443: Amusement Park

I'm over glass.

“>> Okay, so we're going through the gate here into the park.”

>> Yeah, we're going, this is our morning, this is the morning walk into the park. So everybody will split up into their different sections and get the park open and we'll start putting out prizes and get- >> We're at an amusement park in Kansas City, Missouri called Worlds of Fun. We're going to be spending the entire hour today at amusement parks. It's five minutes before opening, and I'm walking with Cole Lindberg, who's 25,

with permanently must hair in the cheerful vibe of the Busom Buddies era Tom Hanks. He's becoming this park since he was a little kid.

Started working here as a summer job at 14, and then basically just never left.

It became his real job. Loving years later, he is a full-time year-round employee. >> I love amusement parks. Anytime my family would go on vacation, we'd schedule it around at amusement park. Because I love rollercoaster because I love amusement parks.

I mean, I've walked this pathway that we're taking right now. I've walked it thousands and thousands and thousands of times. >> When he was little, his family had season passes here, and they would come a lot. He traveled to any new rollercoaster to try it out. Daydream did about a job where he would design parks and build rollercoasters.

And when his dad drove him here at the age of 14 for a job interview, he wore a suit to that interview. Just sitting inside the park's offices, which are utilitarian, picture the principal's office at a public high school. Even that was exciting.

“And I remember being kind of like, "Oh wow, this is the inner sanctum.”

This is the inner working, this is where all the cool stuff happens."

And then, first time actually getting in the uniform, actually working in the park,

I remember to me, it was like, "Wow, this is kind of surreal." You know, I'm actually working in an amusement park now. And to me, that was kind of like awesome. You know, that was so excited about this. The main thing that enthusiasm would diminish over time.

But what's incredible about Cole is that even after a decade here, even after becoming an adult and working 60, 70 hour weeks every week, all summer. Even with the pressure and his current job of running a whole department and hitting financial targets and buying all the supplies and hiring and supervising over 100 young people, he is still pretty psyched about working in an amusement park.

And it is not a glamour job. The department Cole runs is the game's department at World's Affirm. This is 32 games, kind that you would see at any carnival or midway where you get three softballs to try to throw them into a milk can or you throw beam bags of targets or you shoot darts to knock over stack of cups.

Nobody comes to an amusement park for the games.

Cole himself never went to an amusement park for the games.

But he's an extrovert and he has filled the department with extroverts. Like Mallory, the park is barely open, hardly any customers here at all when Cole stops by your game on his morning rounds. The Mallory loves talking on the mic, Mallory does a good job with the mic. I appreciate it.

Let's get it, go for it. Try to get people to play. Alrighty, wherever here at three point challenge today, looking for our first winner, you come on over here, you have 40 seconds at the clock to load shots up and you can be walking away with some awesome prizes.

This is exactly how Cole trains the kids talk on the mic. Don't stop, get a flow, have fun.

“If you have fun, that's what's going to sell the game.”

Watching Cole run the games department at Worlds of Fun is watching somebody who was raised here and who completely thoroughly mastered everything. It's rare to witness somebody so happily great at any job. Alright, let's get around guys. There's still people in cash to trolling by now.

It's the first shift meeting of the day. About 30 teenagers and college kids, Miller on a big tree, before the shift start. Alright guys, listen up, get around. Let's do this. Here we go. Quiet please, real quick, real quick. Here we go. Today is Saturday. Today is a busy day.

Today is the day that we have a very good day because there are going to be a lot of people playing games. And today, of course, is one of my favorite days of the season. Is the second round of the sweet 16 tournament. Let's take a look, Sam, you want to hold this up a little higher? Okay, we've got one of the guys Sam holds up a poster board with tournament brackets on it.

Like ready sports tournament. The sweet 16 tournament pits the kids in all 32 games in the park against each other, in pairs, and a four-week competition to make the most money. Last week, half the games were eliminated. Co as you're letting the remaining games know who they're competing with today.

"Nigs of theory, both pen versus gobletausce, lion shit." "Now, now we're going to further. Could this possibly be a precursor four today? Yesterday, the number one game in the park was scale Africa." Okay, scale Africa is a scale, a game where they guess your waiter age.

And it's no surprise that it's number one. It always makes tons of money.

“All the games in the park are grouped together into four different teams,”

which they call games one, games two, games three, and games four, and these four teams, games one through four, competing against each other all summer long, like teams at summer camp, and a three-month long color war. Most other amusement parks don't go this far, to make things interesting for the workers. This park, words of fun, is owned by a company called Cedar Fair,

that owns 11 amusement parks and six water parks. And Col knows the guys who run the game's departments at the other parks, and some of them do competitions like this between the employees. But I don't think they do it to the extent of what we do. I mean, every year, I talk about, you know, we had the death match tournament.

We had the sweet 16 tournament. A couple years ago we did a thing called Toss the Boss.

And basically what happened was, is that every single day I'd pull a game out of a hat.

And if that game was the number one game in the park for that day, then that section would get to throw me in the pond. The pond is not a good-looking pond. It's gross, and, you know, it smells. And the deal was, is that if you are the number one game in the park, you get to throw me in the pond.

So finally, one day, the game that he picked from the hat that day, tried the hardest, and actually became the number one game in the park for the day. And, ready, one, two, three! Of course, they made a video about this because, you know, the present day of America. And Coat went and told his peers, it's colleagues, the guys who run the game,

departments at the other parks, all about what happened. I go, and I tell the other parks about this, and I showed a picture, you know, like, oh, there's me also, and I mean, I kind of got laughed at. You know, like, why would you ever do that?

“And to me, in my mind, I was just like, why would you not do that?”

