Why I Don't Go to Cedar Point

In the Beginning...

I grew up in Sandusky, Ohio where the Cedar Point amusement park is located. When I was in elementary school, Cedar Point was a sleepy, decaying, Victorian amusement park that had seen better days. All of the rides were old and worn. Gypsies ran all of the games, and different individuals ran each of the food or gift concessions. In fact, one of my uncles had worked for the gypsies as a shill in the 1920's; he walked around the park carrying some of the bigger, better prizes that people could win from the games (at that time the good prizes were Indian blankets), making people think that he had won them so they were more likely to play the games. Of course, he had not won them; he just got paid to carry them around. In fact, people rarely won them because the games were set up so it was almost impossible to win the bigger prizes.

By the time I was in high school, the Cedar Point Company bought the park and started to remodel it. The first thing they did was add the first roller coaster, The Blue Streak, and a few other rides that are still there today. When I was a senior in high school, the park looked a lot like it does today, at least the part where the rides are. The water park didn't exist yet. So the summer after I graduated, I went to work at the Point.

The First Summer

My first job at Cedar Point was as a salesperson for Roose Gifts. I thought this would be a great job because I thought that I would get to stay in the gift shop in the air conditioning. This would have been one of the best jobs at the Point because working in the gift shop was cool, clean, and didn't involve cooking or cleaning anything like the food service jobs did. Was I wrong! Mrs. Roose had a new idea. She had designed a HUGE pushcart filled with shirts and hats and sunglasses which she thought could be pushed around the park, thereby generating more sales, sort of a gift shop on wheels. And lucky me, I was selected to spend the summer pushing this thing.

The first day I set off with a load of sweatshirts (It was 90 degrees; who would buy a sweatshirt?), t-shirts, hats, glasses, stuffed animals, and beach toys. The cart was about the size of a golf cart, and like a golf cart it had an awning from which hung more shirts. Unlike a golf cart, it didn't have a motor, just me. It also didn't have very good visibility because it was hard to tell where I was going when I had to peer through the waving shirts. I went weaving off down the midway, barely avoiding running down heat stupified tourists. I was hot and miserable.

The plan was that I was supposed to position this mobile store at various places in the park during the day, moving from place to place as I saw where there were more people. The first place I parked seemed like a good spot, but nobody bought any shirts, so after a while I decided to move to a better location. But the cart was heavy, and I was small. It wouldn't budge! I pushed and pushed and still nothing! Then I thought maybe pulling might work better, so I gave the handle a good jerk and pulled the cart backwards, right over both of my feet. I broke a toe on each foot. That was my first day.

Later in the summer, as I hobbled after my cart (Mrs. Roose had taken off some of the merchandise so it was easier to push and see where I was going.), I had an even worse experience. I had gotten into the habit of parking by the merry-go-round. Business was ok there and there was usually a breeze from the beach. But today was really hot, probably close to one hundred, and humid, no breeze and hot air rising off the pavement like heat from an oven. Of course, the awning on the cart only covered the shirts, not me, so I had to stand directly in the sun. I remember feeling a little dizzy. Then I woke up on the pavement with feet all around me; suddenly the feet were gone. I had fainted, and while I was on the ground, the tourists had stolen all of my shirts! Needless to say, Mrs. Roose discontinued the pushcart, and I didn't work for Roose gifts the following summer.

The Last Summer

The next summer I worked for food services in a booth near the entrances that sold burgers, fries, hot dogs, and snow cones. It was a better job because I wasn't working alone any more, even if I did have to slave over a hot grill. However, working on the grill was not the worst job in that booth. I dreaded making snow cones. The problem with snow cones was that the syrup dispensers were above my head. I would scoop out the ice, put it in the paper cone, and then hold it in front of me about six inches above eye level to put the sticky syrup over the ice. Sounds simple, but the problem came because the syrup often overflowed the cone, and with the help of gravity, flowed down my arms and inside my shirt. By the end of the day, my arms were coated with a sticky layer of multi-colored syrup, my underarms were glued to my shirt, and I was followed by a flock of flies. I've never felt the same about snow cones since.

