We explore Valleyfair Amusement Park's transformation and growth that has spanned nearly fifty years. Long time employees Tip Harrison and Tom Suel offer unique insights into the behind-the-scenes hustle during the early years, the change in ownership, and the relentless ambition to keep adding new attractions including the game-changer Wild Thing roller coaster that continues to be a crowd favorite today.
Valleyfair
Experience Rochester, MN
We explore Valleyfair Amusement Park's transformation and growth that has spanned nearly fifty years. Long time employees Tip Harrison and Tom Suel offer unique insights into the behind-the-scenes hustle during the early years, the change in ownership, and the relentless ambition to keep adding new attractions including the game-changer Wild Thing roller coaster that continues to be a crowd favorite today.
Valleyfair
Experience Rochester, MN
The Growing Destinations podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Learn more about Minnesota's third largest city, which is home to Mayo Clinic and features wonderful recreational and entertainment opportunities, by visiting experiencerochestermncom.
Speaker 2:At the time I think there were only six or seven of those coasters built. So when we got in on the cutting edge like that, it was pretty amazing for a park this size to get a coaster that big when people were not doing 200-foot coasters.
Speaker 3:So manufacturers didn't think they were going to be able to finish the trains in time to ship and make opening day. We went into serious negotiations on how we were still going to make the right day and the first train was delivered one card at a time in a fresh produce flight at a San Jose.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast, where we take a deep dive into destination development and focus on a wide range of topics from tourism and entertainment to economic development and entrepreneurism and much more. I'm your host, bill Vaughn Bank. We're on location at Valley Fair Amusement Park in Shakopee, minnesota. For nearly 50 years, this major attraction has been thrilling families from across the Midwest and Canada. Today, I'm joined by two people who have been involved with building and growing Valley Fair from the beginning. Tip Harrison was one of the park's first employees before it even opened. Tom Sewell wasn't too far behind greeting guests during Valley Fair's opening season. Tip Harrison, tom Sewell welcome to the Growing Destinations podcast. Well, thanks very much for having us.
Speaker 3:Yeah thanks, Bill.
Speaker 1:This is a bit of old home week because I was also part of Valley Fair back in the early 2000s. I was a short timer. You both have been long timers Tip, retired over the past couple of years. Tom's still here. Before we dig deep into Valley Fair's history, love to learn a little bit about both of you and your journey to Valley Fair, tip.
Speaker 3:I started out in a business at the World's Fair in 74. When that ended I thought I was done with the amusement business. About a couple months after I left and went back home on East Coast I got a call from my old boss who offered me a job setting up rides at various parks around the country. I took that for a while and ended up up in Canada working for him at a little place called Wasega Beach up on the Georgian Bay in Ontario. He was the one who got the original job offer for Valley Fair and I just came as part of the package.
Speaker 1:What year was that?
Speaker 3:That was 1975.
Speaker 1:You were one of the first employees.
Speaker 3:Yes, number 15, if I remember correctly, Tom you weren't too far behind Tip.
Speaker 1:You started actually the year Valley Fair open. Tip started prior to that and helped kind of build get the park ready to open. You started 1976, correct 1976.
Speaker 2:I started a summer job in the games department. I was just looking for seasonal work, something to do. I worked in games for two years and then I moved into the maintenance department in the spring of 1978.
Speaker 1:You and Tip together for decades, worked together in the maintenance department All those years. Tip, we're going to start with you, because you started first and you were involved in prior to the park opening and helping to build some of the rides and get it ready for the inaugural year. Take us back to really the beginning and you, starting here, and you can even share the perspective on why Valley Fair and Shakopee.
Speaker 3:Let's see. I guess the actual start of the park and of course some of this is shared here say because I knew all the original people that developed it. The reason for Shakopee was because of a real estate man that worked for ideas at the time and his assignment was the industrial park property down here in Shakopee, across the street as well, and he came up with the crazy idea of what to do with this property, which didn't have a good industrial use because it was in a floodplain. So he contacted Fred Pierce, who was the owner of Excelsior Park they were winding down in those years and about to close and asked him to put up the original money for a feasibility study for an amusement park here. And then, after working on it for a little while, he decided to leave ideas and turn the file over to Dave Sherman and Walt Whitmer, the two people that did actually follow through and do the development in the amusement park. So it wasn't anything magic about the property other than it couldn't really be useful for anything else.
Speaker 1:You came in 75. What was your role? And take us into the opening season.
