This American Life - 443: Amusement Park

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

We head to some of the happiest places on earth: amusement parks! Ira Glass takes us behind the scenes at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, where the young staff – coached by a funny, fun-loving boss just a little older than they are – truly seem to love their jobs.   Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.(00:00:00) Prologue: Host Ira Glass walks through a Kansas City Missouri amusement park called Worlds of Fun with Cole Lindbergh, who had a season pass to the park as a little kid, starting working there summers at 14, and then just stayed. Now he's a full-time, year-round employee, running the games department. It's possible he does this job better than anyone in the country. (9 minutes)(00:09:26) Act One: Ira continues with Cole Lindbergh and the teenagers who work for him in the games department at Worlds of Fun. We watch them compete against each other to see who can do the most business. (23 minutes)(00:32:26) Act Two: We asked for your stories about amusement parks. Three hundred of you called in, with stories of fear, floating carnies and, um, vomit. (9 minutes)(00:42:15) Act Three: Jonathan Goldstein returns to Wildwood, New Jersey, where he spent one not-fateful summer when he was sixteen. (13 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org / This American Life privacy policy. / Learn more about sponsor message choices.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Robert 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. 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 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. I love amusement parks.

Anytime my family would go on vacation, we'd schedule it around an amusement park because I love rollercoasters because I loved 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 seasoned passes here, and they would come a lot. He traveled 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.

I remember being kind of like, oh, wow, this is the inner sanctum, you know, this is the inner work. this is where all the cool stuff happens. And then, you know, then first time actually getting in the uniform, actually working in the park. I mean, 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 awesome.

I'm so excited about this. 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 in an amusement park.

And it is not a glamour job. The department co-runs is the games department at Worlds of Fun. 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 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. Yeah, Mallory loves talking on the mic. Mallory does a good job on the mic. Thank you. I appreciate it. Let's hear it. Go. Go for it. Try to get people to play.

All righty. 40 seconds on the clock. 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. All right. Let's gather around, guys. Is there still people in cash control? Anybody know? It's the first shift meeting of the day. About 30 teenagers and college kids mill around a big tree before their shifts start.

All right, 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 this evening. 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 for any 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. Cole is here letting the remaining games know who they're competing with today. Pigs of Fury Bullpen.

versus goblet toss lion's it. Now, wait, hold up, don't go any further. Could this possibly be a precursor for 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 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 1, Games 2, Games 3 and Games 4, and these four teams, games 1 through 4, 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 6 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. 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 have 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 the 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 game. 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 of course, they made a video about this because, you know, the 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. I go and I tell the other parts about this and I showed a picture, you know, like, oh, there's me all soaking wet. 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 more 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 I forgot? It's Saturday. Oh, okay. Today I don't be.

like riding in it rides I just want to play all the games don't be like playing Mamba ball when a giant top frog or a big basketball yesterday I don't feel like riding in it rides just playing games in games. All right, let's have a good day, guys. Everybody in, all right? All right. Games all three.

One, two, three. Yeah. All right, let's have a good day. 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 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 when you told some

great ones. Today's show first ran 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. Let'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. It's This American Life, Act 1. Game Boy grows up. Following Cole Lindberg around on his early morning tour of Worlds 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. You 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'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 the call 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 beanbags 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. People love shooting a giant slingshot. Before I've got 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. But in this one, he wears a Viking helmet and fake mustache and wire rim 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 old arcade machines with a 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 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 for a huge, three quick shots of stuffed animal prizes, 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-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 kind of cool. There 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? The prizes attacked me. I was in my game. The Earth's ship, and next thing I knew I was being pummeled by bears. The only semi-normal video of the bunch is a training video. This one opens on Cole. He's in a suit and top. 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 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. I'd say that there's a lot of Michael Scott in this job. 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 Cole to dress up wearing a big beard and a raincoat and tell everyone he lived downtown under the bridge and he was there to motivational speaker of him today? Hi, everybody, I'm thrilled bridges, you know, and like go out and talking to people.

