By Jim Futrell The late 1960s were not a good time for traditional amusement park attractions. With the industry’s attention focused on theme parks, features typically associated with traditional amusement parks were considered passé and too old fashioned for a new and sophisticated generation of customers. Foremost on this list was the wooden roller coaster, a ride that theme park developers could not figure out how to adapt into a heavily themed environment. They were content to continue building tubular steel coasters that could be themed as Runaway Mine Trains or Matterhorn-style rides. As a result, construction of wooden coasters had slowed to a trickle with just one or two rides opening annually at the few traditional amusement parks that were healthy enough to add large attractions. By 1968, construction had all but ceased. The outlook was bleak, but Taft Broadcasting, which was in the process of relocating Coney Island in Cincinnati to a new theme park, Kings Island, wanted a wooden roller coaster for its new park. They chose the Philadelphia Toboggan Company (PTC) as a supplier—not only because Coney Island had been a regular customer since the 1920s, but also because PTC’s head designer, John Allen, was the only wooden roller coaster designer left in the country. John Allen was the last of the old-time coaster designers who learned the trade from his predecessors, relying on engineering basics and gut feelings rather than complex computer models. Sharp Twists and Turns Born on May 21, 1907, Allen had planned a career in engineering, but was sidetracked when a professor at Philadelphia’s Drexel University told him he did not have the right acumen for the profession and should become a salesman. That conversation led to a career in radio and sound amplification, where his employer shared a building with PTC, then the world’s leading manufacturer of amusement park rides. In 1929, Allen’s company received a contract from PTC to install a sound system in a new funhouse it was building. Within a year, Allen found himself working for the company. At the time, PTC operated many of the rides it built at amusement parks, so Allen moved up to Holyoke, Mass., in 1934 to run PTC’s roller coaster at Mountain Park. This gave him the perfect opportunity to carefully study the ride and learn all the intricacies of a roller coaster. The following year, he moved back to Philadelphia, where he became PTC’s production manager, working under the legendary designer Herbert Schmeck. At the time, PTC could fully outfit an amusement park, constructing mill chutes, old mills, fun houses, dark ride stunts, playground equipment, and buildings in addition to its specialties—roller coasters and carousels. As a result, Allen was able to quickly learn about all facets of the business and soon found himself as the company’s chief troubleshooter. After leaving the company briefly during World War II, Allen returned in the late 1940s and helped Schmeck design many of the company’s products, including the Comet at Crystal Beach in Ontario, Canada (now at Great Escape in Lake George, N.Y.) in 1947, and the Roller Coaster at Joyland in Wichita, Kans. in 1949. In 1953, Allen even designed a device at a local golf course to haul golfers up a 280-foot hill. He learned Schmeck’s design style, which emphasized large high-profile rides, speed, and airtime rather than the lateral forces that were popular on many roller coasters from the pre-war era. Allen emerged as a rising star in the company. When Schmeck retired in late 1953, Allen succeeded him as president. By that time, PTC was struggling to survive in a changing industry. With the popularity of traditional amusement parks waning as a result of urban decay and aging facilities, demand for products such as carousels, mill chutes, and funhouses evaporated. Allen responded by introducing products like a kiddie car ride and a Crazy Cups spinning ride that PTC could market to kiddielands, the most rapidly growing segment of the industry in the 1950s. PTC also relied on sales of Skee Ball machines, a product line acquired from Wurlitzer in the early 1940s. Allen took charge of coaster designs in 1954 and continued to market them to parks. A year later he sold his first three designs—identical junior-sized rides for Zoo Amusement Park in Powell, Ohio (now Wyandot Lake); Angela Park in Drums, Pa.; and Hunt’s Pier in Wildwood N.J., which later became a major customer over the next several years. The Sky’s the Limit In 1960, Allen designed his first major roller coaster, the Skyliner at Roseland Park in Canandaigua, N.Y., which PTC operated as a concession for a number of