You know, why would you not want to get people excited about working in the game that they're in? At least they may try. They may do a little bit more. And if I can get a little bit more out of them, we're good. Even if the game only makes a little bit more money. Also, it's my fun for the kids.

Exactly. It's all about more fun. All right, so there's a lot of people in the park today. Now, I have composed a song about today, which I now want to sing for you. And you can all sing along. Okay.

Saturday. It's Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday. Wait, what day is that for God? It's Saturday. Okay.

Today, I don't feel like riding in a ride. We're so excited. I just want to play all the games. I'd really like playing Marmba Ball when a giant top frog or a big basketball. Yesterday, I don't feel like riding in a ride, just playing games.

All right, let's have a good day, guys. Everybody in, all right? All right, games are three. 1, 2, 3. But today on our radio show, we go to amusement parks all over the country.

We see stuff backstage that we had no idea was going on, like that song. We were Jonathan Goldstein's story about moving to the Jersey Shore for a summer when he was 16. And we hear your stories. We asked you to call in with your amusement park stories. And you told some great ones.

Today's show first round a few years ago, but we're airing it again now, because it's summer.

It's hot. Let's spend an hour at the funnest place possible. It's ride the rides. Let's gorge out on terrible, great food together. For this hour, cue the roller coaster sound now.

Stay with us. [Music] Support for this American life in the following message come from Squarespace.

“Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in one place.”

Whether you're doing consultations or experiences, showcase what you're offering with a customizable website, designed to attract clients and grow your business. You can raise support for your cause by fundraising, directly on your website with built-in donation tools.

Visit squarespace.com/american to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. A quick program note. We just put out this new bonus episode that came out really nicely. These bonus episodes go to our this American life partners. People who've subscribed to support the show.

And this particular one is one of the ones where one of my co-workers here at the show brings in a couple of their favorite stories to play for me and for listeners.

or never heard in the first place because they're from so long ago.

And then we talk about them.

“And in this particular episode, a producer Diane Wu picks some stories that just really got to us both.”

And we ended up in this very personal conversation that got very emotional. Anyway, to hear this and the many other bonus episodes that we have put out at this point, need to get all kinds of other stuff. Subscribe at this American life.org/lifepartners that link is also in the show notes. It's this American life act one. Gameboy grows up.

Following Cole Lindbergreiner and his early morning tour of Words of Fun Park,

I learned a couple of things. First of all, people play the games because they want to win the

prizes. And so an important part of his job is actually guessing what prizes are going to excite people. He kind of just go, it is what it is. Oh, I got to show you the lemur. You want to see what a lemur is? Yeah. People love these. This is a lemur. People play for this all the time. This is one of our number one prizes. Really? Yeah. Who the thought? It's a fluorescent, colored monkey, the size of a teddy bear with huge eyes and

a super long tail. When they put it into the dart game, the dart game became one of the most popular

“games in the park, double its business. I also learned the Cole Invence games. You like Angry Birds, right?”

We round a corner and I see why he asked. What we're looking at right now is a giant slingshot with a launcher that you launch basically bean bags at pigs and we built this. So you got permission from the Angry Birds people? Well, this turns out to be kind of an awkward question. Cole points out that this slingshot game is not actually called Angry Birds. It's called pigs of fury. Pigs of fury. So now, this is one of our number one games.

It's people love shooting a giant slingshot. Before I go out to Kansas City to meet Cole, I watched his YouTube videos online. Yes, he has YouTube videos and I heartily recommend them. They are shot, directed, and starring Cole. They are low tech. They're low budget. In this one, he weighs a Viking helmet and fake mustache and wire him glasses and he's walking through a video arcade.

“Those are his echoey footsteps that you're hearing. Next he's inside. What looks like?”

You know there's Odom arcade machines with a mechanical claw that picks up prices. This one is big enough for a person to stand inside and Cole is inside it, surrounded by huge, stuffed animals and he wraps. Okay, I'm going to stop the video right there. When he says a bear, a dog, and a giant monkey, then we have three quick shots of stuffed animal prices, a bear, a dog, and a giant monkey.

As the video continues, the teenagers on his staff join him and they're all dancing around and they're hitting whack-a-mo-mo's on the beat and everything that they do in this video is so deeply uncool that you know that they must really like and trust each other and their total commitment to what they're doing actually flips the dorkiness and makes it kind of cool. They're over a dozen videos all set in the amusement park. With the stuffed animal

prices always playing surprisingly central roles like the sci-fi special effects

movie they made were a mysterious ray from outer space hits and the stuffed animal prices all come to life seeking vengeance. The price is attacked me, I was in my game, the earth ship, and next thing I knew I was being pummeled by fares. The only semi-normal video of the bunch is a training video. This one opens on Cole, he's in a suit and high in front of a bookcase reading a book. He looks up, startled, as if the camera surprised him. Hello! How are you? I was just reading.

Welcome to the world's fun games training video. My name is Cole. I'll be taking you on this wonderful journey here. When he says wonderful journey he mugs at the camera with this gesture that communicates the idea, I know this is completely ridiculous. In fact the entire video seems to be making fun of the idea of training videos while at the same time it is a training video, explaining how to sign in, how to use the tail card, how to stock prices. I saw these videos and

all I could think of was these people really love their jobs and I thought about Michael Scott,

I'd say there's a lot of Michael Scott in me, probably. I do silly things that everybody

looks at me later and go, why did he do that? Why was it deemed necessary for called address up wearing a big beard and a raincoat and tell everyone he lived downtown under the bridge and he was there to motivational speaker tip today. Hi everybody, I'm thrilled for just, you know, like go out and talk to me what went through his thought process and I've run out with a squirt gun all the time. I got my big super soaker and on busy days I'll take the super soaker and I'll fill

it up with ice water and I'll sneak around the corner just in there I'll stand there and I'll just go

“light him up and just so I'd spray across the whole group, you know, that's what makes it fun.”