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. They're all standing there and I'll just go, light them up.

I 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 guys see what Cole did at the shift meeting? 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 passers-by to throw three balls into a camp. 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 2, which did seem to matter to the kids. Before the shift, Haley and a couple of the other kids from Games 3 pulled Cole aside and crowded close so kids from other teams couldn't see. So this is, you have a secret weapon

that is going, they're going to show you a secret weapon on what, and not anybody seen. Guaranteed victory. It's a banana. A banana costume. So is that you made the costume? I made the costume, yeah. She's awesome.

Because we have a game with bananas that's in Sweet 16. So we're gonna have 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 use a pattern. Wait, David likes coming. Put it away. Did you just go buy fabric? No, I've had this fabric. So it's the head hole, the arms hole, and it's gonna look like the bananas in

Lines did. I like it. We're pumped. I like it. That is more than exciting. People are going to be stopping, taking pictures. Oh, maybe I'll win one too. Meanwhile, the guys in Games 4 were doing great in Suite 16.

All their games had survived the first round. Games 1 was eliminated completely in the first round of Sweet 16. As for Games 2, Max and Oaksan 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? 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 Rolla 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 2 is hoping to turn this creaky 16-year-old game Rollaball, which never does well into a crazy dance party they call Technoball. Max and Dominic have brought in a disdain. They brought in lighting gear, and Dominic is explaining to Max how he wants to set it all up. Yeah. We're going to put a light on that toy chest, going to put a light on that box. So shining at the disco ball, disco ball is going to be moving. It's all dark in here.

People want to walk on it. It'll be like, whoa, what am I stepping on? Whoa, lights! Maybe it'll be too much for people to handle. Half an hour before the park opened, 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. 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 plush toys right in the middle of the walkway looking so so easy to win. Basically.

Every prize we've got. Every price we got, yeah. We're throwing 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. Everyone stays energized, get pumped up for the whole day. We really want to win. We lost death match and very painful battle. Years ago, I was lead of games three. This was my section. 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 three. His team would dress as pirates for the guessing game. And they'd be out at the scale and they'd do guessing pirates. Gar, your age be, garr, you know, stuff like that. 2004 came around, we dominated. We beat everyone. It was awesome. 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. We brought my fog machine in from home because at the time I was in high school and I had a band and people flocked to it and we destroyed Games 2. We destroyed them that year. It was the happiest I've been because in 2003 we had gotten so close to winning and I just kept on saying 2004 is a year. Games 3 were 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 looked pretty much exactly as big as I had earlier that morning. Things were slow. And to use the business, one of the supervisors, Sarah, was standing on the roof of this little hot. 88 more guesses until I'm coming off the roof. She's staying on the roof until she gets 100 guesses. I'm more guesses, and then I'm going to allow myself to take a bathroom break. So any of you guys walking by, if you guys want to come play my game, help me out, get me off this roof. It's only $5 to play.

I can guess your age, wait, or birthday month. This is a technique that I recognized 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. Do you play? I mean, seriously? All these people don't want to help me out. Thanks, luck.

You should come. I dare you guys. to come feel these turtles. It sounds like a weird thing, but 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 is a dad who looks like he's 42, and in fact is 42. Sarah guessed as 25. Then a grandmother, who is standing there with kids and grandkids. Sarah writes her guests 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 guess, maybe?

All right. I guess you're 37. It's sunglasses. Sunglasses really throw me off. But congratulations. You guys will make out any prize you want. Later, Sarah privately confirmed for me that she did intentionally take a dive, which is fine with coal 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 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 until the summer because when it was summertime,

I get to come to World Fund and work with people that are just like me and enjoy our whole summer together. 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. It's probably one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make.

But I said, okay, this opportunity is probably only going to come along once in a lifetime. As you'd imagine, it has a lot of. 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, no, you're working real hard,

but when are you getting back to school? Or my grandmother, now before, you know, I pass on, you need to make sure that you've completed college. I mean, my grandma all the time. And I get a lot from the girlfriend, too. when are you going to finish? Because she just graduated college. This girlfriend, Nicole,

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. She's like, 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 don't know. I don't know. Lots of very accomplished people don't have college degrees. 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 midday, down in Games 3, 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. Oh, all right. Well, hey, you guys have a great day. 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 2 finally get Technoball working.

