Fun With Gravity

Photos
Amusement at Knoebels
A wooden roller coaster designer doesn't go for the cheap thrills of steel giants.

But in 1976, when he graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in mathematics, there were no jobs designing new pinball games in an industry being crushed by the new video games. "Pac-Man" and "Galactica" held no allure for him, even if that's where the money was.

So he went back to Knoebels, where he'd been a "park rat" as a kid, and became a ride manager, running and maintaining a secondhand steel roller coaster called the Jet Star.

He hated that ride. It was complicated and quirky and relentlessly uncooperative. He had to mentally tear it down every day to figure out what tweaking was needed to keep it running smoothly. And it lacked the organic beauty of a wooden coaster, which to him is like a living thing, the feel of the ride changing from hour to hour and day to day, responding to the temperature and other aspects of weather.

"I did a lot of supper breaks," he recalls. "I'd get together with a friend and we'd talk about all the great roller-coaster designers, Fred Church, Harry Traver, John Allen. We'd talk about fun roller coasters, dangerous roller coasters."

He immersed himself in the grand sweep of roller-coaster history, dating to 1873, when Pennsylvania coal workers began hopping on the Switchback Railroad coal train at Mount Jefferson for its short but thrilling drop in the last few moments down to the Lehigh River. (The first coaster designed specifically for fun was built in 1895 -- 600 feet of trolley tracks between two wooden hills in Coney Island, then a burgeoning beach resort in Brooklyn. Riders would pay a nickel to climb up, then ride to the bottom in cars that reached the whopping speed of 6 mph. Attendants had to push the cars back up.)

Fetterman discovered the work of legendary designer Allen, who was the first to begin applying advanced scientific principles to the creation of rides. Physics, slide rules and psychology (not to mention the concept of liability) came to roller-coaster design only after the Roaring Twenties, when wooden coaster construction peaked at upward of 3,000 worldwide. (In the early days, parks would post signs on the loading platforms warning "No standing"; when riders fell out, this was generally attributed to their own negligence.)

These wooden coasters soared and shook riders with whirlpool spirals, gravity-defying ascents and spine-crunching dives. But speed and centrifugal force were only the beginning of the sensations on a good roller-coaster ride, Allen told the Chicago Tribune in 1976, a few years before he died. Romance was always in the back of his mind.

"On a curve, we very carefully determine how much thrust your body, and the car, can take," he said. "Then we determine what the proper angle would be to bank the curve so that the girl will get thrown into the fella's arms. I devote a great deal of time to this."

But despite Allen's efforts, America's love affair with the wooden-structure coaster was dying by the 1950s. Walt Disney, for one, was disgusted by the "honky-tonk" atmosphere that had enveloped parks like Coney Island, which had fallen under the sway of the mob and allowed drinking, gambling and even prostitution to take hold. When Disneyland -- the nation's first theme park -- opened in 1955, there was lots of fiberglass and steel and not a wooden coaster in sight.

Steel roller coasters and the advent of computers catapulted designers into the realm of the extreme. Priorities shifted to rocketlike accelerations (zero to 128 mph in 3.3 seconds on Six Flags Great Adventure's Kingda Ka), greater heights (420 feet for Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster), sharper angles of descent (76 degrees on Six Flags Great Adventure's El Toro) and more punishing G forces ( 4.6 on Six Flags Magic Mountain's Riddler's Revenge).

By the mid-'70s, many of the old amusement parks were dying, leaving the skeletons of their roller coasters behind, according to Richard Munch, founding president of the American Coaster Enthusiasts.

Pete Knoebel, Dick's uncle, realized the bind his family's park could fall into. Roller coasters drew crowds, but steel (for one of the new ones, anyway) was too big-budget for his small-town family park. He brought Fetterman along to look at an old coaster in San Antonio's Playland Park, which was slated for the wrecking ball. The first wooden coaster made entirely from pressure-treated wood, it was in surprisingly good shape for its age.