Authors note: This blog almost didn't get posted, it is quite personal, as it tells my personal story in many ways, but also tells the story of the website you are now reading which is why I eventually decided to post it. There will be a new blog post over the next one to two days that will review Winterfest, so watch for it soon.
So far, over the last two months we have looked at several Worlds of Fun anniversaries, Mamba’s announcement in September, Zinger’s last ride in October, and even the 15th anniversary of Halloween Haunt. But there is one anniversary we haven’t looked at, and it’s one that even as I write this I have qualms as to whether it really is even appropriate, and that’s the anniversary of the website you are reading from right now, worldsoffun.org, which as of November 2017 celebrates 20 years online. I have decided however to write it, if for no one else but myself. For as you will see worldsoffun.org is more than just a domain, or a history website, of a fan website it really is in many ways the story of my life too, and I feel that in many ways I am forgetting for me, the most important story, which is my own.
I don’t have an exact day for when the website that would become dot org came online, because quite frankly I really don’t remember. At this point in my life I was a Freshman at Northwest Missouri State University, thanks to their “a computer in every room” for the first time in my life I had access to a computer and to the internet. Of course, the internet wasn’t anything like it is today. At that point my then boyfriend, Eric Steffens had been following a kcnet website, which was posting Mamba construction photos. Both of us had worked at Worlds of Fun in 1997, and were planning on going back the next year. So of course, this was exciting stuff. Little did I know then that my boyfriend at the time had inadvertently introduced me to my future husband, who ran that kcnet website, Jeff Mast. Eric had started his own personal Tripod website for the Bearcat Marching Band, which we were also both involved in,, and persuaded me to start my own personal website. Mind you, I had had three months online at this point, absolutely zero website experience, but sure seemed like a good idea. So I did. My Tripod ID I choose was “Padme” the name of the website? “Jennifer’s Nexus”. What was on the page? Three subpage links for BMB, Star Trek Society and a little page with some stuff I had collected on Worlds of Fun history. I called that page “26 Years the History of Worlds of Fun”.
Jeff always remarks to me how were one of the first amusement park fan website out there, and we were, RCDB I think had been online for a year, Ultimate Roller Coaster a few months, and it always makes me wonder what inclined those who run those sites to create their sites? Was there a plan to create these ultimate guides? One thing is certain, I certainly didn’t have one. If you had told me back then, when I was barely 19 years old that twenty years later I would be doing the SAME thing, I would have thought you were out of your mind.
Here is the next funny thing, though I created a little page (that still exists!), for Worlds of Fun history, there really wasn’t a whole lot on it yet. In 1994, I had worked in Ride Operations at the park and become fascinated with the “ride operations” binders at each ride that gave not only operating instructions, but also a short history of each ride too. That interest became an obsession almost a year later when I searched pretty much every Mid-Continent Library branch Vertical File for information on Worlds of Fun and found virtually nothing (this was still when people used encyclopedias…). When we went out to Worlds of Fun for my Senior Trip in 1996, I started recalling the sky ride I rode as a child and even asked, for some reason, The Icicle ambassador if they knew what happened to it, like they would know! So became my goal for finding out IF that ride DID exist, and what it was called. I didn’t find much until late summer of 1996 when my dad took me to the Missouri Valley Room at the Downtown Public Library in Kansas City. I discovered they had a 1973 souvenir map, and there was the name of that ride, it not only HAD existed but had a name “Sky Hi”, I made a black and white photo copy of the map (actually 6-8 different copies that I taped together) and it hung on my door to my bedroom afterwards for many years. Until I finally got my own version of the real thing of course. I found finding the Sky Hi was only the tip of the iceberg, once I knew that I wanted to know even more… and so it began, the endless hours of searching through old Kansas City Star Archives, discovering attractions named Aerodrome and Bicentennial Square.
All of that is why I created the page I did, to put the little that I had found in one place. Of course, like I said it wasn’t much. And it would have stayed an insignificant little Tripod page if it wasn’t for people like me, people fascinated in the parks history just as much as myself, that found it, and I have no idea how they found it. Google didn’t exist then.
Jeff Merritt was one of the first, and I still have his e-mail printed off that he sent me all those years ago that had updates and corrections to my list of defunct rides, that proved such an absolute gold mine at the time to me. I have found with re-discovering history you don’t discover history by following a trail of breadcrumbs, but by trudging through a desert of nothingness until you reach the next oasis of information.