Max and Oaksan 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. Oh, my goodness. Oh, let's go look at Technoball. Look at this.

It's six of your staff and two, three other guys all dancing. In a big circle. 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 like embarrassed. Hi, Dom. What's up? How many people are playing the game, Dom? Judging a lot of attention. Yeah, but why are we turning that into gameplay? Coles suggest 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. He's firm, but he's very nice about it. You're so close. I know. You're so close. Did the only attention that just attracted? No, it did.

But then you didn't have anybody out here talking to them saying, hey, why aren't you playing the game? I know. I was hoping that they would realize that. No, no, no, no, they're not going to realize that. You know that. It's better than anyone, you should know that. They're not going to just be like, oh. It looks fine.

I mean, all the lights, I mean, it's, I'm not going to deny the awesomeness, but I am going to say that, uh, no more dance 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 went out raggedy piles, maybe half their original size,

which means that they did great. They got lots of people to play. They'd probably given away 500 prizes for wrong guesses. And Claire has had exactly the kind of day that Cole wants 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.

Because it was 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 and the fall to studying 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. Definitely not. I don't think any other boss would do 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 Four, has been here for three summers, and he also says the call 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 sing a goofy song for you guys in the morning. You can imagine high school students and college students sort of rolling their eyes at somebody doing that, but nobody does. No, it's weird. It's almost like that's the thing to do.

Whatever Cole does is the thing to be doing at that moment. And 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 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. That doesn't mean, by the way, that he has 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 was 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 in 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 cannot but 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 started 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 tape right there. Yes, I know. Matthew McConaughey, dazed and confused. Cole has seen 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 out in the park with the 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 100 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. You know? I mean, you're 35 and you work with a bunch of high schoolers and a gay... 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, it can't last. Okay, so we first broadcast that story long ago back in 2011, and so much has happened for Colson Sen. He finally did leave his job at Worlds of Fun. That was years ago. And then worked for a while on sales at a toy company, gave some motivational talks about being a boss in 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. And yes, who knew there 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. He 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, Kearnie's 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. I'm Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This American Life, I have a show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show.

Amusement Parks, it's August, it's hot. We wanted to go someplace fun here on the radio. We've arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2, 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 voicemail messages. She joins me now. Hey, Jane. 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 called and told stories about carnies like making the ride go too fast or keeping them on the ride too long. Demonic carnies. Yeah. 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 carnie story. Only they happened years apart and in different cities. But it's fun to imagine they're talking about the same guy. My amusement park story involves the Gravitron.

Yeah, oh, 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. Right, and it spins around and the fore drops out. Yep, and you're like stuck to the wall. There was a Carney there, and he was waving us all in, and we had purchased tickets. And I guess our first sign 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 last month. I had made friends with the Carney who was running the Gravatron. He started up the ride and the music was blaring and I remember it was Motley Cruz, Dr. Feel Good. Anyway, he gave me a private showing where I'm riding inside this thing, music's blasting. And the lights were going and we were spinning around in the centrifugal. force was pushing us up against the wall. And the next thing I know, this Carney steps out from behind

his operating box and comes out into the centrifuge and proceeds to pull himself up and place his feet on the 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. That's right. The ride 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 because you told me right before we sat down that a lot of the stories that people

caught in to tell were love stories. Tons of love stories or like-like stories. You know, like summer flings, summer romances, first kisses. There were people that lost their virginity on rides. Ew. Don't do that. But then there 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 me on a roller coaster. we were on a viper. He said, will you marry me? And he popped open the ring box, and the ring fell out of the box and down into the pits of viper. It was 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 still searching for it. We have yet to find it. So I called Natasha, actually, to see if they'd found it yet. 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 loop-de-loop. But as she was getting on, she was like fuzzing around with her purse. I reached up to pull the harness down over me and it locks above my head.