They're going to remember Phil Bridges more than, you know, like anything else throughout the day and so if they're talking about did you get to see what called it at the shift meaning, even if they say that was stupid or that was not funny, they're still going to be talking about it and that's still going to get them happy about this job. So, does that work in practice? After all, if you think about it, amusement park jobs are not on their

face very fun, you know, taking tickets, strapping people into rides, convincing pastors by to throw three balls into a camp. Well, the Saturday that it visited turned out to be one of the busiest hottest days of the summer. It was a concert at the park which brought in thousands of extra people and of course this was sweet 16 round two which did seem to matter to the kids. Before the shift, hell eight and a couple of the other kids from games three pulled call aside

and crowded close so kids from other teams couldn't see. So, this is you have a secret weapon that is going to be the secret weapon of what, and I want everybody to think through,

“guaranteed victory. So, it's a banana costume. So, is that you made the costume?”

I made the costume because he's awesome because we have a game with bananas that's in sweet 16. So, you know, somebody running around in this costume to try to sell it. It's kind of big and it's kind of rough because I didn't even give a life to me. Did you just go buy fabric? No, I've had this fabric. So, it's the head full arms hole and it's going to look like the bananas in light instead. I like it. I like it. That is more than exciting.

People are going to be stopping taking pictures. Oh, me go win one too. Meanwhile, guys and games four were doing great in sweet 16. All their games had survived the first round. Games one was eliminated completely in the first round of sweet 16. As for games two, Max and Oakson are pulling a double shift. I'll be to break the record for how much has ever been made ever in their two games. They're not so secret strategy. All right. So,

strobe light, strobe light. You want two black lights out there. Max and his team leader Dominic are setting up at a game called Roll-A-Ball, which is one of the older games in the park. Basically, it's just a ski ball, but as you get points, it moves a little wooden pig, which is in a race

with all the other riders. This doesn't make any sense. It actually doesn't matter. Here's what

“you need to know. Games two is hoping to turn this creaky 16-year-old game Roll-A-Ball, which never”

does well into a crazy dance party. They call techno ball. Max and Dominic are brought in a disco ball. They're brought in lighting gear. Dominic is explaining to Max how he wants to set it all up. We're going to put a light on that toy chest. It's going to put a little a light on that box. They're shining at the disco ball. Just go ball is going to be moving. It's all dark in here. People want to walk on it. They'll be like, "Whoa, what am I stepping on?"

"Whoa, lights!" Maybe it'll be too much for people to look angle. Half an hour before the park gopened, Haley and Claire had gotten to work early and we're down in games three by scale Africa. We wanted to set out the most prizes that we could make the piles extravagant do a lot of flash and that takes a lot of time. So, we came out here early.

So just describe what we're looking at. There's a pyramid here of turtles and there's pandas, lions. There's going to be one of tigers. Each pyramid has over a hundred stuffed animals in it, which is bigger than I think you're probably imagining it. It's like nearly waist high. And so there are four big pastel colored piles of push toys right in the middle of a walkway

looking so, so easy to win. Basically, every prize we've got. Every prize we got. Yeah,

we're thrown it out here. We're going big or go home. We really want to win. We brought in streamers, balloons, energy drinks. We got a whole bunch of energy drinks. We got a whole bunch of Gatorade. We brought in food for everyone. It's energized. Get pumped up in the whole day. We really want to win. We lost death match. Very painful battle.

kids do. When you get him talking about all the fun things that he did back when he was

“Haley and Clare's age, working here, running games three. His team would dress as pirates for the”

guessing game. And they'd be out of the scale and they'd do guessing pirates. Guard, your age, we guard, you know, stuff like that. 2004 came around. We dominated. We beat everyone. It was awesome. And I saw him. It is still so alive for him. They dominated in 2004 by tricking out one of the games with music and all kinds of commotion and turning it into a party. Doubling, it's take for the day. We brought my fog machine in from home because of the time I was in high school and I had a band.

And people flocked to it. And we destroyed games too. We destroyed them that year. It was the

happiest event because in 2003, we got in so close to winning. And I just kept on saying

2004 is your game three. We're bringing the sweet 16 back 2004. And we did. We won. And I was really happy. Late morning when I checked back at games three, the pyramids of plush toys look pretty much exactly as big as they had earlier that morning. Things were slow. And to use the business, one of the supervisor Sarah was standing on the roof of this little hot. 88 more guesses until I'm coming out the room. She's staying on the roof. It's just you get to

100 guesses. I need to get more guesses. And then I'm going to allow myself to take a bathroom break. So any of you guys welcome by. If you guys want to come play my game, help me out, get me off this room. If it's only $5 a play, I can get your eight feet or a birthday month. This is a technique that I recognize from a thousand public radio pledge drives. And it was working about as slowly for her as it works for us. Strangers just don't care if some girl on the roof gets to take a bathroom

break. I'm stuck here so I can get 88 more people to play. And it's easy. No, you people don't want

“to help me out. Thanks. Thanks for the luck. You should come. I dare you guys to come feel these turtles.”

It sounds like a weird and weird thing that we really have the softest turtles in town. You should

feel one. They're really soft. After a while, Sarah switched technique and finally managed to

wrestle up a crowd through the simple tactic of making a series of insanely terrible guesses. First there's a dad who looks like he's 42 and in fact is 42 Sarah guest is 25. Okay. Then a grandmother who is standing there with kids and grandkids Sarah writes a guest for this woman's age on a whiteboard. This could be really wrong. I get the feeling it's really wrong, but that's okay. We'll see. You guys like this guest? Maybe? All right. Turn around. How old are you?

