443: Amusement Park

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

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 Lindbergh, who's 25 with permanently-mussed hair and the cheerful vibe of the Bosom Buddies-era Tom Hanks. He's been coming to 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. 11 years later, he is a full-time, year-round employee.

Ira Glass

When he was little, his family had season passes here, and they would come a lot. He'd travel to any new roller coaster to try it out, daydreamed about a job where he would design parks and build roller coasters. 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.

Ira Glass

You might think 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 in 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 at an amusement park.

And it is not a glamour job. The department Cole runs is the games department at Worlds of Fun. This is 32 games, the 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 beanbags at targets, or you shoot darts to knock over a 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 her game on his morning rounds.

Ira Glass

This is exactly how Cole trains the kids to 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.

Ira Glass

It's the first shift meeting of the day. About 30 teenagers and college kids mill around a big tree before their shifts start.

Ira Glass

One of the guys, Sam, holds up a poster board with tournament brackets on it, like for any sports tournament. The Sweet 16 Tournament pits the kids in all 32 games in the park against each other, in pairs, in a four-week competition to make the most money. Last week, half the games were eliminated. Cole is here letting the remaining games know who they're competing with today.

Ira Glass

OK. Scale Africa is a scale-- a game where they guess your weight or age. And it's in the Africa part of the park, hence Scale Africa. 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 I, Games II, Games III, and Games IV. And these four teams-- Games I through IV-- compete against each other all summer long, like teams at summer camp, in a three-month-long color war.

Most other amusement parks don't go this far to make things interesting for the workers. This park, Worlds of Fun, is owned by a company called Cedar Fair that owns 11 amusement parks and six water parks. And Cole knows the guys who run the games departments at the other parks. And some of them do competitions like this between the employees.

Ira Glass

So finally, one day, the game that he picked from the hat that day tried their hardest and actually became the number-one game in the park for the day. And--

Ira Glass

Of course, they made a video about this because it's present-day America. And Cole went and told his peers, his colleagues-- the guys who run the games departments at the other parks-- all about what happened.

Ira Glass

Well, 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 hear 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 was recorded and first broadcast a few years ago when you could attend amusement parks without wearing a face mask or taking precautions to avoid a deadly and deeply-contagious coronavirus. Let us return to those happy days, shall we? It's summer. It's hot. Let's spend an hour at a really fun place at a safe social distance-- in fact, the safest imaginable-- that is, over the radio. Let's ride the rides. Let's gorge out on terrible great food together for an hour. Cue the roller coaster sound now!

[ROLLER COASTER SOUND]

Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. Gameboy Grows Up. Following Cole Lindbergh around on his early-morning tour of Words of Fun park, I learned a couple 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.

Ira Glass

Who'd have 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-- doubled its business. I also learned that Cole invents games.

Ira Glass

We round a corner and I see why he asked.

Ira Glass

This turns out to be an awkward question. Cole points out that this slingshot game is not actually called Angry Birds.

Ira Glass

Before I flew 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 wears a Viking helmet, and a fake mustache, and wire-rimmed 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 those old arcade machines with the mechanical claw that picks up prizes? This one is big enough for a person to stand inside, and Cole is inside it, surrounded by huge stuffed animals. And he raps.

Ira Glass

OK, I'm going to stop the video right there. When he says "a bear, a dog, and a giant mon-kay," then we have three quick shots of stuffed animal prizes-- a bear, a dog, and a giant mon-kay.

Ira Glass

As the video continues, the teenagers on his staff join him. And they're all dancing around, and they're hitting whack-a-mole moles 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 cool.

Ira Glass

There are over a dozen videos, all set in the amusement park, with the stuffed animal prizes always playing surprisingly central roles, like the sci-fi special effects movie they made where a mysterious ray from outer space hits, and the stuffed animal prizes all come to life, seeking vengeance. Key line?

Ira Glass

The only semi-normal video of the bunch is a training video. This one opens on Cole. He's in a suit and tie in front of a bookcase, reading a book.

[FORMAL ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING]

He looks up, startled, as if the camera surprised him.

Ira Glass

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 till card, how to stock prizes. I saw these videos, and all I could think of was, these people really love their jobs. And I thought about Michael Scott, the fictional boss on The Office.

Ira Glass

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 passersby to throw three balls into a can.

Well, the Saturday that I visited turned out to be one of the busiest, hottest days of the summer. There 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, Haley and a couple of the other kids from Games III pulled Cole aside and crowded close so kids from other teams couldn't see.