years. Even more innovative was the construction of the Gold Nugget that same year; a specialized dark ride at Hunt’s Pier. Allen developed a tire-based drive system to propel the cars through the ride. Unique at the time, it is now a common way to propel roller coaster cars through the station. Allen spent much of the 1960s developing new ways to more efficiently operate roller coasters. He perfected the articulated roller coaster train chassis in the mid-1960s, allowing trains to negotiate curves with less wear and tear. In the late 1960s, Allen proposed building a roller coaster at Dorney Park in Allentown, Pa. that would use a catapult system. Though the ride was never built, it foreshadowed today’s launch coasters. Throughout the 1960s, demand for PTC’s roller coasters was minimal but relatively steady, and Allen managed to design one or two a year. The company also supported itself by selling Skee Ball machines and Crazy Cup rides along with the occasional special project, such as the Skua Pirate Ship at Hunt’s Pier in 1963, the last funhouse PTC would build. But the company continued to make changes when it sold the carousel it operated in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park to Cedar Point in 1967, the company exited from the ride operation business. With the roller coaster business declining, Allen began planning his retirement, although his love for the ride kept drawing him back to the drafting table. When in 1968 the Shooting Star at Lakeside Park, Salem, Va., and Zingo at Bell’s Amusement Park, Tulsa, Okla., opened, it appeared that the era of the wooden roller coaster at PTC was over. With demand for wooden roller coasters all but dried up, it seemed a wise decision for Allen, then 60, to retire. In Ohio, the operators of Coney Island had a different idea. The park’s parent company, Taft Broadcasting, was planning to relocate the park from its cramped flood-prone location along the Ohio River to a spacious theme park, Kings Island. Unlike other theme parks of the time, Kings Island’s roots were in a very successful traditional amusement park. As a result, Taft had no reservations about including traditional amusement park attractions. Race to the Finish Once it decided to add a wooden coaster, the park’s next challenge was to convince John Allen to come out of retirement. Gary Wachs, whose family operated the park at the time, recalls the meeting. “We were at the IAAPA convention in Chicago in 1970 and we said, ‘We have the Shooting Star at Coney Island, we don’t want to put the same thing in at Kings Island,’ even though it was a widely popular ride. So we looked back in the history books and we realized no one is building a racing coaster. We said, ‘Let’s go with a racing roller coaster,’ and we got John Allen at the Philadelphia Toboggan,” Wachs says. “There was a bar under the Sherman House [hotel] and we got John down there. He had tried to retire about 58 times and nobody would let him. We got him down there and said we wanted him to build a racing roller coaster. He said ‘You’re crazy, I’m not going to do it.’ We literally threw enough drinks into him and he finally said, ‘Fine, I’ll do it.’” With that, John Allen set out to design a racing coaster for Kings Island. His design style was well suited for the theme park era. Like his mentor’s, it emphasized speed and air time, and resulted in a thrilling ride that appealed to a wide array of riders. The end result was the Racer, which opened on April 29, 1972 as the first new PTC roller coaster in four years, a drought exceeded in length only by the drought that occurred during WWII. Standing 88 feet tall and 3,415 feet long, the twin-track ride was an instant landmark, attracting national media attention, including an August 1972 article in the Wall Street Journal in which Allen described his roller coaster design philosophy. “Doing a roller coaster isn’t complicated,” he said. “They all work on Newton’s laws. It takes guts and stamina and a little psychology. You want to give people as many sensations as possible, high speed, weightlessness, compression.” He also discussed the appeal of roller coasters. “Roller coasters are the poor man’s way of getting to the moon. On a roller coaster, you can experience everything an astronaut does, weightlessness, centrifugal force, speed, and thrills.” People flocked to Kings Island and lined up for hours to ride the Racer. Kings Island proved that people were still longing for traditional thrills, re-igniting demand for wooden roller coasters. Within weeks of the opening of the Racer, Six Flags Over Georgia in Atlanta was in Ohio evaluating the ride and