RIDE OF PASSAGE
Fifty years ago, the Zipper was born — an amusement park revolution for teenaged thrill-seekers. Today, the ride is still a popular bone-shaker, at the CNE and elsewhere. But the summer of 1977 was different — that’s when a U.S. Zipper turned deadly.
Katie Daubs talks to a woman about the most unforgettable ride of her life,
The Zipper has always been a rite of passage, a way of showing the world that not only are you taller than 52 inches, but childhood is someone else’s game. Growing up, I couldn’t wait for my turn at the fall fair, stepping into the cage-like carriage with its cushy vinyl seats, rising slowly into the sky as the cars loaded one by one, waiting for the operator to start the ride. Then, it was two minutes of screaming and spinning, the world a blur of midway lights and AC/DC blaring from the speaker.
The Zipper, which has always behaved like a teenager, turns 50 this year, and the CNE is celebrating a milestone of the ride where “innocence is left behind and the dangerous world of wild abandon is embraced.” Chance Rides, the successor of the original Zipper manufacturer, asked for ideas to honour “our beloved Zipper” on its Facebook page. The response was as strange as the ride itself: operate 50 Zippers together in one location. Offer a 50-minute ride. Fill the Zipper with riders born in 1968.
“We look forward to giving the Zipper its due,” the company posted online. I emailed Chance Rides to find out more about the ride. “My apologies, I am unable to provide any details/information to you regarding the Zipper. Best of luck.”
Curious about the history, I started looking through old newspapers. It didn’t take long to find a more complicated story.
In the1960s, Chance Manufacturing, based in Wichita, Kan., was rising in the attractions game. Richard “Harold” Chance created the company in 1961, building the C.P. Huntington Train, a “premiere scale replica train” that remains a popular way to ferry dozens of people around amusement parks and zoos. In 1968, Chance knew that the industry was going in a different direction. Teenagers liked the feeling of freedom, excitement and power that came with hot rods, jet planes and motorcycles. And they were the ones who spent the money.
“The public demands a good tossing around today,” he told a reporter with the Chicago Daily News in 1968. “You have to treat people as severely as you can without hurting them.”
Chance described some “expertly engineered rides” in the works, including the Swiss Toboggan, the Skydiver and the Zipper.
The Zipper’s inventor was Joseph M. Brown, described as vice-president of engineering for Chance in his 1978 obituary. Brown filed a patent for a “PLURAL HORIZONTAL AXIS ROUNDABOUT HAVING SHEAVE DRIVEN CARRIAGE” in 1969. In the engineering-speak of the application, “riders experience compound rotary movement about a plurality of parallel horizontal axes,” creating “an unusual sensation of being driven in a plurality of directions, though in a single pane, at the same time.”
It was like a ferris wheel on steroids: 12 spinning cars that travelled around a rotating oblong boom, a ride noted for its strong G-forces and chaotic feel. No two rides were the same. In1968, Chance Manufacturing sent19 Zippers into the world to thrill riders alongside midway classics from other manufacturers such as the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Scrambler.
“A mechanical terror designed to disrupt your digestive system,” the Toronto Star said in 1978.
Nothing felt quite like it.
The Bedford County Fair has long been one of the highlights of summer in the small Pennsylvania town. In 1977, Kelly Barron and her friends Kathy, Lisa and Amy were dropped of by their parents on a Friday night in August. They were about to start Grade 10 that year, and they went to the bathroom to comb their hair in case they saw any cute boys. “Typical awkward little girls,” recalls Lisa Frisch (then Lisa Swindell). Trying to be grown-up, interested in fashion and makeup.
The fair smelled like it always did: funnel cake, cotton candy and popcorn mixed with exhaust and oil. Kelly Barron, now 56, says the Zipper was the one they all wanted to ride.
She rode with Amy Gilbert, who she hadn’t seen much that summer. Amy was tall and lean, with brown wavy hair, braces on her top row of teeth, and a smattering of freckles. They boarded around 9 p.m. and Barron remembers the bright lights of a nearby midway attraction advertising dancing women. The Rare Earth song “I Just Want to Celebrate” played on loop.