Here is where things get foggy, I know at some point I created a forum, and I know that there were several “regulars” that posted there, even one or two that are still around today! I also know that at some point I went asking for help for the website and I found Matt Laskowski, who would join up and work side by side with me for about ten years. Matt was and is truly one of a kind and without him I don’t think I would still be doing dot org, or that dot org would have even happened at all.
After Matt got involved the whole website took off, the forum, everything. I am pretty sure by the time Matt came on the website was no longer “26 Years the History of Worlds of Fun!” but had changed to the Unofficial Worlds of Fun Website (this is why the blog to this day is UNWOF.blogspot.com). I am also pretty sure Matt came online around the same time the website went from Tripod to its own domain www.worldsoffun.org. I bought it in May 1998, for a cost of $80 (I can’t remember the most basic things but I can remember how much I spent on a domain twenty years ago?!). At this time I was still at Northwest Missouri State, still a Freshman, and spent HOURS, sometimes until sometimes 3 A.M. in the morning with Matt on ICQ building separate webpages for all the both current and past Worlds of Fun attractions. I can still remember finding specific wallpapers and midi music for each attraction! Matt choose a MIDI Toto’s “Africa” for the African page, I will never forget that and every time I hear that song I think of that moment.
And Matt wasn’t alone, many people were involved with worldsoffun.org, all the posters on the forum, many of them I can still remember their names, the several that wrote editorials for the website, Thomas Atchity, Michael Parsons, the latter still has stuck around all these years later. Of course I still welcome anyone that wants to write an editorial but at first it was simply because well I couldn’t write, and my grammar stunk. Well actually, my grammar still stinks (than and then, were and we’re and where… I know…).
For a few years there was even an organization that I started called WOFFA (Worlds of Fun Fanatics Association) that had annual events called “Invasions” at Worlds of Fun, and operated from 1999 until about 2002, which was about the time I started becoming active with ACE or the American Coaster Enthusiasts.
It was probably about this time that Jeff actually became more involved. Prior to this point he had “sorta” been involved, providing some additions and corrections to historical information I had posted but that’s about it. His first thought was that we should make dot org more presentable, and not call ourselves “The Unofficial Worlds of Fun Website” saying that it sounded “unprofessional” and… also involved the name of “Worlds of Fun” which at this point we were trying to avoid. (Worlds of Fun permanent staff weren’t our best buddies at the time…) Sometime around 2000 there was a “group think” session with Jeff, myself, Matt and my dad. It was at this meeting that the UNWOF website became known as “Around the World” and the old blue and white website not only became a black website, but also an access database website. Unfortunately, I have to admit, the black background was my idea. I still to this day have no idea what I was thinking at the time. The “databasing” of the website was probably a better idea and served the website well for the over a decade that it operated. It really allowed dot org to survive many years of minimal updates caused by a variety of different reasons, that usually still revolved around Worlds of Fun.
Here is the funny thing, I can remember the year almost every attraction at Worlds of Fun was added and removed, by memory alone. It’s actually rather sad, but I have to LOOK UP on way back machine what year each re-design happened, because honestly… I can’t remember otherwise.
No story of dot org could be told without also telling about Theme Parks Online and Theme Parks Magazine, both of which were Jeff’s brain children, and while good ideas, they just involved a LOT more time than any of us had, and a lot more money in the case of the magazine. Thanks to Jeff’s layoff from Burns and McDonnell and the valuable stocks that came with it we had more money then we had ever had and probably will EVER have again, but even then it wasn’t enough. It was a failure, but one I am still, believe it or not, glad I did.
By 2005 we were back in good graces with Worlds of Fun again, and though not aware of it at the time about to enter a new time of our lives. Chris Ozimeck, the new head of marketing at the park, who still is an all around great guy, began trying to talk us into being Screamsters in the new Halloweekends event at the park. After coming off a “not so positive” experience with the park PR we weren’t really sure about making the jump back into being Worlds of Fun ambassadors, but figured being a Screamster really wasn’t being a typically WoF ambassador so it wasn’t too far off of a jump. By 2006 though, we had had that thought, and both of us became Worlds of Fun Ambassadors again, myself at Voyager, Jeff at Spinning Dragons. Turns out the five years I worked in ride operations, on Voyager, Mamba, Patriot, Depot and finally Engineer on ELI were one the best times I ever had, and I worked with some amazing folks, many are still friends. In fact, I would have worked there probably several more seasons if I hadn’t been accepted into Penn Valley’s Nursing Program and that began to become my entire life outside of my other full-time job, and ACE, for the next three years.
