cj64
The summer after the 11th grade (1963) I got a job at a truly magical place, Six Flags over Texas. In those days it had only been opened about 2 years. It was a theme park, not an amusement park with scary rides. The “six flags” referred to the flags that had flown over Texas during its long history – French, Spanish, Mexican, Texas, the Confederacy, and the US. So, parts of the park were devoted to each of those eras, some more than others. The French section, for example, featured the LaSalle boat ride and Lafitte’s pirate ship, while the Texas section was large and extensive and featured an old West town and railroad depot. The Confederate section looked like plantation houses and was centered on a huge fried chicken restaurant. It also had Skull Island, which was an island with a giant skull. You could slide from the top of the skull out through the skull’s mouth. It had dark pathways around the island and was a great place to take your date. It also had Indian canoe rides. The Mexican section was limited to an El Chico restaurant and the Sombrero ride. Spain had the Log Ride, a fun house where things rolled uphill, and curio shops. The US section, called the Modern section by the park, featured Humble Oil’s Happy Motoring ride and a train depot, plus refreshment stands. There was one more section just past Modern called Boom Town. It had mining town buildings housing souvenir and refreshment stands, plus the Mine Train ride. Tying the park together were the train, that ran the perimeter of the park; and the Astrolift, where you road a suspended bucket from Modern to Texas to see the whole park.
The park was extremely well-managed. Their training was excellent and lasted about 2 days just for the indoctrination. Their overall message – “We have no customers or employees. They are guests, and you are hosts. If you don’t treat them as your guest, we will fire you.” What we learned is that good attitude and good manners can be taught and can become habitual, and pays off with pleased “guests”.
Six Flags had 3 job organizations – Food & Beverage (eating and drink establishments), Operations (the rides), and Maintenance (cleaning and repair). They also had vendor operations, which were outside companies who operated at the park under lease arrangements, such as El Chico or the souvenir hat stands (more about them later).
I was hired into Food & Beverage and spent the summer of 1963 in the popcorn stands at a pay of $1.20 per hour. We had 3 locations you could work at – the big stand with multiple workers serving popcorn and cokes in the Modern section, and one-worker stands in a mining shack in Boom Town, and a vintage popcorn wagon in the Texas section. The latter two were popcorn only, no cokes. Modern was more fun as you could chat with your fellow workers, but the standalones were good for doing some serious thinking if so inclined.
We all wore uniforms. The standard for boys were white shoes, white pants, a blue-and-white or red-and-white striped shirt and white straw hat with a shirt-matching band. Fry cooks and table bussers wore a chef’s smock and hat with the striped design. Operations wore uniforms appropriate for their ride. Maintenance wore yellow shirts with orange pants and hats. The girls wore shirt-waist dresses with pink or blue stripes. I have to add that the girls must have been hired for their good looks. Gosh, they were pretty. Six Flags hired from all over the DFW area, and they were a pleasant bunch to work with.
Six Flags was open on the weekends in the spring and fall, and every day in the summer. In the spring of 1964, my senior year, I worked weekends and that summer bussing tables or as a fry cook in the Depot Café of the Texas section. You worked in shifts – the day from 8-4, or the night from 3-11. The night shift had its benefits as the park was beautiful at night and a little quieter. Sometimes we would organize a party after work and head for Lake Arlington, and some romancing might occur. That summer the Park had arranged for the famed Kilgore Rangerettes (the original drill team) to work at the park. They would perform their routines occasionally in return for park jobs and park-paid accommodations. They were all lookers with loads of personality and fun to work with.
In the summer of 1965 I worked for Howell Instruments. I got the job through Don Pipes’ dad, who was a VP there. It was actually a construction job, as the Howells had bought a beautiful mansion in Rivercrest (built in 1912) and they used Howell workers to do a lot of the tear down. My main job was knocking down a 3-foot thick rock and mortar outer wall. The tool was a 110-pound jackhammer. At the time I weighed about 160 pounds. I would lift that hammer up and stick it against the wall and pull the trigger, then repeat, all day. At the end of the summer the wall was gone and I weighed 180, mostly in my chest and shoulders.
It was back to Six Flags in 1966. This time at the souvenir hat stands. Ken Huddleston got me the job as he had worked there the year before. We sold all kinds of novelty hats and had stands in every section. The fun part was learning how to sew names on the hats. We had a sewing machine that had a rotating handle underneath the counter. You would hold the hat with your left hand and twist and turn it as needed while you were rotating that handle to guide the needle. It required considerable practice to learn and the progress was usually in these stages – 1) you couldn’t do it 2) you could do it but the result was unreadable, and 3) you could do it and the result was OK.
The big test was on a busy day where one guy would man the machine and the other guys would toss the hat to you for name-sewing. They would toss a sailor hat (called “gobs) to you and yell out the name. You would sew it on and toss it back, yelling out the name again. After an hour of this you got good at it, but the first hour was a mess with lots of re-sewing.
We had a lot of fun with this operation, I guess just to keep it light-hearted, such as – the host would ask the name, and the guest would say “Jim”. The host would toss the hat to the guy at the machine and yell out “Jim, G-Y-M”, misspelling it on purpose. The sewer would yell back “G-Y-M” then start sewing J-I-M on the hat and toss it back. All the while the guest is protesting like crazy, until the host handed him the hat and they would grin big time. Sometimes they would keep re-reading the hat to make sure it really was “Jim”.
Also, people were always asking directions, and we noticed they rarely listened to us but would pay a great deal of attention to where we were pointing. So they would ask, “Which way to the Astrolift?”, and we would point in that direction and say “Just past the chyser on the timex!”, or some other nonsense and they would take off happily. It sounds silly now, but it kept our spirits up.
We learned a great deal about people, as individuals and in crowds. For example, most people expected July 4 and Labor Day to be extremely crowded, so they wouldn’t come that day. As a result, July 4 and Labor Day were practically empty. I even went home early one July 4. But, the Sunday before Labor Day was the biggest day of the year and we would extend the park’s hours to a midnight closing to accommodate that crowd.
And, we learned that people were always pleasant if you were pleasant to them. The exceptions were extremely rare.
We had a function at the park that proved to be very much appreciated. It was called Lost Parents. That is where we placed the lost kiddos. The procedure to be followed when a crying child came up to you was to comfort them, pick them up if small, find the nearest security guard (dressed in white pants, blue tunic, and white pith helmet), and turn the child over to them. He would take the child to Lost Parents, located in the headquarters area, where nurses and nannies were waiting to take care of them. The inquiring parents, wherever they showed up, were directed to Lost Parents for the reunion.
Every section of the park had theme music playing in the background over hidden speakers, and it varied by section. In Modern, they played a lot of music from Camelot, for example. In Texas, it might be “The Green Leaves of Summer”, from The Alamo. Wherever and whatever it was, it gave you an opportunity to stop and reflect on the music and recall the memories music always generates in people. It might be quiet where you were, and it was night with a moon and a breeze, a family would stroll by, and one of the pretty girls would walk by in her striped dress, and the music would make you wonder if she was in your future. Magic is like that, and the park could produce it in abundance, but you had to watch for it.
