Fun With Gravity

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

Fetterman often meets his wife and son for dinner at the park during the week.

"She would like me to be home more than I am," he says. But after 26 years of marriage, she's accustomed to his roller-coaster obsessions. The Flying Turns is his oldest one.

It was during his early years at Knoebels that Fetterman first saw photos of the legendary ride dreamed up by a former World War I Canadian Royal Air Force pilot named Norman Bartlett. Bartlett showed up one day at the office of John Miller, one of the greatest roller-coaster designers of the early days, with a moving picture of a toboggan slide, according to Robert Cartmell's "The Incredible Scream Machine: A History of the Roller Coaster."

"I don't think [Bartlett] knew the difference between a tenpenny nail and a two-by-four," Cartmell quotes a witness to the meeting in his book. But Miller took the idea and turned it into a ride.

Fetterman was amazed at the rubber-castered cars caroming wildly through a cylindrical chute of cypress like untethered bobsleds. It was different from anything he'd ever seen before. And it was essentially extinct.

He remembers asking Dick Knoebel about it. Knoebel had ridden one of the originals. And he'd ridden a steel rendering of the ride in England. "It wasn't the same," Knoebel told him.

"There's a smell and feel to it that you don't get with steel," says Carole Sanderson, president of American Coaster Enthusiasts. "The oil they used on the wood, the graphite of the tracks. . . . A steel coaster is very sterile. But the wood is . . . like a piece of furniture, like artwork."

Fetterman tucked away the memory, and went on with his job. He and the Knoebels relocated the Rocket. He built the Twister, modeled after a design by John Allen. Then three years ago, he made a pitch to the Knoebel family: We should build a Flying Turns.

"I had just worked on this for 30 years and got to the point where it felt like it can't lose," says Fetterman. "But I think it's gutsy on the Knoebels' part."

Where a larger company might have bought a roller-coaster design and had it built within months, Dick Knoebel says he recognizes Fetterman's perfectionist tendencies. Knoebels amusement park, founded by his grandfather, has evolved over time. Why shouldn't a ride? "It's what works," Knoebel says. "None of us here at the park are suits."

Even now, Fetterman is still changing a design that is midway through construction. He has added vertical supports, increased the layers of wood on the track and lengthened a straightaway since work began. Just one or two workers hammer on the site on a midweek afternoon.

"We're moving, but we're not running," says Leonard Adams, the construction foreman who wears a Stetson-shaped hardhat and yellow-lensed sunglasses. Last week's rain shut down work only for a few days.

The beauty of this roller coaster, Fetterman believes, is that it will show it takes less force than one might think to convince people they are going to barrel into the earth or float away.

Away from the park later, Fetterman confides that in person he finds roller coasters a little overwhelming. All the noise, the clanging, the constant bangs and rumbles leave him jangled. The most pleasing sounds to his ears are chimes, a modulated pitch, the tones of Tibetan throat singing or of Ben Franklin's armonica, a glass bowled instrument that emits crystalline notes.

Could you build a roller coaster that would sound like that? He's been playing with that puzzle in his mind. He hasn't solved it yet.

Still, he hears its harmony in his imagination. Maybe he'll build it some day.

News researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.