Kings Island opened 50 years ago. Take a look back in time
Kings Island turns 50 this year, which doesn’t seem possible. It’s the new amusement park, the exciting cousin to old Coney Island. It is THE place to be every summer.
Time slips away to riding on the Beast over and over, testing whether the front car or back car has the most exciting trip. Being wholly invested in which train is faster on the Racer – go Red Racer! – or sharing Smurf blue ice cream with a special someone. Every generation has its own Kings Island memories.
The park was a game-changer for Cincinnati, drawing visitors from all over the Midwest. Even the Brady Bunch came to town.
Kings Island will reopen for its 50th anniversary season on April 16, so folks can revisit their favorites and make new memories. A daylong celebration is planned for April 29, the date that the park opened for previews back in 1972. Kings Island’s “Golden Celebration” events will begin May 28.
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From Coney Island to Kings Island
Anything you want to know about Kings Island? It’s probably found in Evan Ponstingle’s thorough history on the subject in “Kings Island: A Ride through Time.” He interviewed just about every principal figure in the creation and development of the park to get the inside scoop.
As Ponstingle lays it out, the origin of Kings Island was the convergence of two ideas at the right time. In the late 1960s, Gary Wachs, son of Coney Island owner Ralph Wachs, was tired of cleaning up the park after the frequent flooding. He dreamed of ways to move and expand old Coney to rival Disneyland and drew up a plan.
Charlie Mechem, then the CEO of Cincinnati-based Taft Broadcasting, had his own idea. The company could promote its Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters in amusement parks, using Disney as a roadmap. He had lunch with Roy Disney, who told him, “You have the finest small amusement park in America right in your backyard, Coney Island!” Go see about working with them, he suggested.
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So, in 1969, Taft and Coney Island announced they were building a new amusement park in Warren County. Taft also purchased Coney for $6.5 million in stock. The old park was to close in 1971, with the new one slated to be ready the year after. The name Kings Island was a tribute to both the location, Kings Mills, and the park’s predecessor, Coney Island.
Lousy weather for the opening
As general manager of the new park, Gary Wachs was in charge of making his idea a reality. He had adapted Disneyland’s hub-and-spoke design into a cloverleaf, with four main "lands": a children’s area, a historic area celebrating Cincinnati’s river heritage, a Coney Island tribute and a European boulevard. That was pretty close to the finished park.
Kings Island opened on time, with a price tag of $31 million (that's $214 million adjusted for inflation into 2022 dollars). Critics questioned whether anyone would pay six dollars to get into the park when Coney Island had been free. To make it worse, a preview opening on April 29, 1972, was dampened by heavy rains.
“Nearly everyone did agree that the park is big and beautiful, with lots of potential,” wrote The Enquirer’s Jim Knippenberg. “And everyone agreed that the weather was lousy. Certainly no kind of a day to open a new amusement park.”
The official grand opening on May 27 – with sunshine, parades and hot air balloons – was better received.
“I was blown away,” said Don Helbig, now the area manager of digital marketing for Kings Island. “When I first walked in, the first memories, you saw the fountain and you saw the buildings going down International Street, the Eiffel Tower, you had the Sky Ride going across in front of it. … As you walked through the front gate, because you couldn’t see it from the outside, it was like you entered a whole new world.”
Three Fs dominate map of the park
The one-third replica of the Eiffel Tower, standing 314 feet tall, was the eye-catching centerpiece of International Street. The boulevard was inspired by Wachs’ trip to Europe and featured what he called the “three Fs”: flags, flowers and fountains.
The Happy Land of Hanna-Barbera was a place for kids to meet their favorite TV cartoon characters, Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear and Fred Flintstone. Even better, they could go into the TV on the Enchanted Voyage, a boat ride similar to It’s a Small World, where they passed through an animated world. Parents were just glad to have air-conditioned relief from the summer heat.
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Rivertown, the homage to Ohio history, featured the timeless Kings Island & Miami Valley Railroad and the Kings Mills Log Flume (which still exists as Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown).
The Oktoberfest area had its own teacup ride with a Germanic twist – Der Spinnen Keggers, aka the drunken barrels.