soon signed Allen to design the Great American Scream Machine. It opened in 1973 and was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest roller coaster, standing 105 feet tall and 3,800 feet long. By that time, Allen was slowing down, retiring as PTC’s president, but remaining head designer. In 1976, his last roller coaster, the Screamin’ Eagle at Six Flags St. Louis, opened. It again made the record books, standing 110 feet high and 3,872 feet long, and was cited by Allen as being his favorite roller coaster. Although he designed no more roller coasters, effectively ending PTC’s 72-year coaster design tradition, Allen and the company continued to work on smaller projects. His final project was the launch and braking system for Paramount’s Kings Island’s Beast, which opened in 1979. On August 17, 1979, John Allen died. As other designers moved in to fill the void, they continued to spark the interest in the wooden roller coasters. This peaked in 2000, when 16 wooden roller coasters opened around the world, the largest number since the 1920s. Today, PTC is one of the most enduring manufacturers in the amusement park business. It now concentrates on building roller coaster components and is best known for its roller coaster trains. Allen’s impact on the amusement industry is undisputed. His coaster design style was well suited for family-oriented theme parks and reignited interest in the rides during periods when amusement parks were turning their backs on traditional attractions. But his impact was also felt in smaller ways. He designed systems that simplified the process of operating roller coasters and ultimately made them more reliable: pneumatic braking systems, articulating roller coaster chassis, electronic lap-bar locking systems, and tire-based drive systems. In fact, his contributions were considered so profound that he, one of IAAPA’s original members, was inducted into the association’s Hall of Fame in 1990. Tom Rebbie, president of PTC, agrees. “He kept roller coasters in the public eye and park owners’ minds.” He fondly remembers the times he met Allen. “He was a very intense man, especially when talking about coasters,” Rebbie says, recalling his particular disdain for tubular steel roller coasters. “He told me ‘Those pipes and welds have to be inspected and I don’t know any SOB who is small enough to walk through them.’” Allen also showed little regard for the roller coaster arms race that he helped launch in the 1970s and that continues to this day. He turned down numerous requests to build roller coasters more than 120 feet high and thought that high-speed rides were a waste. “If you go too fast, the mind doesn’t keep up. People get off and say ‘What happened?’” he told the Wall Street Journal in 1972. Rebbie also remembers some advice Allen gave him, when, as a young employee at PTC, he expressed some disappointment in the mundane nature of some of his duties. Allen told him, “No job is ever boring. Make the best of what you do. As long as you do your best, that’s all you can ask for.” John Allen’s Roller Coasters Flyer, Hunt’s Pier, Wildwood, N.J., 1956 (demolished 1989) Roller Coaster, Angela Park, Drums, Pa., 1949 (closed 1989, demolished 1991) Sea Dragon, Wyandot Lake, Powell, Ohio, 1956 (formerly Zoo Amusement Park) Jet Star (a.k.a. Comet, Mighty Lightnin’), Rocky Glen, Moosic, Pa., 1958 (closed 1997) Skyliner, Roseland Park, Canandaigua, N.Y., 1960 (relocated to Lakemont Park, Altoona, Pa., 1985) Tornado, Wedgewood Village, Oklahoma City, Okla., 1961 (relocated to Petticoat Junction, Panama City, Fla., 1969, closed 1984, demolished 1990) Starliner, Miracle Strip Amusement Park, Panama City, Fla., 1963 Mister Twister, Elitch Gardens, Denver, Colo., 1964 (closed 1995, demolished 1999) Blue Streak, Cedar Point, Sandusky, Ohio, 1964 Jetstream, Riverview Park, Chicago, Ill., 1965 (demolished 1967) Swamp Fox, Family Kingdom Myrtle Beach, S.C., 1966 (formerly Grand Strand Amusement Park) Skyliner, Fair Park, Nashville, Tenn., 1966 (demolished 1988) Cannonball, Lake Winnepesaukah, Rossville, Ga., 1967 Shooting Star, Lakeside Park, Salem, Va., 1968 (demolished 1986) Zingo, Bell’s Amusement Park, Tulsa, Okla., 1968 Racer, Paramount’s Kings Island, Kings Island, Ohio, 1972 Beastie (a.k.a. Scooby Doo), Paramount’s Kings Island, Kings Island, Ohio, 1972 Great American Scream Machine, Six Flags Over Georgia, Atlanta, Ga., 1973 Scooby Doo’s Ghoster Coaster, Paramount’s Kings Dominion, Doswell, Va., 1974 Rebel Yell, Paramount’s Kings Dominion, Doswell, Va., 1975 Screamin’ Eagle, Six Flags St. Louis, Eureka, Mo., 1976
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