Barron didn’t know that two sisters had fallen from a Zipper ride six days earlier, at a theme park in Tempe, Ariz., and a 12-year-old girl was dead. It might not have made a difference. “Just being 15, you’re like, well, that happened to somebody else, it wouldn’t happen to me,” she says.
It happened at the part of the ride most Zipper lovers look forward to — when the car gains enough momentum to flip at the top with a burst of speed. That’s when Amy said the door was coming open. Then she was gone.
Barron remembers reaching for the door’s handlebar. “I don’t know whether I jumped on to it, or grabbed on to it just to try to close the door. I don’t know, but she was already out,” she says. “I was able to get myself a few more seconds closer to ground.” Then she fell out, feet first.
“At that moment I felt completely helpless,” she says, noting that she let her body go limp. “I can’t describe that feeling except for maybe Shavasana, in yoga, (where) at the end you let yourself be completely held up by earth. I’m getting a little zen on you, but that’s exactly how it felt, and I didn’t know any of those terms then.”
She landed on her back and tailbone, and she couldn’t see Amy. She didn’t know what had happened to her friend, the aspiring gymnast and drummer in the school band, but “I knew she was worse off than I was.”
She stood up and sat in a chair, not realizing her tailbone was broken. The ambulance took Amy Gilbert away. Barron later learned she died of head injuries. She was still in hospital during the funeral, where the town remembered the 14-year-old who loved horses and her black lab Ebony. She was a fan of Jerry Lewis and Mel Brooks movies, her friend Lisa Frisch remembers, a teenager who thought professional wrestling was hilarious, and listened to “Bohemian Rhapsody” endlessly when it was released in 1975.
State police called it an accident in local coverage afterward. The ride’s 18-yearold operator told police he inserted a safety pin in the door of the cage before the ride began, but the Daily News in Huntingdon, Pa., reported that the pin had “apparently become loose,” and was “later found lying near the base of the machine.” Richard Chance, then president of Chance Manufacturing, told an Allentown newspaper in1978: “Evidently they got in a hurry or something and didn’t close the door (securely) before they started the ride.” At the time, when the doors were closed, a padded lap bar attached to the door came down across the laps of the riders.
Barron didn’t know if any conclusion was reached as to what happened. She “checked out” afterward. “I couldn’t be that involved with it,” she says.
The death in Tempe was also ruled an accident, according to the Arizona Republic newspaper that August. Similarly, a cotter pin “used to secure the car door” was found near the ride. An investigator with the Arizona office of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said he found no evidence of faulty design or maintenance. (In 1980, a jury in that state awarded $1.35 million (U.S.) to the family of the young woman who had died in the Tempe incident, according to the same newspaper.)
In the summer of 1977, everybody was talking about the Zipper. Some said it was more popular than ever.
“Certain people want to say, ‘I rode the ride that is dangerous,’ ” an amusement company manager said at the South Carolina State Fair. “If we thought it was dangerous, we wouldn’t operate it.”
At the Iowa State Fair, a labour department official assured residents the ride was safe. He said “investigators had determined that the two fatal accidents had been caused by operator errors and not faulty equipment.”
Bud Shuster, a Pennsylvania member of Congress, tried to ban the ride. In September1977, the American Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning: “Four deaths and two serious injuries have resulted when the door of the ‘Zipper’ car opened in mid-air causing the victims to fall to the ground.” The commission was seeking an injunction “to prohibit further use of these rides until they are fixed.”
“State and local authorities, as well as the owner operators of these rides, have been notified by the Commission as to the extreme danger these rides present to the public.”
The manufacturer, as well as a group of owner-operators, filed suits in protest, contending that the consumer safety commission had no jurisdiction.
The ban fizzled, but by 1978 the Zipper had an extra latch on the side, in addition to the latch in the front. It was the result of an “unwritten out-of-court settlement” that June, reported the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, Pa.
While the insurance industry inspected rides because “virtually every thrill ride operator has insurance,” the Chicago Tribune noted, safety precautions varied by state. Mary Ellin Gilbert, mother of Amy, was appalled to learn that Pennsylvania was one of the U.S. states that had no regulations for thrill rides. Arizona was another. In 1978, there was an industry-wide effort to draft standards for American rides, and Gilbert joined as a non-industry representative.
“Amy was my youngest child, the joy of my life,” she told the Tribune. “I’ve taken positive action because I know she would have done the same for me.”