When Coney Island closed in 1971, most of the rides like the Grand Carousel, Cuddle Up and Tumble Bug were packed up and transported up the highway to the aptly named Old Coney section of Kings Island. So were the midway games. The popular Shooting Star wooden roller coaster was not, though. Wachs decided to build something new.
Kings Island set the trends
Wachs hired venerable coaster designer John C. Allen of the Philadelphia Toboggan Co. to build a side-by-side racing roller coaster they called the Racer. Red and blue trains raced on twin tracks, up and down hills. “There’s been a lot of sensation built into this ride,” Allen told The Enquirer at the time. “We think this is the finest coaster ever built, one of the largest ever built, and certainly the largest we ever built.”
The Racer was the first large-scale coaster built since 1947, and is credited with reigniting the roller coaster renaissance in the 1970s. It made history again in 1982 when one of the trains was reversed and became the first roller coaster to ride backward. (Both trains started going forward again in 2008.)
Another feather in Kings Island’s cap: it was the first amusement park to sell pizza. Really. Gregg Pancero and his father, Jack, handled the pizza concessions at La Fiera Pizzeria on International Street, selling sauce, dough and toppings provided by family friend Buddy LaRosa. The popularity of the pie set a new trend for amusement parks and the shop became an official LaRosa’s franchise.
But it wasn’t cheap. “A modest slice with pepperoni is an outrageous 55 cents, and a whole cheese pizza is $3.60,” the Dayton Daily News complained in 1973.
Partridges, Bradys and Evel Knievel
More than 2 million people visited Kings Island in its first season, which was double Coney Island’s attendance in its final year.
It helped that Taft Broadcasting used its Hollywood connections to promote the park beyond Cincinnati. Most folks remember when “The Brady Bunch” filmed an episode on location in 1973, with the Brady kids riding on the Racer and cutting in line (those weren’t extras in the show, just guests at Kings Island for the day). But “The Partridge Family” beat the Bradys to it. Teen heartthrob David Cassidy and his costars filmed at Kings Island in August 1972.
Dennis Spiegel, the assistant general manager when Kings Island first opened, told Ponstingle he had received a call from someone at WKRC-TV asking if his son could come see the filming. “This little guy was 10 years old, I think, at the time,” Spiegel said. “It was George Clooney! He was running around, getting into everything, messing around.”
That death-defying daredevil Evel Knievel came to Kings Island to perform his most successful jump in 1975. He rode his motorcycle down a launch ramp and soared over 14 Greyhound buses, which got the highest ratings on “ABC’s Wide World of Sports.”
Here comes the Beast
What really put Kings Island on the amusement park map was the arrival of the Beast, the “biggest, baddest, longest, fastest coaster in the world,” in 1979. John Allen, the coaster designer, had retired by then, but he scribbled formulas on the back of a menu for Kings Island engineers Al Collins and Jeff Gramke to design it themselves.
“It was very labor-intensive,” Gramke said. “There were no scientific calculators, no computers. Everything had to be calculated by hand. It didn’t take long to see why John didn’t want to do it.”
They designed the 7,359-foot-long wooden coaster track to interact with the wooded terrain. The tunnels were added because the track needed to go underground for a bit on a dip so the structure didn’t have to be built so tall. The double helixes at the end were to use up the energy accumulated from the two lifts.
The Beast attracts attention from roller coaster enthusiasts all over the world. Even with the loops and thrills of newer rides, such as the giga coaster Orion, the Beast is still the standard. The track is undergoing refurbishment to make the ride smoother in time for the park’s 50th birthday celebration.
Fifty years isn’t what it used to be, a link to a bygone age. Things from 50 years ago don’t seem that old. But a golden anniversary is still a milestone for a park that has created so many memories for so many people.
“I’ve always said, we don’t make hubcaps or bottle caps,” Spiegel said about his years at Kings Island. “What do we do? We don’t pollute the skies, we don’t put pollution in the rivers. What do we do at the end of the day? We make smiles and memories, put smiles on people’s faces.”
Additional sources: Enquirer archive, visitingkingsisland.com.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Kings Island turns 50 years old: History of Cincinnati amusement park
