The Wet Stuff: Jeff Henry, Verrukt, and the Men Who Built the Great American Waterpark – Grantland.com
The Wet Stuff: Jeff Henry, Verrukt, and the Men Who Built the Great American Waterpark – Grantland.com .vkt-nav, .vkt { opacity: 1; } Grantland Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share via Email The Wet Stuff by Bryan Curtis Skip Video Jeff Henry, Verrückt, and the Men Who BuiltThe Great American Water Park by Bryan Curtis / Photographs by Kevin Cooley / Illustrations by L-Dopa Kansas City, April Seventeen stories above Kansas — above cement rivers and man-made surf waves and cups of Dippin’ Dots: The Ice Cream of the Future; above America’s Potemkin beach, the water park — the ride designer was talking to the governor. They were standing atop Verrückt, the tallest waterslide in the world. “Feel the shaking tower?” Jeff Henry, the designer, asked. Sam Brownback, the governor, said, “I thought it felt like it was a little …” “It wobbles,” Henry said. The designer had a slightly wild look in his eyes. Without the slide, you might have thought Brownback was introducing an aggrieved rancher fighting the feds over grazing rights. Travel Channel cameras were shadowing Henry for a documentary. “I’m not really a designer anymore,” he told Brownback. “I’m an actor.” Jeff Henry and Kansas governor Sam Brownback, 17 stories above the plains. Photo courtesy of Jeff Henry Before Brownback could reply, Henry added, “I’m not as good as you, though, governor.” “Huh?” Brownback said. “I don’t think I’m as good as you.” Brownback let the jab land and laughed. “It’s going to be a great attraction,” he said. “Gotta love it,” Henry said. “Cowabunga,” Brownback said. Waterslide designers compete in a parallel-universe version of The Right Stuff, vying for height and speed records because — this can be the only reason — it seems like a really awesome thing to do. Of these men, Jeff Henry is the most brilliant. He has the ability to make humans not only go down waterslides but up them, in the manner previously possible only on roller coasters. More than one of his employees compares him to Steve Jobs. Henry relishes the role of the eccentric inventor. “You could call it manic-depressive,” said Tom Lochtefeld, a fellow ride designer, “but he’s always manic.” Even in the presence of Brownback and an official from Guinness World Records, Henry wore his typical work uniform: muddy boots and a fishing shirt. His sense of humor is rural Texas hipster. He now targeted Brownback with something more subversive than needling: an appeal to his civic virtue. Waterslide designers compete in a parallel-universe version of The Right Stuff, vying for height and speed records because — this can be the only reason — it seems like a really awesome thing to do. Henry knew that Kansas Speedway, which he could see from Verrückt’s summit, was trying to secure a night race. He told Brownback: “If we can get NASCAR to give us a night race — we want a night race — then we’ll have water, we’ll have lights, we’ll have sound, and we’ll have fireworks shooting off the top of this tower for ’em. All during their race. Give ’em some more excitement, more reasons to bring that race to Kansas City.” “Absolutely,” Brownback said, with a knowing smile that indicated his talking points had been poached. “Oh, yeah. Wow, that would be a lot of attractions. Man.” Henry kept on the pressure. “What’s really interesting about my family is, we don’t really work for the shareholders,” he said. “We actually work for the people who buy our tickets …” “Absolutely,” Brownback repeated. “If you’re not workin’ for the voters …” Upon that wobbling platform, the governor and the ride designer stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Behind them, the mouth of Verrückt opened to the Kansas plains. “Jeff,” Brownback ventured after a time, “you thought about politics or anything?” Somewhere at his core, Henry was both flattered and deeply horrified by the prospect. He turned to Brownback and said, “I got a history — especially with my multiple ex-wives.” “Oh,” Brownback said. “OK. Ha-ha-ha!” After Brownback had gone, Henry sat at a picnic table in the shade. There are two Jeff Henrys known to the world. Henry the Salesman appears for public ceremonies. More elusive is Henry the Inventor: a brooding artist, a man who has attached more deep thought to a waterslide than a thousand Disney Imagineers ever did to It’s a Small World. I asked Henry if a waterslide could be seen as art. “The whole park is art to me,” he said. Do you think of Verrückt as beautiful? “This is an erotic piece of art, yes.” Is Verrückt erotic because it’s scary, or erotic because it’s erotic? “It’s gorgeous,” Henry said. “It’s just a beautiful shape. It’s grander curves, grander valances, steeper drops. Everything is just really, really, really sexy.” Two generations of Henrys — Gary and Jeff with their father, Bob — in front of Verrückt. Photo courtesy of Jeff Henry Henry works in a family business. His brother, Gary, is the CEO of