Speaker 3:I came down with Don O'Sickey, my original boss, and acted as his assistant manager. He was the original manager of maintenance and I could go on forever on what we did, because when we got here, it was a field and I actually had my doubts, to be honest, because they said we want to open in May. This was October. Anything built, yet the only thing standing was the shell of the warehouse.
Speaker 1:So no roller coaster, no carousel.
Speaker 3:There were a few footings in to build the roller coasters on top of, but none of the rides. There was a couple building shells and I just thought that's terribly ambitious, based on what I know about the park business. But then he insisted it could be done and when my boss talked to her with me he said what's your opinion? I said well, got no place else to be, let's give her a try. So we hung around and sure as heck. The following May the place did open.
Speaker 1:That would be a precursor to future growth of Valley Fair. Short timelines, but being able to pull off amazing work. Tom, you started in the games area in 1976. Take us back to the inaugural year of Valley Fair in your perspective being a frontline employee.
Speaker 2:When I started games back then there it was so new, not many rules, and it was. It was like a family out there. Everybody just was out having a really good time, and so we got to know a lot, a lot of different people out there. We just, yeah, like I said, we just had a lot of fun there.
Speaker 1:And back then it was not a mature site in terms of trees and shrubs, it was. It was pretty barren.
Speaker 2:There was very little for trees out here. I remember when antiques used to be in the front of the park and there were no trees out there, and now it's just covered with trees and stuff. So there there is a big difference. It was pretty barren, as Tiff said, it was very barren in first several years.
Speaker 1:Opened with 20 rides and attractions. Tiff aside from a short timeframe, what were some of the biggest challenges you face getting ready to open?
Speaker 3:First exposure to a Minnesota winner was pretty challenging, because even with a tight schedule, you were still canceled out for a good month during the worst of the weather. We were a small startup company then, so budgets were extremely tight. So it's it's easy to accelerate things if you have unlimited finances, but that wasn't the case. Everything had to be done the hard way. As far as other challenges, those were probably the worst. We had good people to work with. We had great contractors, so as long as weather led us and the budget allowed it, we pulled it off.
Speaker 1:Tom, some myth-busting here. Tip had mentioned Excelsior amusement park was winding down Before Valley Fair opened. There's always this, this, these myths out there, or these people who think the high roller, which was the original roller coaster that opened in 1976 here at Valley Fair, everybody thought it came from Excelsior amusement park once and for all, did it or didn't it?
Speaker 2:You know we still get that question on a regular basis and it did not come from Excelsior. The high roller was built as as a new roller coaster when they put it in here at Valley Fair, but there is a ride here from Excelsior amusement park. Yes, there is the carousels from right at the front of the park. Correct, it's a beautiful carousel. It is. It's been refurbished the last several years and it's yeah, it's still in great shape.
Speaker 1:After two operating years, 76 77, cedar point amusement park out of Sandusky, ohio, acquired Valley Fair. Was that always the plan tip?
Speaker 3:Not as far as I know. I know it wasn't the plan of my immediate boss, the vice president, maintenance and construction, walt Whitmer. In fact when he got the news he was kind of surprised. I didn't know if he got pushed forward by the CEO or by the investor side the investors. It may have been their intention after it was up and running to go ahead and make a Fast exit, but I know my boss planned on staying for quite a while and was shocked when the decision was made.
Speaker 1:So you have cedar point and you have Valley Fair. You have the cedar from cedar point and the fair from Valley Fair created cedar fair Limited, which then became the corporation which would not only have two amusement parks but eventually expand to many regional parks, tom correct, that is correct. How did you approach the balancing between preserving Valley Fair's classic charm from the early days While introducing new attractions and technologies and, ultimately, greater growth?
Speaker 2:But yeah, that that could be a tough one. Looking at different areas of the park and you want to make sure everything fits in and you don't want a short-term vision here. You have to think about what's this going to look like down the road in five, ten, twenty years from now? And you know a big thing is always like vegetation trees. Trees are a big thing. People never plan what this tree is gonna Look like in 20 years, to how big it's gonna get. So it all ties into when you're developing a new area and stuff, along with traffic patterns and everything else.
Speaker 3:There was an adjustment period to start reconciling the two design philosophies. Cedar Point was more or less an old-fashioned amusement park, valley Fair and the original theme of the park was modeled after the old trolley parks which were the original amusement parks in America. People would go out to the end of a trolley line, buy-up property, put up a park in the beginning. That's what excels here was so. That's why they carried the theme over here and tried to make it as much turn of the century as they could. So the shift has been Gradual over all these years because of course the new home office was more standard amusement park. They didn't try and change it all once, it just Gradually evolved over the years to be like.