52. I guess you're 37. It's fun glasses. Sunglasses really don't me off. They can graduate since he needs to be got any pairs you want. Later Sarah privately confirmed for me that she did intentionally take a dive. We're just fine with Cole because it turns out it doesn't matter if the kids guess right. The game costs $5 to play. The prizes cost less than $5. Sarah can be wrong with every single guess and they'd still make a nice profit. In fact, it's good to lose because people

carrying prizes around the park are a walking advertisement for all the games. Cole's journey from summertime employee like Sarah to full-time year-round boss happened in a couple of steps. He said there's a kind of nerdy kid in high school in a small town. It was nice to come to a place where his personality was rewarded. I couldn't wait till the summer because when it was summer time, I get to come to world fun and work with people that are just like me and enjoy our whole summer

together. It's actually years of that. In his senior year at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, he got a phone call offering him the job of games manager and he dropped out of school to take it. It's it's probably one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make. But I said, okay, this opportunity is probably only gonna come along once in a lifetime. As you'd imagine, it hasn't been such a popular decision with family. So, I mean, I have a full-year left. I'm

like one full-year of college left. It comes up when you least expect it. It comes up when they, like, oh, I know you're working real hard, but when you get back to school or my grandmother,

“now before, you know, I pass on. You need to make sure you complete a call. I'm a grandma all the time.”

And I get a lot from the girlfriend, too. When you get a finish, because she just graduated, college. This girlfriend and Cole were pretty serious. They just moved in together. They met in games back in 2006, though she moved on from games. I get that all the time, just like you weren't, we're not going to be together forever. If you don't finish college, I get it a lot. How often will it come up? Once a week. Maybe once every two weeks, depending on the week.

I know. Steve Jobs? Yeah. But Steve Jobs, he changed the world. You know, I'm just a lowly little games manager in a small mid-sized park in Kansas City. Who wants to play some games? By mid-day, down in games three, that is Dustin who's wearing the full body banana suit that

haily handmade for him, which looks amazing, but it is 94 degrees, which is sapping everybody's energy

and business is slow. All right. Well, hey, you guys have a great day. There was the date. We're on people slowly migrate from the rides to the games. And by nightfall, when it cools off, the guys in games too finally get techno ball working. Max and Oakson are covered from head to toe in glow lights, colonite, around a corner together, and we see them in the distance. And there's a crowd of three

dozen people surrounding the game. It's fantastic. Oh my goodness. Oh, let's go look at techno ball. Look at this! No, it's six of your staff and two, three other guys all dancing in a big circle. Yeah, four other guys all dancing in a big circle, to techno music. And how many people are actually playing? Zero.

Hey Dominic! Hey Dom.

That's Dominic, the team leader here at Games 2.

Oh look, Dom's all the way to comparison. Hi Dom. Sup, how many people are playing the game, Dom? It's showing a lot of attention. I, yeah, why are we turning that into gameplay? Mostly just, maybe they should dance inside the game instead of on the walkway in front of the game,

so people would be pulled into play. Dom does not want to do this. And listen to what a good boss call is. It's firm, but he's very nice about it. You're so close. I know you're so close. Do you want to touch and not just attract him?

It did. But then you didn't have anybody I hear talking to them saying, "Hey, why aren't you playing the game?" I know, I was hoping that they would realize that. They're not gonna realize that. You know that.

“You, and better than anyone, you should know that.”

They're not going to just be like, "Oh." Did it look fine? I mean, all the lights. I mean, it's, I'm not gonna deny the awesomeness, but I am going to say that, uh, no more damn parties. I really think the dance parties are not going to help you win.

I walked down to check on games three. It is 10 30 at night. Claire has been here for 13 hours since I saw her setting up pyramids of plush before the gates opened to the park. Those pyramids were now raggedy piles maybe half their original size, which means that they did great. They got lots of people to play. They'd probably give them away 500 prizes for wrong guesses.

And Claire has had exactly the kind of day the cold ones for all the kids. Did you have fun today? Yes, I had a lot of fun. I had no idea what time it was until about 20 minutes ago when I checked. It just didn't occur to me that I needed to check the time.

“'Cause there's going by so fast. Yeah. When did you take your first break today?”

I haven't taken a break. Wow. Yeah, I guess I'm kind of used to it.

This is Claire's third year here. She's 18. Going to Missouri State in the fall to study nursing.

But she tells me what a lot of kids here tell me. She wouldn't keep coming back to work at Worlds of fun. If not for coal. Definitely not. I don't think any other boss would do like the rally days, the death match, the sweet 16, the toss the boss, just all the fun stuff that we do that keeps us going through the season and just keeps this job exciting every day. Sam, one of the leaders for games for has been every three summers.

And he also says the coal is the reason that he keeps coming back. Honestly, no one else could do a better job. He was made to do this. It's funny like watching him do something like seeing as a goofy song for you guys in the morning. You can imagine high school students and college students sort of rowing their eyes. It's somebody doing that, but nobody does. No, it's weird. It's almost like that's the thing to do.

Whatever coal does is the thing to be doing at that moment. And we just we just all feel like

“that was the right move. Do you remember what it was like the first time you saw one of his videos?”

I do. I remember seeing it and I was like, that's my boss and he just made that video. And it was so cool because I went and he even showed some of my friends. They're all like, like, who's this guy? It's like, that's my boss. That's so weird because a lot of people would say, well, it's an amusement park. You know, you're great at working at an amusement park.

