks are spotless,” he said. “We’ve got to make more of an effort to be spotless, too.”
The irony of the situation was that my father was anal about litter and mess in the park, sometimes stopping employees and telling them to straighten their collars or water the sod, which remained one of his largest pet peeves. The recent surge in attendance had left us struggling to keep up with sanitation. It was probably better to have anticipated the problem, but once I presented it to him, he pledged to fix it.
I later found out that part of the reason people had an urge to shit on the floor was not entirely attributable to lunacy or a lack of convenient amenities. When Bud Kelley was hired, he bought a towering inventory of chickens to roast on the premises. He boasted that he had paid only fifty cents per bird.
“Why so cheap?” my father asked him.
“They’re just a little expired,” Bud said.
We were feeding people spoiled chickens and then had no place for them to empty their bacteria-ridden guts.
As the summer wore on, Julie ran into an impasse with some of the tie-in companies. Great Adventure and Dorney had gotten wind of the promotions on the soda cans and were strong-arming Pepsi into keeping their deal with us limited. Great Adventure sold more Pepsi than we did, so they had all the leverage.
It didn’t really matter, though. Word of mouth was what brought people in the gate. Besides, if a lack of advertising on soda cans helped shrink the crowds a bit, I could not complain.
I tried to work with the resources I had available. I could do little about the garbage or the poop, but I could still exert influence over my domain. I vowed to make Water World the most improved section of the park. I did not expect the lifeguards to listen to all of Ellis & Associates’ suggestions, but there was undoubtedly room to mature.
With the understanding that Ellis was monitoring us throughout the summer, I headed to another pre-opening meeting at the Wave Pool. The guards were doing their laps. I asked Chuck Kilby where Jeff Ellis was.
He shrugged.
Ellis didn’t come that week or the next. Without a word, he simply stopped showing up.
In abandoning us, Ellis signaled that he knew what the rest of us knew. The park was getting too big to control.