And I have nothing holding me into the roller roller. coaster. So I look over in horror as the carny guy that was running the ride looks at me and he pushes the button to go and the thing starts to go and I'm telling him, wait, wait, wait, stop. I don't have my seat but he doesn't stop. So

I know, so now 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 loop-de-loop. So she's upside down? I know, just like hanging on to her friend. As tight as I can to stay inside the ride. And what really got scary is we whipped around the corners.

I almost got thrown out, but I didn't. She said that she had whiplash for a week and that she was too young to realize that she probably could have sued them. So there's another story from this woman, Susan. and her three-year-old wanted to go to the fair, but it was super late at night. And so they humored him and they were like, sure, we'll take you, but they figured he would fall asleep on the way there. But he didn't. He stayed awake. So I said, okay, I'll take you in for one ride on the ferris wheel, and then we'll go back to the car.

My husband, D. Noon, put his shoes on because we didn't think he'd make it there. So we took him to the ferris wheel, and he kept pointing to the scrambler saying that he wanted to go on the scrambler. and I said no, no, no. And when 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 scrambler, and the scrambler was going. His head was just at the car level, and the Carney 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 a carney again.

I'm glad we finally have some unequivocally pro-carney material. in this story. Me too. Hi, my amusement park story takes place in Disneyland and I was really excited to go on the haunted house ride. I'll forget what it's called. Anyways, the door opens and you are let into a room

and the door opens in the dark, empty room and there is a person, a little person who 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 were both screaming at each other.

And then we both realized that it was not part of the haunted house and that we just waiting in the line with each other. And we pretended like nothing happened. And finally there were the puk stories. A lot of people caught about puke. Mm-hmm. And is the story more than just 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 want to hear that. Was there any that had a twist? Was it a surprise pot twist? The one that stands out for me is this lady was on that ocean-motion ride, you know, that's like big boat that swings back and forth. It basically just goes up and down. Yeah, it's like a pendulum. And so she was up at the highest part of the boat, and she saw the guy on the big, the other end of the boat start puking.

And so then she was like swinging down at the puke. I don't know. And did you see the puke in midair? Like slow motion. I could see in slow motion this line of vomit coming towards me. And it hit her? Yeah. About two seconds later, it splattered the entire right side of my body.

There's nowhere to go. You can't get off the boat. Jay Marie, she has to be a producer here. 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 quintessentially 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.

It 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 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 Menhivar. 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. The smell of garbage is really bringing it all back in a rush. Maybe I could bring back a bag with some saltwater toffee. 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 suggests that I spend the summer at this religious camp,

just to give me a better idea of what was to come. But my best friend Evans 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 eld really good, he wrote, like a blood oath in my 1986 high school yearbook. That's eld, as in the letter L.

And getting eld seemed important, especially if I was going to be giving my life over to the Torah, a text that placed greater emphasis on getting seed, as in circumcised. And so I went to Wildwood, And now I was back. How close did you live to the pier? Um, 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 like floating around and then I got jar of formaldehyde. 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 Evans' 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. Do you remember where on the pier? Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. I'm trying to, like, I think, I mean, if anything, maybe that The 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 Alvi Singer grew up in in Annie Hall. 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, skankiest 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. Yes, that's my job. I take money from them. That's your whole job, is just blowing bubbles? Not only. And shine with laser. Shine a laser in people's eyes?

No. No, of course. The bubble girl tells me she. 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. Is it a good summer? It's all right. It's all right. This boardwalk's getting bad. At nighttime, this boardwalk is bad.

What are the bad bites and people, stabbing people and shooting people, yeah. You go two blocks off the boardwalk. There was a shooting and stabbing the other day. Oh, yeah. It's worse under the boardwalk. What goes on under the boardwalk? Oh, 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 on the steps and right underneath the boardwalk. Wow. Sex under the boardwalk. Cool. and you. Oh. Yeah.

