Episode 220: The Zipper

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This is the Memory Memory Palace.

I'm Nate Tomeo.

This one was different.

You don't know where the ideas come from all the time when part of your job is coming up with ideas.

But it seems that one day at work, Joe Brown saw something in a piece of plywood.

There was something there.

Maybe he took it to a table saw and cut out a shape.

A little different than the ones that folks there at Chance Amusements of Wichita, Kansas typically use when they made their rides.

A change from those flat bottom circles, the little setting suns that might hang from a Ferris wheel, or if you flip them over, could spin like a teacup.

He cut out a new shape that looked a bit like an apostrophe, or a particularly cartoony lowercase B, depending on how you oriented it.

Hadn't tried a shape like that before.

Could be something, but how would he attach it?

Pictured people sitting in a cart the shape of that piece of wood.

He picked up a metal rod and placed it to one side behind the imagined backs of the imagined people.

That wasn't anything.

That was just another affairs.

Put the rod on the top, and the cart would swing about a bit.

But so what?

That had been done.

But then a light bulb went off.

One of those blinking carnival light bulbs.

Maybe one that's fritzing out a bit, maybe making you worry that maybe the carnies aren't really keeping up with maintenance like they should at this carnival.

Anyway, Joe Brown has an idea.

He drills a hole in the plywood, just a bit off center, puts the rod through the board and holds onto each end of the rod, and starts to move the model up and around through space.

This was something.

This one was different.

Harold Chance first found business success helping people take it easy.

In the middle of the 1960s, he was America's foremost manufacturer of miniature railroads.

The tiny engines that pull tiny cars filled with passengers big and small slowly around amusement parks, public gardens, and the occasional sprawling estate.

But he was born Harold Chance, and one does not waste a last name like that playing it safe all the time.

So he bet on excitement.

He purchased the patent for a ride called the Trabant.

It was his company's first foray into thrill rides.

Looked a bit like a teetering roulette wheel that spins and rocks up and down and thrills or nauseates depending on the rider.

And it was a huge moneymaker.

Thanks in large part to Harold Chance's first major contribution to the history of amusements.

He figured out a way to build the Trabant, sometimes branded as the Wipeout or the Mexican hat.

He figured out a way to build that ride such that it could be easily disassembled and put onto the back of a single flatbed truck.

And so now he didn't just have an exciting ride that he could sell to amusement parks, but one he could sell to folks who ran traveling carnivals, who can now take the Trabant with them as they went from town to town.

The one truck ride.

It was a revolution in the business of things that make lots of revolutions.

So he was very excited to hear that Joe Brown, his plant manager and primary ride designer, had a new one-truck ride to show him.

There is an interview that Harold Chant sat for not long before his death in 2010 at the age of 88.

In it, he remembers the first day he encountered Brown's new ride.

The day that would change his life.

He is pretty nonchalant about it.

He says as the founder of the company, he had to be the first person to test it out.

He kind of shrugs and says he wouldn't build anything he wouldn't ride.

But was he that nonchalant at the time?

On that day in 1968, when he first took in the sight of the zipper, rising 57 feet off the ground, a long oblong tower that spins in its center like a Ferris wheel.

But along its edge run parallel cables that pull a dozen cars carrying two passengers each around that tower, as it turns in the opposite direction.

And the cars are attached, like Joe Brown's original plywood apostrophes, a bit off-center.

So they wobble as they hang there as the ride is loading.

Rocking back and forth as anxious passengers adjust in their seats and wait for the ride to start spinning.

Spinning in three directions at once.

The tower turning at the center, the carts going around that tower, then each of those carts tumbling and flipping as they go up and over and around and around.

Harold Chance hopped in.

Strapped in.

And off he went.

The tower whipping around, the carts zipping about the tower, as the whole thing is whipping around.

Those carts tumbling, going around and around.

Harold Chance's little apostrophe cart almost flipping over with all that whipping and zipping.

The thing was fast.

It was scary.

And it was going to be huge.

Never again did anyone ride the zipper the way that Harold Chance did that day.

Turns out that the next time they tested it, they loaded the passenger seats with passenger-sized sandbags and belted them in and turned on the zipper and it zipped and whipped and the cars flipped and the zipper flung those pretend passengers out to smash down in in a cloud of sand when they hit the concrete.

So they installed a metal cage around each of the carts and the zipper went on sale.

It was a sensation.

The carnival operators loved it.

One truck, two carneys, two hours, and the zipper would be up and running.

It was new, it was flashy, and it was tall.

It could be seen for miles, blinking above the treetops or a glow in the fog by the shore.

And it was loud.

Not the ride itself, that was just the typical generator hum.

It was the screams.

A siren call across the dirt parking lot.

Teens running to try this new monster.

Little kids gawking, wondering if they would be that brave one day.

Older folks wondering at the way that summers just seemed to slip away.

Carneys love the zipper too.

Because an off-label benefit of all that flipping and spinning was stuff would just rain out of the passengers' pockets as they tumbled through the air.

Put up the sign that says the management isn't responsible for lost articles, and the Carneys could just rake it in at the end of the night, change by the cupful, lost wallets.

This became such an added attraction for the Carneys that the folks back at Chance Rides actually changed the spacing in the mesh in the cages so it was big enough to allow coins up to a silver dollar size to slip through.

But for the riders, it was probably worth it.

To say you had dared to ride the zipper.

To have managed to hold on to your lunch, if not your lunch money, to have defied death.

But not everybody did.

By the late 1970s, there were 93 zippers operating around North America.

Thousands of people riding them each day and night during the fleeting summer carnival season.

A handful of those riders died.

After two girls were thrown from two separate rides, one in Arizona, one in Pennsylvania, and killed two weeks apart in the summer of 1977, a congressman tried to ban the zipper.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission sought an injunction to shut down the ride until a task force, eventually led by the mother of one of those girls, made sure it wouldn't happen again.

And thanks in large part to her effort,

the zipper still rises above fields and clearings and church parking lots each summer,

as it has for more than 50 summers.

Even as time marches on, as roller coasters get wilder and wilder, adding new thrills, new twists on twists.

The zipper endures.

It is safer now, with latches and locks that can't as easily come undone.

The whole ride spins more slowly than it used to.

But it still terrifies.

The newspaper stories about injuries and deaths, about a possible ban, made the zipper into something of a legend, added to its allure to the kids staring up.

Maybe thankful that they weren't this tall yet to ride the ride.

Not this summer.

Maybe wondering the whole next year whether they could really do it.

For the teenagers high-fiving, jumping up and down in the Midway Lights, having conquered it.

Swearing they weren't scared at all.

You were screaming, they weren't screaming.

To the dad, wobbling away, having kept a promise, maybe needing to sit down for a minute, but having made a memory that will last a lifetime.

There is still some summer left.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in the summer of 2024.

This show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

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