The $4 million star of the State Fair
Towering ride takes four days to set up, weighs 195 tons
WEST ALLIS – The biggest movable Ferris wheel in the country cost $4 million, requires a small fleet of semi-trucks to haul, and is owned by a third-generation carnival man.
It’s also a premier attraction, for the third year running, at the Wisconsin State Fair.
You can’t miss the thing. It towers 152 feet over South 84th Street and lights up the night like an exploding star.
“I spent 10 years just kind of toying with the idea,” Michael Wood said of his decision to go in with a partner on the purchase of a Lamberink
RL46 Ferris wheel, branded here as the WonderFair Wheel, “doing some homework and probably just trying to get the courage to take the leap of faith and go buy a $4 million ride.”
Wood, 52, is a Michigan State University graduate who got a degree in personnel management and promptly went into the carnival business his grandfather had started in 1946.
“I always say that this isn’t a job, this is a disease,” he said from behind the desk in his mobile office, a 48-foot trailer stationed in the RV camp along the freeway at State Fair Park. “And once you have it you can’t change it.”
Wood’s a carnival lifer. He even met his eventual wife (her family has been in the carnival or circus business for four generations) at the Texas State Fair.
Based in San Antonio, Texas, Wood’s company owns eight rides and works 17 events a year, from February into November. He brought the big wheel here from the Central Florida Fair in Orlando and will be taking it next to the Minnesota State Fair.
The moves are complex, orchestrated affairs.
“The wheel itself takes 12 transport trailers,” he said. “Then we have a single mobile workshop that goes with it and then I have the portable housing that we provide for the workers ’cause we’re moving them from town to town. … So it’s 14 semi-trailers.”
The wheel was made in the Netherlands. European firms make the great majority of the more spectacular rides, Wood said. He believes that’s because blue-collar work and the carnival business are more respected in Europe than they are in the U.S.
“In the United States we’ve spent three generations telling everybody you’ve got to have a college education … so nobody sits around and dreams those kinds of things up anymore,” he said.
Once on site, it takes a crew of 12 about 40 hours to set up the wheel, the collective parts of which weigh 390,000 pounds.
“And we have to pick every piece of it up either by crane or by hand,” Wood said.
The first day’s work involves anchoring the candy-striped, tree-trunk-size poles of the A-frame, raising them and fitting them where they join with the ride’s 9,000-pound axle. For this, Wood always contracts locally for a 200-ton crane and operator.
“It’s right at 600 bucks an hour,” he said of the cost, “so you’re talking $10 a minute.” He used the big crane for 81⁄2 hours here.
On the second day, workers install safety systems and begin assembling the spokes.
“If we have a really good day, we’ll get them all in there,” Wood said. “If we don’t, we’ll get 80% of them in. The (third) day will be the loading station and the gondolas and then the fourth day will be the remainder of the gondolas, the front entry canopy and general cleaning.”
Wood and his partner in ownership, Frank Zaitshik of Wade Shows, had the wheel fitted with 627,000 tiny lightemitting diodes. They can produce 256 colors and be programmed in the sorts of fireworks-like patterns that had two young girls sitting cross-legged along 84th Street outside the Fair Park Thursday night, staring upward.
They weren’t customers at the time, but the wheel is getting plenty. Since 2017, it has brought in nearly 400,000 people a year, Wood said. At the current price, $5 a head, that would come to nearly $2 million in annual gross revenue. The Minnesota State Fair is a big part of that — 121,000 rides last year. The wheel drew 81,000 at last year’s Wisconsin State Fair, and 78,000 in 2017, Wood said.
Ferris wheels date to the 19th century and, most prominently, to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, where 33-year-old engineer George Ferris suggested a giant revolving steel wheel as an answer to the sensation the Eiffel Tower had generated at the 1889 world’s fair in Paris.
A great success, Ferris’ ride spawned a mini-industry. Immense stationary wheels dot tourism locales around the world, rising as high as 550 feet (the High Roller, in Las Vegas), while operators like Wood truck portable versions around the country, assembling and disassembling them at fair sites.
It’s not the kind of dizzying ride that makes you scream, but the attraction seems to endure.
“When you own a Ferris wheel,” Wood said, “here’s what it is — it’s a big rotary observation platform, you know? I don’t know why humankind likes to go up high and look around, but thank God they do because we turned it into a business.”