Running a safe park has always been paramount to the industry, but the main thrust of the committee was to “raise the bar” and standardize best practices, says engineer Harold Hudson. Hudson spent most of his career with Six Flags and is now a consultant. He has been involved with the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) Committee F24
on Amusement Rides and Devices since 1979, and says there have been other people like Gilbert who joined after an incident involving a loved one.
The group has crafted standards for the industry, including manufacturing, operating and maintenance of rides.
The standards do not have force unless a state adopts them. Hudson estimated that 44 of 50 states have. In Ontario, the Technical Standards and Safety Authority (TSSA) has been regulating rides since 1997. It does not use the American Society standards, but they’re under review for possible adoption.
In 1984, Mary Ellin Gilbert drove to Harrisburg, Pa., in her Volkswagen bug. After years of her lobbying, Pennsylvania was empowering its agriculture department to regulate the industry. She brought along Amy’s friend Lisa, who was now 21. It was a bittersweet, exciting day. The governor gave a short speech about Gilbert’s role in the bill. Then he asked a question.
“Lisa, would you like to hand me the pen?”
The Zipper, its name lit up in familiar cursive on its sparse, spinning frame, has been a mainstay of the CNE for decades. The ride has a cult following. On one Facebook page, fans compare their personal records, and share quips: “This thing will shake the change out of you,” one says. “King of the Midway,” says another.
It was Michael Jackson’s favourite at his Neverland Ranch. He liked its wildness, a former ranch manager told Park World, an industry journal. “Michael liked spinning at the top up to three times if he hit it just right,” Lance Brown said.
“I hold the world record on that ride,” Jackson said in Michael Jackson’s Pri
vate Home Movies, released in 2003. “I went on that for 35 minutes straight.”
The Zipper was absent from the CNE last year. North American Midway Entertainment, the company that provides the midway for the Ex, was considering retiring it. There are only 12 carriages, so there is usually a line. It’s a sign of popularity, but also of its limited capacity.
When Scooter Korek, the company’s VP of client services, mentioned the potential retirement to a reporter at the Stampede in 2017, it became a national news item, and the response was quick. You can’t retire this ride, people told him. So his company sent it back to Kansas for a “complete refurbishment.”
Their Zipper now has new cars with a shoulder harness inside for each rider. (Chance notes that “riders will be more comfortable in the seat” and will “experience greater spin velocity,” and “lowtech redundant safety features will ensure reliable operation.”)
Hudson says after any incident, an operator and the manufacturer will review it in “great detail” to find out why it happened, and what can be done to prevent it.
“I’m sure Chance made some changes at the time of the (1977) accident, and probably made more changes as the standards were developed and new requirements were placed,” he says.
Chance Rides, the current iteration of Chance Manufacturing, did not return an email asking questions about changes made to the ride since 1977, but every industry official contacted by the Star reiterated the rarity of such incidents.
Hudson says the industry has tried to eliminate human error whenever possible, with checks and balances and backup systems. “Operators are still important, but we try to help them out as much as we can with the design of the ride.”
At the CNE, once a rider boards the Zipper, the operator presses the shoulder harness down, where it locks into place depending on the size of the person. When the door closes, the door locks automatically in three places: two locks on the front and one on the side. “It’s going to happen every time,” Korek says. Then the operator pulls on the door to make sure.
“I would put any one of my family members on that ride any day,” Korek says, noting it has been a good, safe ride for his company. “We have some very talented people in our organization, and I trust them emphatically with our safety program.”
In 1977, there were close to 100 Zipper rides in existence, mostly in the U.S. Harold Hudson estimates there are likely 50 to 60 Zippers in operation today.
In 2006, two young women were injured when they were thrown about eight metres from a Zipper in Hinckley, Minn., according to The Associated Press, which noted that the state did not have oversight of carnival ride inspections, but required ride inspections through insurers.
Aspokesperson for the TSSA reported 19 incidents involving a Zipper in Ontario since 2011. They all resulted in nonpermanent injuries, mostly bumps, cuts and bruises. They were all related to user or operator behaviour — not mechanical issues, he noted. In 2005, a mishap grabbed headlines with reports of a boy dangling in the air before he fell into the arms of rescuers at the CNE.