It doesn't mean by the way that he has seen by his bosses as some kind of superstar. You get to respect, sure, that really likes him. He's a media boss map thing. So there's nobody better at games in any of the 11 amusement parks owned by their parent company, Cedar Fair. But coal was working at one of the smallest of the 11 parks. So other games managers,

is actually the smallest revenue producer at most amusement parks. The biggest money at an amusement

“park comes from ticket sales and you just food at buddy buys food, then merch. And then bringing”

up the rear is games. What coal does has less effect on the company's bottom line, but lots of people in the company. And as much as coal loves this job, he can't put wonder,

how long can a person do this job? So the one thing that I always say is, I mean, I'm 25 now.

I start here when I was 14. And the weird thing is, is that I'm getting older, but everybody else in the department staying the same age. I'm going to set the taper right there. Yes, I know. Matthew McConaughey is confused. Cole is seeing the film too. But the thing I'm wondering for you is, do you feel like somehow accidentally in this job you got stuck in high school? You got stuck at 15. Like there's a part of you where you're still back there.

I like working on the park with kids. Absolutely. 100%. The goofball part, the goofball part. The part where you get to act their age instead of your age. Yes. Does that make me sound bad? I mean, I'm still a manager. I'm still overseeing a hundred people that work for me. You know, but at the same time, you know, 10 years from now, I mean,

“I don't think I can still be a goofball. I think that just kind of get creepy.”

I mean, you're 35 and you work with a bunch of high schoolers in a gate. Is that creepy? Maybe,

maybe not. I don't know. Do you worry that you'll never be happier in any job than you are

in this one? Yes. Absolutely. That's a weird fate. Do you know that you're in the best job you may ever have at 25? Especially when it's a job that you know in your heart, I can't last. Okay, so we first broadcast that straight long ago back in 2011. And so much has happened from Colson's son. He finally did a leaf his job at Worlds of Fun. That was years ago. And they worked for well on sales, the toy company gave some motivational talks about being a boss and

an amusement park. He got married very happily, not to the girlfriend in the story, by the way. Now he has a six-year-old daughter who has the same roller coaster amusement park bug that he has. They ride roller coasters together when they go on vacation. He is still putting himself on stage in different ways. In 2024, he won the U.S. Air Guitar National Championship in Yes, who knew the was such a thing. He went on to Finland for the International Competition

where he placed fifth in the world as an air guitarist. He's competing there again in two weeks for the World Championship. These days he's also writing music. He's performing. He's going on auditions. He turned 40 this year. Says that he has had jobs that were satisfying in ways that

the amusement park job never was. But he said so far, it's still the best job he ever had.

Well, coming up, Carnies float in the air, scary things happen on rides, and bold steps forward for pink ball targets everywhere. Our hour of amusement park continues in a minute. I'm just gonna go public radio when our program continues. Sport for this American life and the following message come from Squarespace. Squarespace gives

“you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in one place. Whether you're doing”

consultations or experiences, showcase what you're offering with a customizable website, designed to attract clients and grow your business. You can raise support for your cause by fundraising directly on your website with built-in donation tools. Visit squarespace.com/american to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. To American Life America, I see you're going to show of course we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme today. Show amusement

parks, it's August, it's hot. We want to go someplace fun here on the radio. We've arrived at two of our program at two great adventures. Well, we asked you our listeners to call in with your amusement park stories. Nearly 300 of you did, and one of our producers, Jane Marie, listen to all of those voice messages. She joins me now. Hey Jane. Okay. So Jane, trends patterns. What can you tell me? Carnies. Oh, yeah. There's like creepy carnies and hot carnies and carnies that

people married and a bunch of people are called and told stories about carnies like making the ride go too fast or keeping them on the ride too long. Yeah. Um, these two calls that I'm going to play are from Barry Silver and Penny Delaney, Coffron. And they had the same exact like crazy

they're talking about the same guy. My amusement park story involves the Gravitron. Yeah. Oh, and let me interrupt real quick because the Gravitron, that was like the most popular ride people talked about in the phone calls. Huh. That's the one where it's a cylinder and you climb in it and you put your back up against the inside wall of the cylinder. I read it and it spins around in the four drops out. Yep. And you're like stuck to the wall. There was a carnie there and he was waving us

all in and we had purchased tickets and I guess our first son that this was going to be an interesting

ride was when he said no to the tickets we offered him and just kind of waved us in. I was working for the world of wonder side show, uh, last month. I had made friends with the carnie who was

“running the Gravitron. He started up the ride and the music was blaring and I remember it was”

motley crews, um, Dr. Feelgood. Anyway, he gave me a private showing where, uh, I'm riding and slide this thing, music's blasting. And the lights were going and we were spinning around in the central feudal force was pushing us up against the wall. And the next thing I know, this carnie

steps out from behind his operating box and comes out into the central fugge and proceeds to pull

himself up and places feet on this spinning wall and walk over the rider, step by step, with his body completely horizontal to the earth. He's standing on the wall next to me surfing inside of the Gravitron. It's right to the right operator, left the control panel to start surfing the inside, parallel to the ground. The force was holding his feet against the wall and it was just the most

“amazing thing I'd ever seen. Best experience of my life. So I know, uh, because, because you told me”

up before we sat down, that a lot of the stories that people caught in tell were love stories. Tons of love stories or like like stories. You know, like summer flings, summer romances,

first kisses, um, there were people that lost their virginity on rides. No. Don't do that.

Um, but then they were the proposals. There were a lot of people proposing at amusement parks. Some more successfully than others. My name is Natasha, and in May, my boyfriend, proposed to me on a roller coaster. Um, we were on a viper. He said, well, you know, he means he popped up in the rainbox, and the ring fell out of the box and down into the pits of viper. It was a pretty awful. I started trying to get the right operator to stop the car.