Ira Glass

Meanwhile, the guys in Games IV were doing great in Sweet 16. All their games had survived the first round. Games I was eliminated completely in the first round of Sweet 16. As for Games II, Max and Okson are pulling a double shift, hoping to break the record for how much has ever been made-- ever-- in their two games. Their not-so-secret strategy?

Ira Glass

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 skee 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 II 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 have brought in a disco ball. They brought in lighting gear. And Dominic is explaining to Max how he wants to set it all up.

Ira Glass

Half an hour before the park opened, Haley and Claire had gotten to work early and were down in Games III by Scale Africa.

Ira Glass

Each pyramid has over 100 stuffed animals in it, which is bigger than I think you're probably imagining it. It's nearly waist high. And so there are four big, pastel-colored piles of plush toys right in the middle of the walkway looking so, so easy to win. Basically--

Ira Glass

Cole gets just as excited as the kids do when you get him talking about all the fun things that he did back when he was Haley and Claire's age, working here, running Games III. His team would dress as pirates for the guessing game.

Ira Glass

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 its take for the day.

Ira Glass

Late morning, when I checked back at Games III, the pyramids of plush toys looked pretty much exactly as big as they had earlier that morning. Things were slow. And to goose the business, one of the supervisors, Sarah, was standing on the roof of this little hut.

Ira Glass

This is a technique that I recognize from 1,000 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.

Ira Glass

After a while, Sarah switched technique and finally managed to rustle up a crowd through the simple tactic of making a series of insanely-terrible guesses. First, there is a dad who looks like he's 42 and, in fact, is 42. Sarah guesses 25. Then a grandmother, who is standing there with kids and grandkids-- Sarah writes her guess for this woman's age on a whiteboard.

Ira Glass

Later, Sarah privately confirmed for me that she did intentionally take a dive, which is 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, as a nerdy kid in high school in a small town, it was nice to come to a place where his personality was rewarded.

Ira Glass

So after 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.

Ira Glass

As you'd imagine, it hasn't been such a popular decision with the family.

Ira Glass

This girlfriend and Cole are pretty serious. They just moved in together. They met in Games back in 2006, though she moved on from Games.

Ira Glass

By midday, down in Games III, that is Dustin, who's wearing the full-body banana suit that Haley handmade for him, which looks amazing. But it is 94 degrees, which is sapping everybody's energy. And business is slow.

Ira Glass

Though, as the day wears on, people slowly migrate from the rides to the games. And by nightfall, when it cools off, the guys in Games II finally get Techno Ball working. Max and Okson are covered from head to toe in glow lights. Cole and I round 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.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

Cole suggests, maybe they should dance inside the game instead of on the walkway in front of the game so people would be pulled in to play. Dom does not want to do this. And listen to what a good boss Cole is. He's firm, but he's very nice about it.

Ira Glass

I walked down to check on Games III. 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've probably given away 500 prizes for wrong guesses. And Claire has had exactly the kind of day that Cole wants for all the kids.

Ira Glass

This is Claire's third year here. She's 18, going to Missouri State in the fall to study nursing. And 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 Cole.

Ira Glass

Sam, one of the leaders for Games IV, has been here for three summers. And he also says that Cole is the reason that he keeps coming back.

Ira Glass

That doesn't mean, by the way, that he is seen by his bosses as some kind of superstar. He gets respect, sure. Everybody likes him. His immediate boss, Matt, thinks that there's nobody better at games in any of the 11 amusement parks owned by their parent company, Cedar Fair. But Cole is working at one of the smallest of the 11 parks. So other games managers at bigger parks bring in way more money than Cole does.

And games, in the grand scheme of things, is actually the smallest revenue producer at most amusement parks. The biggest money at an amusement park comes from ticket sales. Then there's food-- everybody buys food-- then merch. And then, bringing up the rear, is games. What Cole does has less effect on the company's bottom line than lots of people in the company. And as much as Cole loves this job, he can't help but wonder, how long can a person do this job?

Ira Glass

All right. I'm going to stop the tape right there. Yes, I know. Matthew McConaughey, Dazed and Confused. Cole has seen the film, too.

Ira Glass

That's a weird fate-- to 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-- it can't last.

We first broadcast this story in 2011. Cole is now solidly in his 30s. He left his job at Worlds of Fun years ago, worked for a while in sales at a toy company, traveled a little, giving motivational talks about being a boss at an amusement park. Now he works in sales at a tech company. And he's a dad, which he loves-- really, really loves.

Cole's still crazy about amusement parks. He actually helped set up an alumni association for his old staff at the games department, worked out a deal with Worlds of Fun to allow old games kids to go back to the park and work a shift in games, relive the glory. His latest project is figuring out how he can build a roller coaster in his backyard.