Speaker 3:It is now a little less of the old, little more than new and is you think about new when you Fast forward to 1996?
Speaker 1:I remember that so well. I certainly didn't work here at that time, but everybody knew Valley Fair back then because of a new roller coaster, a hyper coaster Called Wild Thing. That really changed the trajectory of Valley Fair.
Speaker 3:Walk us through the building of the coaster and its opening year tip that was probably the park's most challenging year, I'd say for our department, tom is. Originally the project was slated to go out at another park, darning Park.
Speaker 3:Out on the East Coast right in Pennsylvania and they had ample time to do planning design and they couldn't get through their permit process in a timely fashion with the local city. Once the contract was signed for the coaster, it couldn't be cancelled or postponed without penalties. I so they said at the last minute we'll just shift gears and put it at Valley Fair.
Speaker 1:Because Dornie Park was a sister park.
Speaker 3:Right, and once they did that, normally you want one to two years to work on a project of that magnitude, all the way from the design phase, the engineering phase locally, and then the construction phase, of course, keeping in mind we have a real short construction season here and it was given to us, I believe, in October or no, it was August of the year before it was to open. So we had about nine months to do a two-year project and everybody pulled it together.
Speaker 1:Tom, talk us through that. You're shaking your head.
Speaker 2:It was crazy. It was such a compressed timeframe that it was probably the most challenging project ever been involved in. But like everybody has to pull together to make this thing work and it did. It was behind. People don't know or realize. I think that all the structure was built down in Wisconsin by Manstead Steel and stuff and shipped up here, because a lot of that didn't make sense to build in California and then ship it all the way out here and stuff. But we did all the painting on site and so we had to build temporary paint booths and the winter up here is obviously very, very difficult and stuff. But we had some excellent contractors and the organization here. To keep it rolling and keep it on schedule was extremely challenging, but it was also very rewarding when you saw that train going around the track for the first time.
Speaker 1:Almost like a design-build project.
Speaker 3:All of it was happening simultaneously as they had a rough design. The finished design was probably finished after the fabrication began, with little adjustments made along the way. To give you an idea of how tight the schedule was is a manufacturer didn't think they were going to be able to finish the trains in time to ship and make opening day. We went into serious negotiations on how we were still going to make the right day and the first train was delivered one card at a time in a fresh produce flight at a San Jose and otherwise, if we had to wait for the truck, the ride would open to weekly. Made it on time.
Speaker 1:Yes, it did. This was, I believe, a $10 million coaster, pretty significant investment at that time, considering the cost to open valley fare in 76 was about $7.5 million.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a huge investment that they made in this park and, um, but yeah, they like say it paid off and at the time there I think there are only six or seven of those coasters built. So when, when we got in on the on the cutting edge, like that it was it was pretty amazing for a park this size to get a coaster that big when people are not doing 200 foot coasters.
Speaker 1:And that was a game changer from a business standpoint for Valley Fair.
Speaker 3:It was. I'm I'm not sure if we would have gotten the coaster if it hadn't been for, uh, the local city at Dorney tying up their permit and then being stuck with that decision on. We've committed the dollars. It's got to go somewhere because we're not getting them back.
Speaker 1:And it wasn't just a one year lift in terms of attendance and positive business for the park. I mean, it was multiple years, oh, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And that that coaster people just love them to kept coming back and coming back. And it is, it is, it is a great ride.
Speaker 1:Why do you think Wild Thing is still so popular after all these years?
Speaker 2:Well, I think part of that you know the original design was is somewhat of a family coaster in. In respect to that, all age groups can ride it from, you know, from young to older and stuff, and it's such a smooth coaster too. They just they did a great job on on the design and stuff of the ride.
Speaker 1:Speaking of design, and I'm I'm thinking about design of the park. We talked about that a little bit earlier, but one of the great things about Valley Fair, first of all, is the skyline today it's very picturesque, but also the landscaping within the park. It's beautiful. And that that just doesn't happen and there's dollars involved in making a park look like that.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of dollars involved, but it really comes down to creativity of the people working in in landscape as well, and we do all the design and all the plantings. Everything is in house. We go to several different greenhouses to supply us with the different materials, but landscaping has been just a huge part of the development of this, of this property. Keith Kratz and Scott McKenzie are are our landscapers and they've both been here for well if I got at least 30 years and stuff and you know they know their job and they just do a great job of it.