Kathryn Woodcock, a Ryerson engineering professor and director of the school’s THRILL Laboratory, a group that studies how humans interact with rides, said she did not see the 2005 incident, “but from what I understand, one pair of guests had exited, causing the seats to shift due to unbalanced weight. The operator had attempted to level the seats for the remaining two guests to exit more easily, but the wrong button was pressed in error and a team member stepped up to assist the guest to jump out.”
Every summer, she and students in the lab spend time at the CNE. Students come from backgrounds in engineering, occupational health and safety and the creative fields, she notes.
“The students are learning about rides and the industry, which gives them insight into safety in general, or design/ entertainment value,” she writes in an email. “We mainly attend the pre-opening construction week to see the equipment before it gets all decorated and covered in. I encourage them to return during the operation of the show to observe how guests interact with the rides because a ride is the guest’s experience. Until a guest is on it, it’s just a machine.”
Woodcock is involved with a number of industry safety groups, including ASTM Committee F24. She is also on the board of the CNE Association.
She says serious injuries are rare, and Ontario has “multiple layers of highly qualified safety oversight.” The TSSA inspected the Zipper and approved it in mid-August. Woodcock also noted that safety engineers and certified inspectors for both CNE and North American Midway do daily and weekly checks during the fair.
Woodcock sat in the remodelled Zipper before the opening of the CNE to check out the new restraint. She said she probably won’t ride it. (It’s just not for her.) Her favourites are roller coasters and dark rides, she writes in an email. “Whichever one is where I am, I think.”
When Kelly Barron learned about the shoulder harnesses on the Zipper, she sounded relieved.
“That is so good to hear,” she said, from her home in Asheville, N.C.
Every August, she and her friend Kathy, one of the four to ride the Zipper that night, get together. They live close by, and it’s a chance to see each other, remember Amy and that August night in 1977. “It’s still very powerful after all those years.”
Barron goes on rides at Disney World, but not travelling fairs. She thinks there is “too much room for error” when rides are built up and torn down “too quickly.” But she didn’t outlaw the Zipper for her daughter, now 29.
“I didn’t want to put my stuff on her because in some ways I know that there was culpability in it, but it was a freak accident. It wasn’t an accident, it was a freak error,” she says. “I didn’t think that it would happen to my daughter. I don’t think it would happen to me if I had chosen to go on it again.”
Each summer, she sees the Zipper in mall parking lots and carnivals. It always catches her eye.
“It’s the tallest one for sure,” she says, “but also it makes my throat and heart clench up for a second.”
The CNE’s Zipper is next to the Mega Drop and the bumper cars. When Tyler Shepherd and his daughter Tessa-Lyn walk off, he says he loved the ride as a teenager, but it’s “way crazier” now that he’s 43. I wasn’t certain I would go on, but Korek of North American Midway persuades me as we stare up at the orange, green and purple cars spinning in the midday sun.
Bailey James, 13-going-on-14, rides with me. We are first to board.
“Are we supposed to be swaying?” she says at the top, as we wait for the other cars to load.
“Is it OK if my head is moving?” she asks, wondering if the shoulder harness should be snug to her head.
“I had Subway for lunch, but only a few pieces of cheese because I’m lactose.”
Her meal description hangs ominously. But she’s not the type to throw up, she assures me. She is just nervous — her hands are already sweating — so she reads the safety notes inside the car door. She’s from Burk’s Falls. She doesn’t know the people I know there. It was a veggie sub at lunch.
She is going to close her eyes once we start to help control her nerves. When that happens we are strangely quiet, but the first really good spin rips a scream from me.
We’re suspended upside-down at one point looking at the inverted CN Tower through a Plexiglas window. Her eyes are open. We flip again and again and this ride feels much longer than two minutes and I stop myself from swearing, but she can’t help it, and apologizes. Don’t worry. You took the words out of my mouth.
Afterwards, we stand in the midway. Her favourite ride is the Remix, but this is now one of her favourites, too.
“You gotta come on it,” she says to her younger brother, Jesse. “It’s not that scary.”
“The public demands a good tossing around today. You have to treat people as severely as you can without hurting them.” RICHARD CHANCE CREATOR OF CHANCE MANUFACTURING