Well, coming up, carnies float in the air, scary things happen on rides, and bold steps forward for paintball targets everywhere. Our hour of amusement parks continues in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show-- amusement parks. It's July. It's hot. We wanted to go someplace fun here on the radio, someplace that lots of us, me included, would never visit today because of coronavirus. Today's show is a rerun, recorded before all that.

We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act 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, listened to all of those voicemail messages. She joins me now. Hey, Jane.

Ira Glass

Jane Marie-- she used to be a producer here. These days, she is the host of the podcast The Dream, a show we really like. It's about multi-level marketing schemes and the people who get caught up in them. Act Three-- What I Didn't Do On My Summer Vacation. Sometimes, somebody ends up in an amusement park who really has no business there at all, who was 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 boardwalk, three wooden piers with roller coasters and a Ferris wheel, and lots of dropped popcorn and hot dog buns for the seagulls to eat. It's been 29 years 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 Menjivar.

A 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.

After a whole religious rebirth that I won't go into here, the summer of my 16th year found me seriously considering yeshiva, rabbinical school, for the fall. My rabbi suggested I spend the summer at this religious camp just to give 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 that if I came with him to Wildwood, he'd personally make sure I had a good time. "I'll get you L'ed really good," he wrote, like a blood oath in my 1986 high school yearbook. That's L'ed as in the letter L. And getting L'ed seemed important, especially if I was going to be giving my life over to the Torah, a text that placed greater emphasis on getting C'ed, as in circumcised. And so I went to Wildwood. And now, I was back.

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 patsies 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 walk 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.

You've still got pizza parlors, games with unwinnable prizes, and the vague threat of 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, swankiest games, all their joysticks having had the 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.

Jonathan Goldstein

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 plants a big kiss on her cheek, as though marking his territory.

My old boss, Mike, was creepy, too. Mike always wore sunglasses and a red, skintight bathing suit that, for some reason I could never quite fathom, always appeared 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 skee ball machines asking for free games. Those old skee ball machines haven't really changed.

[ARCADE MACHINE MUSIC PLAYING]

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 skee 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 yeshiva was the place for me.

When he wasn't goofing off drunk, Mike was furthering Evan's work of trying to get me L'ed. 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 "devirginalize" me. Nancy was a Jersey girl who wore low-backed shirts that showed off a large, complicated dragon tattoo. She told me it was a Chinese wind god and that an old biker boyfriend 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 congealing in my throat. "The best."

Jonathan Goldstein

My producer Jonathan and I walk down the boardwalk, where we discover what's got to be the very worst job in Wildwood.

Jonathan Goldstein

This is Dutz Bonus, Jr. The sounds you hear are people shooting at him with guns. Dutz Bonus, Jr. is a human paintball target. He shuffles back and forth and eggs on the crowd while being splattered like a Jackson Pollock canvas.

Jonathan Goldstein

Before Dutz, human paintball targets simply shuffled from side to side, holding a shield. Then, one day, Dutz dropped his shield and began to moonwalk. Soulja Boy was to follow. He also invented shadowboxing at the paintballs 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.

Jonathan Goldstein

Before agreeing to talk with me, Dutz wanted to finish his break with the woman who works next door at the old-timey photo place. As it turns out, she's his wife, who he met on this very boardwalk. Dutz might spend his day getting fired at in a cage. 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 their early 20s, coming toward me. One of them, a little ahead of the others, was 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 mine.

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, as she stood there smiling at me all stoned and 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 bachelorhood. In yeshiva, 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 mildewy 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 yeshiva. 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'd never been L'ed, that they were the pants of someone who got L'ed all summer long.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the podcast Heavyweight. Check it out on Spotify or whatever you get your podcasts. There's a list of their best, favorite episodes. Just search "Heavyweight Starter Kit" on Spotify.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Jane Marie and me, with Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Robin Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help on this rerun from Nora Gill, Catherine Raimondo, Stowe Nelson, and Matt Tierney.

Special thanks today to Bill Childs, Dave Althoff, Kim Martin, Jeff Potts, Dave Dickerson, Amy Silverman, Lindsey Young at Morey's Pier in Wildwood, New Jersey. Original music scoring in Act One of our show by Dave Hill, featuring Dave Hill on guitar. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia, whose turtle breeding experiments are finally paying off.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - "ROLLER COASTER BY THE SEA" BY JONATHAN RICHMAN AND THE MODERN LOVERS]

(SINGING) Roller coaster by the water, you made me feel more as I ought to, whoa, whoa. Yes, you knocked me out of my head.