“The director of operations at the park, assembled a team of about 20 people, and they searched”

for the ring for hours and that happened in May. So the kicker here is that that ring was actually my grandmother's ring, and they're actually so searching for it, but we have yet to find it. So I called Natasha actually to see if they'd found it yet, um, and she said that the park had called her recently and said they found a ring, but it wasn't hers. It was another engagement ring. Really? Yep. Well, it's good to know that her fiancé wasn't the only dummy. Right.

And then we got a bunch of scary calls. So this is a scary one. Wendy in Austin, Texas. She and her friend went to the fair, and they were getting on a roller coaster. It was like one of those medium-sized fair roller coasters where there's one big drop and then a looped loop, and um, but as she was getting on, she was like fudging around with her purse. I reached up to pull the harness down over me and it locked above my head, and I have nothing holding me into the roller coaster. So I look over

in horror as the a carny guy with, uh, that was running the Lord, looks at me, and he pushes the button to go, and the thing starts to go, and I'm telling him, wait, wait, stop, stop. I don't have me seen a lot of them. But he doesn't stop. So I know, so she's like going up the hill. So she said she turned to her friend, and she just decided to wrap her arms and legs around her friend. I know, and so they go down the hill, and then they go through the looped loop. So she's upside down.

I know, just like hanging under her friend. As tight as I can to stay inside the ride, and what we really got scary is we whipped around the corners. I almost got thrown out, but I didn't. She said that she had whip lash for a week, and that she was too young to realize that she

wanted to go to the fair, but it was super late at night. And so they humored him and they're

“like sure, well, take you, but they figured he would fall asleep on the way there, but he did”

and he's there to wait. So I said, okay, I'll take you in for one ride on the fairs wheel, and then we'll go back to the car. My husband and I knew him put his shoes on because we didn't think he'd make it there. So we took him to the fairs wheel and he kept pointing to the scrambleer saying that he wanted to go on the scrambleer, and I said no, no, no, and we got off the ride. I held the chain for the person behind me to come out, and when I turned back around, he was gone.

He could not find him anywhere. And as we're looking around and we have a whole group looking for this little three-year-old boy, I looked up and he was inside the gate of the scrambleer, and the scrambleer was going. His head was just at the car level, and the carnie woman stopped the ride, and she stopped it in time. She walked over, picked him up, handed him to me, she didn't say a word,

“and I took him, and he said, she was really scary. And I said, that woman was an angel,”

and so I will never badmouth the carnie again.

I'm glad we finally have some unequivocally pro-carnie material in this story. We too. Hi, my amusement park story takes place in Disneyland, and I was really excited to go on the haunted house ride, and I'll figure what it's called. Anyways, the door opens, and you are letting to a room. And the door opens in the dark empty room, and there is a person, a little person, he was in the room already, and I thought it was part of the haunted house.

So I started screaming, and he was looking at me, because I was screaming, he was screaming at me. We are both, and you know each other, and then we both realized that it was not part of the haunted house, and I'll be just waiting in the mind with each other, and we pretend to like nothing happened.

And finally, there were the puke stories. A lot of people caught it up here.

And this is the story more than chance I was on a ride, and I puked. Yeah, I was on a ride and I puked, or I was on a ride and I got puked on.

“Well, I don't know, I don't want to hear that. Was there anything that had like a twist? Was it a surprise?”

Pot twist? The one that stands out for me is this lady was on that potion motion ride, you know, that's like big boat that swings back and forth. It basically just goes up and down. Yeah, just swings, it's like a pendulum. And so she was up in the highest part of the boat, and she saw the guy on the other end of the boat start puking, and so then she was like swinging down at the puke. And did she see the puke in the mirror? Like flow motion.

I could see, in flow motion, this line of vomit coming towards me. And it hit her? Yeah. About two seconds later, it's fodder, the entire right side of my body. This is nowhere to go. You can't get off the boat. J. Murray, she used to be a producer here these days. She is the host of the podcast, The Dream,

which is a book based on that show called "Selling the Dream." But those are about large scale, quintessential American scams, and the people who get caught up in them. Which brings us to Act 3. Act 3, what I didn't do in my summer vacation. You know, sometimes, somebody ends up in an amusement park who really has no business there at all. Who is not built to thrill at the thrills that the amusement park offers.

As a teenager, Jonathan Goldstein spent a summer working at an amusement park one that was situated right on the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey. It is your typical amusement park on the beach. There's a board walk, three wooden pairs with roller coasters and a ferris wheel and lots of drop popcorn and hot dog buns for the Seagulls to eat. It's been decades since Jonathan

went to work at Wildwood, and he always wanted to go back. And so we sent him along with one of our

producers, Jonathan and Hivar. Quick note to listeners this story has nothing explicit in it, but it does make reference to the existence of sex as does this warning. The smell of garbage is really bringing it all back in a rush. Maybe I could bring back a bag with some salt water toffee. After a whole religious rebirth that I won't go into here, the summer of my 16th year found me seriously considering Ishiva, rabbinical school,

me a better idea of what was to come. But my best friend, Evan, said that summer camp was for

suckers, and religious camp was even worse. And then if I came with him to Wildwood, he personally makes sure I had a good time. I'll get you yelled really good, he wrote, like a blood oath, in my 1986 high school yearbook. That's yelled as in the letter L. And getting yelled seemed important, especially if I was going to be giving my life over to the Torah, a text that plays greater emphasis on getting seeded as in a circumcised. And so I went to Wildwood. And now I was