The most interesting thing about working near the entrance, however, was that I was able to observe the families as they entered and left. In the morning they were happy and excited. As they left in the evening, I often saw the same families. The children were whining from being overtired, hot, and stuffed with junk food. The parents were angry because they had spent a fortune on rides and other goodies and the kids weren't happy. And now they all had a long, hot car ride home in heavy traffic. Is it any wonder I don't like amusement parks?

The Stress of Going to College

Undergraduate Adventures
(Why I didn't become a high school teacher or a prize winning reporter.)

As I was growing up in Ohio, I was an avid reader and writer. I wanted to go to college, but my family didn't have enough money. Then my grandmother died and left me almost enough money to pay for the four years of school it would take me to get a BA degree. I chose to go to Bowling Green State University (see my link), a school about an hour away from home, not because it had a good reputation (Luckily, it did!), but because my boyfriend went there. When I started college, I thought I was going to be a high school English teacher, so I majored in English education, but my first education course changed my mind. I wanted to teach Shakespeare; the professor wanted me to make sock puppets!

Since sock puppets weren't for me, I changed my major to journalism. I was going to write for big city newspapers! But the journalism program required me to take typing. I didn't want to take typing because I was worried that if I knew how to type someone was sure to make me type, and I was afraid that I might end up as a secretary rather than a teacher or a journalist. So being a very liberated young woman, I refused to take the typing course (which I now regret) and changed my major again. Since neither typing nor making sock puppets was required of English majors, that's what I picked.

As an English major, I spent three years reading great books and writing about them. But then the money started running out. I tried to finish before the money did, and I almost made it. Since I had gone to summer school for two summers and I had almost always taken extra classes during the regular school year, I knew I could finish if I just signed up for 20 hours in my last term.

Bad idea! First, the extra classes took the last of my money, so I couldn't afford to buy all of the books for the classes. I also couldn't afford to pay my gas bill, so the company turned off my gas. Luckily it wasn't cold (It was spring term.), but then I didn't have a stove! I learned that I could cook a lot of things besides popcorn in an electric popcorn popper. But it was very hard to take the classes without reading the books. First I dropped one class, which brought me down to 16 hours. A few days later I dropped another class. Now I was only taking 12 hours, the normal course load. Finally, I decided that since I wasn't going to finish anyway, I might as well quit. I dropped out of college, bought a beat-up Volkswagon van, married my boyfriend, and drove to California. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I spent a few years in San Francisco managing a photography store and hanging out in Golden Gate Park before I decided to go back to school, but that's another story.

Let's Talk About Writing!

Writing in General
Why do people write? To communicate through space and time. That's why writing is so amazing, because it is both space-binding and time-binding. When you talk, you can communicate only with people within earshot, but when you write, you can communicate with people far away (notes, letters, email, blogs, etc.) or even with people in the future (historical documents, old letters, diaries, etc). But there are two problems with writing: 1) unless you are passing notes in class, you don't get the immediate feedback that you do when you talk to someone, and 2) the only way your audience may know you is by your written persona (who you become while writing). Why are these problems? Because if you can't get immediate feedback, you have to anticipate the questions your audience might have to ask to understand what you want to say, and if you have problems writing, you may not be able to express the true you in your persona.

Why Blog?
Blogging is a good way to communicate with a larger audience and for that audience to provide feedback. Blogging is like a sort of online journal which gives you a chance to develop your thoughts and try them out on an audience. Sure, in a journal you usually talk to yourself (unless somebody reads your journal), so blogging is a little different. It also allows you to create a writer's persona because each writer has an individual voice that makes him or her unique. That's why people like to read different authors. If you are a mystery fan, then you know that not all mystery writers sound alike. After you read a few books by one author, you become able to recognize that author's style or voice. So blogging should give you a chance to find your individual writing style or voice. And it's more interesting to try out style and voice on an audience than it is to talk to yourself.

Finding Topics
So what are you going to write about in your blog? That's for you to decide; although if you are having trouble coming up with some ideas, feel free to follow my lead. Some possible topics are about your life, or what you like to do in your spare time (if you have any), or books or movies that you like, or memories you might want to share. Think of blogging as a kind of conversation, and since we are all just getting to know each other, we can talk about some of the things most people talk about when they meet for the first time. So what shall we talk about? It's up to you!

First Entry

Here's to beginning new projects!