For three years, though I often thought of worldsoffun.org and tried to visit Worlds of Fun whenever I could (which wasn’t all that often), it really just didn’t make it to the website. I kept most of the details up to date, the timeline, the operating calendar, things like that, but other that that natta. It was during this time though that I fulfilled one of my long time Worlds of Fun visions, and that was to create a Worlds of Fun historical exhibit. Really whenever I come up with project or ideas its primarily because they are things I would myself have geek’d out if someone else had done it before me. I’ll be honest with you and with myself worldsoffun.org has never entirely ceased being my own personal website in which I do things really because I love to do them for myself first.
The first history exhibit was in 2009, but I also came back and both duplicated and improved the thought in 2010 and 2011, and 2013 for the park’s 40th anniversary, we also were slightly involved with Randal Strong-Wallace’s Screams of the Past exhibit at Union Station. My favorite, and my most difficult project to date was of course the 2015 “Worlds of Memories” Exhibit also as part of Randal Strong-Wallace’s endeavor the Model Roller Coaster Museum. Proving that more than one crazy Worlds of Fun geek has followed their dreams of epic proportions that the bank account simply couldn’t afford.
My father who passed in 2011 had a massive impact on dot org, and no story of the website is complete without mentioning his assistance. Besides taking me to the Downtown Library in 1996, he in multiple ways helped host the website at virtually no cost for many, many years. Sadly, it was all that time that we took for granted NOT paying for a hosting service that came back and bit us HARD. When my dad unexpectedly passed away in 2011 (he was only 55) he hadn’t left the login or password to the dot org server to anyone. No one thought about it. However, once that happened no one could login and change anything. I should have realized this was going to be a big problem if we did nothing, but … we did nothing. Here is the thing, it was free, we never received a bill so what was not to like? In 2016 though, as the rest of my life seemed to be either falling apart or drastically changing all at once… (breast cancer… broken hip… moving to Florida…) the website went down one morning. I had to dig up our old contact from my dad’s employer… turns out they were updating the hardware, shut down the old hardware, and guess where we were? Just like that.
In reality, it might have been a blessing in disguise. For years I had grown sick of the black background and the restrictions and problems it created, got tired of the restrictions of the database system, and really wanted to redesign the website, but it had grown into a 25-ton problem, and was very daunting. All the tons of free time I had when I was 19, I lacked almost twenty years later. We handled problems one at a time, found a hosting service that wasn’t too expensive, got the domain registration and renewal taken care of, and attempted to find someone to help me rebuild the website.
At that time and even today I am stuck with me myself and I when it comes to rebuilding dot org. I decided early on that I wanted to pay homage to my “original” (though it wasn’t really original), blue and white color scheme, I also knew that dot org was first and foremost an information depository which meant that being restricted to my incredible lack of website design skill wasn’t going to be a huge impediment. I have tried to find someone to help, but if I had little free time, most people of my age can say the same…
For many years I have created new Worlds of Fun projects, editorials, blogs, YouTube videos, even history exhibits, I have even started recently laboring away on my ultimate goal, which is a book on park history. However, recently I turned forty and I have begun reflecting on my life. Dot org, and Worlds of Fun by default have been a MASSIVE part of my life for a long time. It has 100% been a labor of love, there has been no time I have ever done something for any other reason other than I loved to do it. If no one ever read a blog that I wrote, I probably would still write some of them. It’s a fact I could post a link to my Blogger account and you would see probably about 40-50% of the posts I have written I have never posted. This one almost joined that list too.
Often I have questioned myself why I do continue to do it. Do I do it to make a difference, to help others with their memories, I don’t know. The simplest answer is usually the right one though and for me it comes back to the fact that even though I live in Florida, and have for almost two years now I still love Worlds of Fun, I still fly back to Kansas City JUST to go to Worlds of Fun. There is something special, something I can’t define, that keeps dragging me back to that place, and has been doing so for the last twenty years, and I don’t regret one moment of it.
1 comment:
Just wanted to say, THANK YOU for the great website and history. I am a lifelong WOF fan and WOF unlocked a major passion on my life of theme parks. I've been an avid reader of your site (and blog) for many years, as it is probably the only source for some of the historical information. Just wanted to say thanks.
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