back. How close did you live to the pier? I mean, as you've seen getting here, my sense of direction isn't my forte. Man, it's like the whole summer I was just floating around and I got Jara from all to hide. The plan was to go down and get jobs. It was what a lot of teenagers in my town did. Evan's older brother had done it years earlier and had arranged a job for Evan, handing out darts to Patsy's eager to pop balloons on the boardwalk. And I was supposed to get a job

too. But on our fourth night there, still without work, I sat on the edge of my bed and felt that sense of being a failure. This feeling would eventually become a staple in my life, something I'd grow comfortable with, in bars, gyms, offices, and bedrooms. But just then the feeling was strange and new, and I didn't quite know what to do with it. We lived in a co-ed boarding house, run by a woman with a face like a clenched fist named Mrs. D. I spent my days hanging out at Evan's

balloon stand, where his boss finally became so tired of having me around that he pulled some

strings to get me a job working as a change boy at an arcade. If you walked down the boardwalk, there was a point where it looked like the fun had come to an end. My arcade was just a few yards past that. Do you remember where on the pier? Yeah, you weren't. I'm thinking, I'm trying to, like,

“I think, I mean, if anything, maybe that little shack right over there was the arcade,”

where there's a roller coaster going over it now. It's sort of like the little house that I'll be singer grew up in in any hall. You've still got pizza parlors, games with unwinnable prizes, and the vague threat to violence about to erupt. In other words, Wildwood hadn't changed much. Back then, everything looked like 1986, now 1987. Though as it turns out, the arcade I worked at is long gone. Even at the time, all the other arcades were carpeted and air conditioned. But mine

was like an outhouse with all the oldest, skankiest games, all their joysticks having had to joy jerked right out of them years earlier. On the 4th of July, I remember watching the fireworks through a little crack in the wall, right above the Donkey Kong machine. I felt like a young Tony Montana just having come to America. Except the only person I wanted to kill was myself. Being a human-change machine is just one of the jobs that seems only to exist on the boardwalk,

like the guy who's paid to dance in front of the t-shirt shop to draw customers, or the girl who blows bubbles all day, outside a souvenir store. Yes, that's my job. I take my new

“from there. That's not your whole job is just blowing bubbles. Trying to laser in people's eyes?”

No, of course. The bubble girl tells me she is from Bulgaria. The Bulgarian bubble girl is very

young looking, like first time away from home young. And as she explains to me her work responsibilities,

she is approached by a man who turns out to be her boss. He plans a big kiss on her cheek, as though marking his territory. Is it a good summer? It's all right. It's all right. This boardwalk is getting bad. And nighttime this boardwalk is bad. People stabbing people and shooting people yeah. You go two blocks on the boardwalk, they're shooting and stabbing the other day. It's where it's under the boardwalk. What goes on under the boardwalk?

Sex and drugs. I park underneath my store and you can see underneath it here. And you catch them all the time down under there. They go right down their steps and they're underneath the boardwalk.

“Sex under the boardwalk. Me and you. Yeah, you want to do it?”

Yep, all right. See you later. Oh boy, that was creepy.

that for some reason I could never quite fathom, always appear to be wet.

My friend Evan said that it was unwholesome how Mike's arms were so short. He's like a T-Rex, Evan said. The first time Mike paid me, he had to get all crooked to get his wallet out. Most of the time I was in the arcade all by myself and hardly anyone ever came in, just little kids who sat on the ancient ski ball machines, asking for free games. Those old ski ball machines haven't really changed.

Now my technique used to be, I kind of do a sort of bank shot. Like there was this kind of sweet

“spot that I would hit on the right bank. That was really close, wasn't it?”

You got the lowest amount of points you can get. He liked my son that I'm taking out.

I'm trying to, you got the lowest one, Dad. That little beer cozy is going to be mine. No longer on my hand, I have to be so frigid when I'm drinking a Budweiser. Mike was an alcoholic, and he left me to open and close the place most of the time. Sometimes he would stagger in in the middle of the afternoon and lay down on the lopsided pool table. Once comfortably spread out, he'd ask me to cover him from head to toe

with the stuffed animals for ski ball so he could sleep without getting caught by the old woman who ran the pier. Every time I put Mike to bed, I became more and more convinced that Yashiva was

“the place for me. When he wasn't goofing off drunk, Mike was furthering Evan's work of trying”

to get me yelled. He would invite Nancy, the 19-year-old Redhead, who ran the water-squirt game next door over so he could tell her about how she should divergenize me. Nancy was a jersey girl who wore low-back shirts that showed off a large, complicated dragon tattoo. She told me it was a Chinese wind god and that an old biker boy friend had given it to her. It started at her neck and slithered all the way down into her pants to blow across the tundra. In the afternoon when business

was slow, Nancy would come by and tell me about how Mike had just been over pleading on my behalf and how she tried to explain to him that we was just friends, right? Oh yeah, I'd say, swallowing back the hard lump of foul-tasting virgin tears can gealing in my throat. The best. Listen to this music, you know you feel like you're going around like the corner and you're going to see like Joe Pashi beating someone to death with a baseball bat. It's all I can think about.