Speaker 1:And longevity among employees, well, especially in maintenance.
Speaker 3:I was going to say I can't think of two better people to work for than Tom and myself.
Speaker 1:The park would continue to grow with additional coasters, new theming with the Penance Gang and an expanded water park Plus. Cedar Fair, as a company grew a lot 11 regional amusement parks today with four water parks tip along the way. What were the growing pains Valley Fair experienced?
Speaker 3:They weren't terrible In the early days. There was probably some cultural differences that had to be reconciled, which happens anytime one company takes over another. Cedar Point was very old, established company and people had their habits and we were still a young entrepreneurial company, which always takes a while to iron out. But on the plus side, being taken over by a larger park like that, it expanded our possibilities and opportunities because of additional funding and everything wasn't is critical anymore. If there was a bad year, you were owned by a company that was so big that they could absorb it, and then it still wouldn't interfere with your future expansion plans and your opportunity at larger rides in order to grow the park, which obviously it did, Tom.
Speaker 1:Valley Fair is closing in on 50 years. Let's talk about the here and now a little bit, but I guess we maybe should identify the fact that Valley Fair is kind of rebounding from COVID. Tell us about the impact COVID had on the amusement park.
Speaker 2:Oh, this industry took huge hits. I mean from small parks to large parks and in 20,. We didn't know in the spring if we're gonna open or not, and it was obviously decided with a lot of businesses that we were not gonna open, and so but I just can't say enough about Cedar Fair keeping all the employees working all summer when you don't have any business coming in. From a maintenance perspective, we had a lot of projects going on in the spring. We had a lot of buildings for building and so, even though we had shut down, we had to keep working to get these buildings finished or at least sealed up, and then, throughout the summer, when we're working, gave us the opportunity to do some long-term maintenance projects. That helped us get caught up in a number of different areas.
Speaker 1:Looking ahead, what do you envision for the future of Valley Fair and how do you hope to see the park continue to evolve and thrive?
Speaker 2:We're doing a lot of different things. Past years we've had carnival in here, we're doing a tricks and treats for a fall events and we're really expanding out of the shows and attractions throughout the summer. And now I think we're also looking at the future, growth and reevaluating a lot of what used to be the status quo and things have changed a lot in this industry, so you have to look at it differently. But I think the future is just going to be bright and I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:Combined, you both have spent nearly 80 years building.
Speaker 3:Valley Fair. Sorry to share that news. Let us fear through my heart.
Speaker 1:Can you both share some of your favorite memories? You have so much time spent here, tim.
Speaker 3:I easily go back to the wild thing. You think that's a lot of people's favorites. It was most challenging and the biggest emotional payoff when the ride opened on time and on budget, I might add.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think over the years. The other thing that my first thought comes around to is all the different people I've worked with here and how many are still here and they're good friends. But it really does come down to the people and their commitment and everything else and they've had to make a lot of commitments and a lot of sacrifices. It can be a challenging business but it's also rewarding. I agree 96 with the wild thing was the most difficult year just because of the schedule and the timeframe we had to get it done. But again it was very rewarding and stuff. But we've had a lot of good people here.
Speaker 1:As a former employee, I have many fond memories here too. I won't share all of them. We did a lot of great promotions, a lot of those thanks to the maintenance department, but I think the one that stands out the most is Extreme Swing. When you completed that ride, had a schedule and decided you wanted to test it in the winter and we decided to turn that into a promotion and put Santa Claus and a few elves on the ride in mid-December. That was just a home run and that made national news and it was just the coolest thing, because Valley Fair is obviously known for being a summer attraction, not a winter attraction, and opening that ride and turning it on in December was pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Well, that's not a decision the maintenance department would have made.
Speaker 3:Well, you honored it Well it kind of showed off a little once in a while.
Speaker 1:Well, it did help sell some additional season passes for the holidays. This has been a fascinating conversation, learning the history of Valley Fair, the challenges, but also the opportunities and the great successes that you both have had. And, I might add, valley Fair is a big amusement park for this area and also an economic driver for Minnesota. So I want to thank Tip Harrison and I want to thank Tom Sewell for being our guests on the Growing Destinations podcast. Thank you, bill. Thank you, thank you for tuning in to the Growing Destinations podcast and don't forget to subscribe. This podcast is brought to you by Experience Rochester. Find out more about Rochester, minnesota and its growing arts and culture scene, its international culinary flavors and award-winning craft beer by visiting ExperienceRochesterMNcom.