You want to do it? No. Yep. All right. See you later. That was creepy. My old boss, Mike, was creepy too. Mike always wore sunglasses and a red, skin-tight 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 ski ball machines asking for free games.

Those old ski ball machines haven't really changed. Now, my technique used to be I'd 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. Be like my son that I'm taking out. You got the lowest one dad. Dead little beer cozy is going to be mine.

No longer all my hand 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 Yeshiva was the place for me. When he wasn't goofing off drunk, Mike was furthering Evans' 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 divergenitalize 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. Watch the tram car, please. Listen to this music, don't you feel like you're going to round, like, the corner and you're going to see, like, Joe Pesci beating someone to death with a baseball bat? It's all I can think about. It's a song called Wildwood Days. Do you hear it? Wildwood Days and Wildwood Night.

My producer Jonathan and I walk down the boardwalk where we discover what's got to be the very worst job in Wildwood. Most of the stuff I do is just off the top of my head. It's whatever I can pick up on the spot. This is Dut's Bonus Jr. The sounds you hear are of people shooting at him with guns. Dut's 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. You know, I'll put it as blunt as I can because this is how it is on my tax forms too. I'm an entertainer. Not the dancer kind, but basically I get suited up in a hockey gear and I get shot at all night. And it doesn't start to get to you a little bit? Do you dream about it?

No. I love it. It's entertaining to me because this is one of the jobs that I can be as creative as I want to be. And, you know, it's just like, you know, web page design. You know, when you go in, you can do whatever you want. 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.

Soldier Boy was to follow. He also invented shadow boxing at the paintballs and running towards the shooters. Dutts 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 paintball guns? Yep, that we provide. Because 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 any pain? For the most part, yeah. There's some weak spots, but, you know, I can't say where the weak spots are because then a lot of people will find out. And then, you know, then it kind of becomes a little dangerous, you know. 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 we 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 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 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, and 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. Dee, 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 held, that they were the pants of someone who got held all summer long.

Jonathan Goldstein is the host of the podcast, Heavyweight, which returns for a brand new season next month, that you can find their amazing archive of old episodes wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of winners today? Everybody wins. What would you say to get a guy like me to come over? I don't know if I would call you in.

You don't look like the type of guy that would spend money here, you know? Was he saying that I'm too cool a customer or is he saying you're too cheap a Jew? You see, I went on the roller coaster last night when I was feeling bad. See in Santa Cruz And I was feeling sad But we went down and around Well, program is produced today by

Jane Marie and me with Ben Calhoun, Sarah Kinning, Jonathan Ben Hibar, Lisa Pollock, Robin Seminole, Alyssa Schip, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder Production Up on this rerun from Adrian Lilley, Stone Nelson, Ruby Schwartz, and Matt Tierney. Special thanks today to Bill Childs, David Outhoff, Kim Martin, Jeff Potts, Dave Dickerson,

Amy Silverman, Lindsay Young, at Mori's Pier in Wildwood, New Jersey. Original scoring and act one of our show by Dave Hill, featuring Dave Hill and guitar. Thanks today also to This American Life Partner, Sarah Coppolo. Life 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 becoming a life partner. You'll listen ad-free. You'll get regular bonus episodes. 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 Lindbergh story, that Act 1 of today's show, that was interesting to me,

that I never really talked about much and didn't make it into the story. Anyway, to join, to read that, go to ThisAmericanLife.org slash Life Partners, that links also in the show notes. Thank you for considering this. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks as always, do our program's co-f. founder, Ms. Tori Malitia, whose 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 on our glass. Back next week for more stories of This American Life. Next week on the podcast of This American Life, Janet McNamara is a stand-up comedian. And this weird thing kept happening to her.

People would come up to her after shows and say, I'm autistic, and just to let you know, you are too. So she got tested. I remember I took the test, and the guy, he just looked up from his notebook, and he goes, well, people with Asperger's generally have above-average IQs. So, I'm not smart enough to be mildly autistic. That's next week on the podcast. on a local public radio station.