It's a song called "Wadwood Days." Do you hear it? "Wadwood Days" and "Wadwood Night." My producer Jonathan and I walked down the boardwalk where we discover what's got to be the very worst job in Wildwood. "Most of stuff I do is just off the top of my head, whatever I can pick up on the spot." This is Dutzbona's Junior. The sounds you hear are of people shooting at him with guns. Dutzbona's Junior is a human ping ball target. He shuffles back and forth

and eggs on the crowd while being splattered like a Jackson Pollock canvas. You know, I'll put it as blunt as I can because this is how it is on my tax form, too. I'm an entertaining. Not the dance or

kind, but basically I get suited up in a hockey gear and I get shot at all night. And that doesn't

start to get to you a little bit. Do you dream about it? I love it. It's entertaining to me because this is one of the jobs that I could be as creative as I want to be. And you know, it's just like, you know, webpage design, you know, when you go in, you can do whatever you want. Before Dutz, human ping ball targets simply shuffled from side to side, holding a shield. Then one day, Dutz dropped a shield and began to moonwalk. Soldier Boy was to follow. He also invented

shadow boxing at the ping balls and running towards the shooters. Dutz is protected by a suit that looks like what you'd come up with if you tried to build a Michelin man costume out of moist newspaper and epoxy glue. So people are armed with ping ball guns? Yep, that we provide. 'Cause a lot of people try to, you know, they want to bring their own, but we don't allow that. It's just not going to happen.

“So the suit that you wear protects you from, from any pain?”

For the most part, yeah, there's some weak spots, but, you know, I can't say where the weak spots are, 'cause there's a lot of people who'll find out, and then, you know, and then it becomes a little dangerous, you know.

at the old timey photo place. As it turns out, she's his wife. We met on this ferry boardwalk.

Dutz might spend his day getting fired at an occasion, but at least on his time off he has someone

“to talk to, someone with whom to share the secret weak spots in his armor.”

Back when I lived there, Wildwood had this reputation for being a big party town. People were supposed to be scoring like nuts on the boardwalk, every night, and actually they were. The only real action I got that summer, though, was in the form of a single kiss. I later referred to it as the kiss that ruined my summer. It happened while I was out walking on the boardwalk late one night. I saw a group of older girls, maybe in the early 20s, coming toward me.

One of them, a little ahead of the others, was sort of spinning with her arms stuck out,

and her long blonde hair all over the place. Just as she got right up close to me, she grabbed the back of my neck and put her lips right on mind. I remember as she pulled back, I spastically grabbed onto her wrist. I didn't want her to leave. Her friends had to pry my fingers off one at a time, and she stood there smiling at me, all stoned in airy. That night back at the boarding house in our room, I spent the rest of the evening obsessing. As it might have been the last one I'd

receive until I got married, that kiss pretty much felt like my swinging bachelor hood. In Yeshua, I'd be the mysterious one with a past. For the rest of the summer, I couldn't pass a woman

“on the boardwalk without thinking that we should somehow be meeting in a kiss, that that's how”

life should really be. It turned walking along the boardwalk into a relentless drizzle of small but horrible disappointments. I didn't know it then, but that summer would prove the best one I'd have as a teenager. Even though I was worked like an indentured servant giving every penny of my earnings to Mrs. D, even though I made no friends, and even though I only made it to the beach, but once, where I sat on a mill to weed boarding house washcloth, exhausted and pale, that whole summer felt

like some big fat vacation, just because I was 16 and away from my parents for the first time. When I got back home, I didn't end up going to Yashiva. I didn't bring home any pen pals, money, or happy romantic memories. But I did bring back a pair of black pants, covered in small white skulls. They were really baggy and I had to wear them with 10 inch cuffs at the bottom, but when I showed up for my first day back at school, I thought I looked really punk rock.

I thought, like anyone who never been yelled, that they were the pants of someone who got yelled all summer long.

Down in the Goldstein is the host of the podcast Heavyweight, which returns for a brand new season next month. You can find their amazing archived of old episodes wherever you get your podcast.

“A lot of winners today. Do you want to get better? Well, would you say to get a guy like me to come over?”

I don't know if I would go in. You only look like the type of guy that would spend money here, you know? Get three shots for five. Was he saying that I'm too cool a customer or is he saying you're too cheap a Jew? And below. And below. And below. And below. And below. And below. And below. Well, the program was produced today by J. Marie and me with Ben Calhouns. They're a canning child of him and he largely supplied Robin Semina with the ship and Nancy update.

See the producer for today's show is Julie Snyder, production up on this rerun for major in Lily Stone Nelson, Ruby Schwartz and that Tierney. Special thanks day to Bill Childs, David Outhoff, Kim Martin, Jeff Potts, Dave Dickerson, Amy Silverman, Lindsay, young at Morris, Peer and Wildwood, New Jersey. Original scoring an act one of our show by Dave Hill featuring Dave Hill and Guitar. Thanks today also to this American life partner Sarah Coppola, my partners here at the show,

support us with monthly or yearly donations with a very straightforward goal to help us continue making the show. If you would like to help us keep doing that, please consider it becoming a life partner. It was an ad free. You'll get regular bonus episode. You'll get this little newsletter that I just started where I recommend stuff to see and hear. And I also do some behind the scenes stuff about the show, including this week, stuff about the Cole Windberg story, that act one of today's show.

That was interesting to me. I talked about much and didn't make it into the story. Anyway, to join to read that go to this AmericanLife.org/lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes.

the public radio exchange. Thanks as always for your program's co-founder, Miss Tori Malatia,

who's turtle breeding experiments are finally paying off. I dare you guys to come feel these

turtles. It sounds like a weird, a weird thing, but we really have the softest turtles in town.

“You should feel one. They're really soft. I'm Arrogas. Back next week with more stories of this American Life.”

Oh yes, you knocked me out of my head.

Next week on the podcast of this American Life, Janet McNamara is a stand-up comedian.

“And this weird thing could happen to her, people would come up to her after shows and say,”

I'm autistic and just let you know, you are, too. So she got tested. I am a writer of the test. And the guy just looked up from his notebook and he goes, "Well, people with Asperger generally have above average IQs." So I'm not smart enough.

“To be mildly autistic. That's why we're going to podcast on the local public radio station.”

[BLANK_AUDIO]