Schlitterbahn, which has five water parks scattered across the country; his sister, Jana, handles the retail side. They work as safety valves on Jeff’s untamed creativity. “If Jeff says, ‘I can build this waterslide for $1 million,’ Gary puts it in the budget for $2 million,” said Gary Slade, editor of the trade publication Amusement Today. When I read Slade’s quote to Gary Henry, he said gently, “Over time, over budget — sometimes those are just modifications of scope.” On this day in April, Jeff Henry was happily behind schedule. Verrückt wasn’t running; despite a planned Memorial Day opening, the slide wouldn’t open for a further six weeks. Henry was also building a new Schlitterbahn park in Corpus Christi, Texas. It, too, was facing lengthy delays. The industry viewed the unveiling of Verrückt (German for “insane”) as a coup for Henry the Salesman. Its 168-foot drop and subsequent 55-foot uphill rise made it easily tweetable. Within a few months, YouTube clips of Verrückt riders littered the Web. Few noted that the former world champ, a 135-foot Brazilian slide called Insano (Portuguese for “insane”), had also been built by Jeff Henry. Henry the Inventor waved away praise. “This particular ride and the way that it looks to me is like about one-tenth of what I want,” he said. “I had always planned just to hook some more ride to it and go a couple of thousand feet long. I like long rides. I don’t like quick, short things like this. People like this.” Middle Americans are a beachless people. Their ocean is the water park, places like Schlitterbahn and Wet ’n Wild and Action Park and Water Zoo. But the water park has never acquired the cultivated mythology of a Disneyland nor a resident genius like Uncle Walt. That’s an oversight I intend to correct. For two men created the American water park as we know it. One is Jeff Henry. The other is George Millay. Neither man would find the pairing flattering. By beginning with Millay’s Wet ’n Wild, which opened in 1977, we can wind our way forward, in the style of a corkscrew slide, to Verrückt. And then being 17 stories above Kansas will make a demented kind of sense. I asked Henry what he thought of Millay. Henry acknowledged Millay’s brilliance and then said, “He was mean. He was the meanest man I ever met.” Let’s start there. A visitor entering Wet ’n Wild saw waves rolling in from the Surf Lagoon, just like at the beach Photo courtesy of the University of Central Florida Orlando, 1977 The formative moment of the American water park was a grand heist. Maybe that’s too strong a term. Maybe “appropriation” is better. Or “enlightened borrowing.” But if you knew George Millay, you knew he wasn’t one for euphemism. In 1974, Millay, then 45 years old, found himself standing before a swimming pool in Decatur, Alabama. It was 9 p.m. Millay was a large man — “big-boned,” a former colleague said. He had the thick, belly-less form of 1970s NFL linemen and flame-red hair. When he got angry, which was inevitable, his cheeks flushed until they matched it in color. He had come to Decatur, more than 300 miles away from the Gulf of Mexico, to see the waves. There, Point Mallard Park was using German technology to manufacture 4-foot swells. Visitors were bobbing up and down just as they would in the Gulf. As Millay stood there, he realized that for the landlocked, this wave pool was their Gulf. Why, a man could make a fortune building simulacrums of beaches across America. Years later, Millay recalled to a reporter the words that crept through his head: We’ve got it … It was the first of many such heists. Millay went to Canada and saw a children’s water playground designed by Eric McMillan. He would need his own version of that, too. On a family road trip through Placerville, California, Millay happened to pass a waterslide, a fast concrete flume that sent kids feetfirst into a pool of dirty water. My god, Millay thought, what a concept this is … By 1974, the United States was saturated with roller coaster theme parks; various surveys put the number at more than 500. Millay envisioned an alternative — a water park. The set of rides that made up the first Wet ’n Wild were already extant. Millay’s insight was to create a new kind of park by putting them in one place and charging a single admission price. As one magazine would later note, “For most of us, Wet ’n Wild is to waterparks what Disney is to theme parks.” George Millay, the man who created the water park. Photo courtesy of the University of Central Florida At first glance, George Millay was an unlikely man to invent a slacker’s paradise. He was ex-Navy, a staunch conservative, a reactionary. “A lot of us thought of him as our General Patton,” said Dick Evans, who worked on an early feasibility study for Wet ’n Wild. Millay kept a carving of Attila the Hun behind his desk. In letters to friends, Millay referred to the Japanese as “Japs” and the Cold War as the “World Bolshevik Expansion.” His birthday was the Fourth of July. Millay hated long hair. It was the badge of the nitwits