multiham

Great pictures. Recognized a few people from my days working in games from 83 to 88. Can't say I miss the beautiful green pants and striped shirt we got to wear! Liked the blue ride ops costume better I keep checking the pictures to hopefully find one of me posted. I have NO pictures from my 6 years there! Worked Fascination and the slot machines my first year. Was a runner in the game square for a year. Managed both arcades, Skeeball Barn, Hernando's and the Western area. Finished up my last year and a half as both a Cash control manager and surveillance manager watching the cameras that were installed in most of the games. Still tell stories about my days at GA.

I believe this was pre cage days.

Great site. I worked at Great Adventure from 1983 to 1988. 5 years in Games and 1 year in Rides. Pretty much worked every game in the park at that time. When I was in rides, I mostly worked the Scrambler, Matterhorn, Little Wheel and once in a while Lightning Loops. I remember that since I was not a regular on Lightning Loops, I was only certified to be a loader which was a pretty boring job. My infamous rides moment was when I turned the Little Wheel into a thrill ride! Most of the riders on the Little Wheel were people who were not exactly thrill seekers and were looking for a nice quiet ride to get a view of the park. It was raining one day early in the season and I was working the Little Wheel by myself. When it started to rain, the area supervisor shut down the ride. About an hour later, it had stopped raining and I was told to open the ride again. There were only a couple things you needed to know to operate the ride. First, you had to balance the cars. You had to estimate the weight of the people you put on one section of the wheel and make sure that you loaded the cars directly opposite with about the same amount of weight. Thats why there were colored cars so that I knew if I loaded the yellow cars, I needed to load the blue cars which were exactly opposite on the wheel from the yellow cars. The second thing you needed to do to operate was to get comfortable with the lever that made the wheel turn. If you moved it too quickly it would either start or stop real fast. Took a while to get the feel of it.. The wheel itself was spun by a couple of what looked like car tires turning in opposite directions. The speed of these tires was controlled by the operating lever. Well, no one told me it was a good idea to run the ride without passengers until the tires were dry. So, I load the first 2 or 3 cars with some pretty big guys and gals. Start the ride and the wheel turns so their cars are at or pretty near the top. Now to load the cars at the bottom. Still remember almost 30 years later that I had a group of 5 women who must have been in their 60's or 70's. Thought to myself that the weight distribution wasn't perfect but it was okay. So I loaded them in their cars and turned the wheel on. Wheel starts to move forward and then I hear the loudest, ear piercing noise I've ever heard AND the wheel starts spinning backwards!! What was happening was that the tires driving the wheel were wet AND I had an unbalanced wheel (too much weight near the top). So the wet tires were getting no traction against each other and were spinning the wrong way! You should hear the noise that rubber on rubber makes!! I immediately shut the wheel off and try again. Same thing! Horrible noise and wheel is spinning backwards. Gravity is bringing the heavier guys down and lifting the lighter women up. I've got no control over the ride and the women can tell this. They start screaming, I stop the ride and next thing I know I have the area supervisor there who heard the noise all the way on the other side of our rides area! Guess I was not the first person to do this, but there is no solution other than to let the wheel spin backward until you can get the heavier people to the bottom and off the ride. The whole time the wheel is making this horrible noise. Never felt so bad in my life as I did that day for those woman. I'm pretty sure these women never went on another ride and I'm to blame for that!! Had some great times working there and still tell stories about the park to my friends today! Wish I hadn't thrown away the pictures of me wearing those beautiful green pants and striped shirt that was the "wardrobe" for games. Steve

Awesome picture. One of my absolute favorite places to work in the park! Was the manager here in either 1984 or 1985. I was pretty decent at skeeball. Could consistently hit the 40 ring by knowing where on the side rail to bank the ball off of. Could never nail the 50 consistently. We used to play a lot before the park opened, or after it closed at night. The Video Jukebox in the Skeeball barn and in the arcade by the games square used to make tons of money. I still think about the video jukebox whenever I hear the song Let's Go Crazy by Prince. Think it must have been summer 0f 84 and people would constantly pick this song. Used to be great on Sunday nights when we had to dump the arcade machines. Used to have a red bag that was associated with each game in the arcade. After the park closed on Sunday, we had to walk around and put the corresponding bag in front of each machine. Than we had to open each machine and dump the tokens into the bag. Used to crank up the volume on the video jukebox and play the songs I liked!

Yes they were. As I remember, if a player won on any of the "big" games like Doc's Dime Doozy, they had to sign for the prize. You should have seen some of the bogus names we used to get on those sheets! Seemed like a lot of Looney Tunes characters won the prizes!!

Did I ever hate this game! Two good reasons. Worked in games from 1983 to 1988. When you were new, there were 3 areas no one wanted to work. They were the mini golf course (just sit at a register), the boats over by The Runaway train, and the Shoot out. You would have to stand down there in case anyone needed to break a big bill ($5, $10, $20's) or their game didn't work. They didn't trust you with the keys so you had a refund sheet you had to have the customer sign to give them back their money. Second reason I hated this game is when I got "promoted" to manager in games. Every Sunday night we had to sweep the money from this game. Used to be kinda spooky walking down there when no one is around and a lot of the lights were off. The littlest sound down there used to make me jump!!! You've got to remember these were the days when the park was open to eleven or midnight so I'm down there at 12:30 or 1AM in the morning. Can laugh about it now, but back then, not so much!!!

I worked in games from 1983 to 1988. Used to try them all before the park opened or after it closed. Very rarely was I able to "win". I could stand there all day with the hula hoop and never get it around the square block unless of course I used the full size hula hoops which we only gave out for a little while to get some prizes circulating in the park! I still remember a rainy day in early June where I was managing an area in the games square. Had a bunch of new employees and since there was no one playing any games, had them cleaning up their games, fixing the plush, etc. About 30 minutes after I asked everyone to clean up, I saw a large and growing crowd over at Bowler/Roller. EVERYONE was winning. Turns out my overeager employee had waxed both the bowling balls and the rails!!! Everything looked great, but it was almost impossible to lose as the ball would go over the bump and just spin in the win zone. My supervisor at the time (Mark Kane ) would not allow me to shut the game down until we had given out every prize that was in the stand and on the wall!!