who wanted America to lose in Vietnam, a generation that was taking the country straight to hell. In 1974, Millay asked for a meeting with Rolly Crump, the famed Disney Imagineer. “I went over to his condo,” Crump remembered. “It was my beatnik period, and I had a beard and wore a bandanna and had rings all over my fingers. I was walking down the hall. George comes out of the door with a cup of coffee. The first thing he said was, ‘We don’t allow beards in this building.’” “I said, ‘I’m Rolly Crump.’” “He said, ‘Oh, god. OK. Get in here!’” Another time, Millay walked into a bar, sat down, and told the man next to him: “You have a beard. You don’t belong in this restaurant.” The man ignored him. Millay stood up. He warned the man he had been a boxer at UCLA. The man rose, coldcocked Millay, and walked out of the bar. That was George Millay: a man who’d offer to fight on behalf of civility. Millay could yell. Boy, could he yell. When an employee dared to tell Millay he couldn’t do something, Millay’s cheeks went red and his sonorous voice began to boom. But to reduce Millay to his outbursts was to sell him short. Millay had considerable charm and was known for his enormous generosity among pals and employees. Hours after a tirade, Millay could be found in a bar drinking vodka with the object of his scorn. He believed that the most essential thing two men could do together — other than argue — was to get drunk. In 1976, Millay was diagnosed with skin cancer. The resulting surgeries chipped away at his face. A doctor removed part of his right ear. The nerves on the right side of Millay’s face were severed, causing his mouth to sag. Another time, a divot was taken from his temple. “It looked like someone had taken an ice cream scoop to the side of his head,” said Gary Zuercher, who sold Millay the technology to build the wave pool. “It would have killed a normal man,” said Fred Brooks, who worked with Millay on the planning of Wet ’n Wild. Yet Millay was only embarrassed by having to grow out his hair and beard to cover the scars. “He was just a bull, just god-awful tough,” added Brooks. The night Millay spotted the Alabama wave pool became a turning point in his career. In the 1950s, Millay had made a smallish fortune with a harborside restaurant in Southern California. A decade later, he struck it rich when he took the age-old concept of the oceanarium, added showbiz flair, and created the park we know as SeaWorld. Under Millay’s tutelage, Shamu the killer whale became a mononymous international star. But in 1974, Millay lost a power struggle with SeaWorld’s board and angrily left the company. Wet ’n Wild would be his comeback. Millay had gotten the idea for a water park one summer at SeaWorld, when he realized he had brought visitors to the water but not into the water. He explained to a reporter years later, “All you have to do is spend some time in Central Florida in the summertime — it’s hot and muggy — and ask what does a person want to do in his spare time. The answer is either sex, booze, or go swimming, right?” “When they heard us say we were charging money for people to go swimming, they held the door for us as they chuckled,” Millay’s gamble was that people would pay to swim. Bankers thought he was nuts. “When they heard us say we were charging money for people to go swimming, they held the door for us as they chuckled,” said John Shawen, Wet ’n Wild’s first general manager. But Millay managed to raise more than $3 million. For a site, Millay selected Orlando. It was beachless. It had legions of existing tourists. Initially, the water park was not a go-to attraction; it was an add-on for families who had turned over their wallets to Disney. The 15-acre tract Millay leased on International Drive sat at a spot former Universal Orlando president Bob Gault called the city’s “50-yard line” — right where the airport expressway met Interstate 4, the road to the Magic Kingdom. Naming the park proved simple. Rolly Crump remembered, “One day, at a meeting, George said, ‘We got to come up with a name. It’s got to be wet and it’s got to be wild.’ “I said, ‘Well, George, that’s it. Call it Wet ’n Wild.’” Later, the name would be as soothingly generic as the chains on International Drive: the Red Carpet Inn, the Western Sizzlin’ steak house. Yet for the men standing on the threshold of a great invention, Wet ’n Wild almost sounded dangerous. They made sure the opening round of ads emphasized that the park was safe. About that: A few days before Wet ’n Wild opened, in March 1977, Millay invited the Orlando hotelier Harris Rosen to watch the first teenager test the Whitewater Slideways. These were the concrete slides Millay had seen in Placerville, California, now rebranded and lengthened. (They measured 400 feet.) The teen folded his arms across his chest, slid down the flume, skipped right across the surface of the splash pool, and landed in a heap on the concrete. “That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it, George?” Rosen said. “Oh my god,” Millay said. The centerpiece of Wet ’n Wild was the wave pool — now called the Surf Lagoon. Millay’s pool was nearly identical to the one he’d seen in Decatur: It held 570,000 gallons of water and measured 8 feet in the deep end. Millay placed it right inside the entry gates, so that as you walked into the park you saw waves rolling at you, just like at the beach. The original Wet ’n Wild in Orlando — note the wave pool facing the entrance. Photo courtesy of the University of Central Florida When you turned left, you came upon the children’s play area. The name revealed its provenance: Canadian Water Caper. Wet ’n Wild’s footpaths were hot asphalt. An admission ticket cost $3.75 and you could rent a locker for 50 cents. For Millay, Wet ’n Wild stood as a corrective to ’70s hedonism. According to his biographer, Tim O’Brien, Millay prohibited so much as a single piece of litter to hit the ground. The park’s lounge chairs were red, white, and blue. In the first days of the American water park, Millay was known to glance out his office window and count the cars pulling into the lot. An employee would climb to the top of the highest structure at Wet ’n Wild, like a Navy man on a conning tower, and scan the horizon for rain clouds. Millay liked to say, “When they’re nipple-to-nipple and bun-to-bun, we know the turnstiles have really spun!” New Braunfels, late 1960s When he was still in his teens, Jeff Henry became an inventor. His family had moved from Houston to New Braunfels, Texas, a sleepy river town between Austin and San Antonio. The Henrys bought Camp Landa, a collection of 34 wood cabins that stretched along the Comal River. On Christmas Day, Jeff and Gary and Jana would open gifts, then put on wet suits and jump in the river. Camp Landa was a refuge for Houstonians, who would come to New Braunfels to ride inner tubes. As an afterthought, the Henrys installed an old playground slide on the second story of the lodge building. The slide was very fast, and riders would often shoot off the bottom and go skipping across the grass. Jeff Henry had an idea. He put a dip into the bottom of the slide and filled it with water. Now, when the rider came down at high speed, he fell into the water and slowed down. This technology — known as a water brake — is still used in parks today. Jeff Henry had invented a waterslide. Across America, late 1970s George Millay lifted ideas so successfully that it wasn’t long before Wet ’n Wild became a target for larceny. The culprits were roller coaster people — the men who’d watched with raised eyebrows while Millay created a new kind of amusement park. Now they were coming to Orlando and looking the place over. Millay prohibited his employees from giving tours to potential competitors. It hardly mattered that his own staff’s tours of other parks had provided the inspiration for several rides at Wet ’n Wild. Millay knew this was coming. He had planned to open Wet ’n Wild, make a killing, and then quickly build seven more water parks across the country, essentially claiming the territory as his own. Cities north of the Mason-Dixon Line didn’t interest him. Millay wanted hot, beachless places that could become mini-Orlandos. He considered Dallas–Fort Worth, St. Louis, Nashville, and Atlanta. Problem was, the public was slow to embrace the Orlando park. “No one knew what we were,” said John Seeker, who handled Millay’s marketing. The park took a $400,000 loss in its first year. The following November, Millay wrote to his investors, “Who would be dumb enough to buy stock in Wet ’n Wild?” Millay began to wonder if the park would go the way of failed Orlando attractions like the replica Great Wall of China and Hurricane World. “George never ran out of ideas,” Shawen said. “We just ran out of money.” A typical roller coaster guy was Pat Cartwright, who had worked at Busch Gardens and Opryland USA. Cartwright came to Orlando in 1981 with his wife and two children. At Disney World, he trudged from ride to ride with sweat pouring off his brow. Then he went to Wet ’n Wild. His kids played in the Canadian Water Caper while Cartwright and his wife sat in the shade and watched. “You didn’t see lounge chairs at Disney World or Six Flags or Busch Gardens,” Cartwright said. “But at a water park you could sit on a lounge chair for an hour.” The water park’s role as a babysitter was central to Millay’s vision. “Our type of park is the one that the tourist will visit after he’s fought the crowds and heat at the other places,” he once remarked. In fact, an early problem Wet ’n Wild faced was that people were lying on its beach chairs for so long — sometimes 12 hours at a clip — that the chairs were bursting under the strain. Millay’s idea had escaped. Cartwright went to Williamsburg, Virginia, and built a park called Water Country USA. More water parks opened in Oklahoma City and Branson, Missouri. Still more in Tampa and Silver Springs, Florida. That made Millay really angry — competitors right in his backyard. I… truncated (38,349 more characters in archive)