Orlando, 1977

The formative moment of the American water park was a grand heist. Maybe that’s too strong a term. Maybe “appropriation” is better. Or “enlightened borrowing.” But if you knew George Millay, you knew he wasn’t one for euphemism.

In 1974, Millay, then 45 years old, found himself standing before a swimming pool in Decatur, Alabama. It was 9 p.m. Millay was a large man — “big-boned,” a former colleague said. He had the thick, belly-less form of 1970s NFL linemen and flame-red hair. When he got angry, which was inevitable, his cheeks flushed until they matched it in color.

He had come to Decatur, more than 300 miles away from the Gulf of Mexico, to see the waves. There, Point Mallard Park was using German technology to manufacture 4-foot swells. Visitors were bobbing up and down just as they would in the Gulf. As Millay stood there, he realized that for the landlocked, this wave pool was their Gulf. Why, a man could make a fortune building simulacrums of beaches across America. Years later, Millay recalled to a reporter the words that crept through his head: We’ve got it …

It was the first of many such heists. Millay went to Canada and saw a children’s water playground designed by Eric McMillan. He would need his own version of that, too. On a family road trip through Placerville, California, Millay happened to pass a waterslide, a fast concrete flume that sent kids feetfirst into a pool of dirty water. My god, Millay thought, what a concept this is …

By 1974, the United States was saturated with roller coaster theme parks; various surveys put the number at more than 500. Millay envisioned an alternative — a water park. The set of rides that made up the first Wet ’n Wild were already extant. Millay’s insight was to create a new kind of park by putting them in one place and charging a single admission price. As one magazine would later note, “For most of us, Wet ’n Wild is to waterparks what Disney is to theme parks.”

George Millay, the man who created the water park. Photo courtesy of the University of Central Florida

At first glance, George Millay was an unlikely man to invent a slacker’s paradise. He was ex-Navy, a staunch conservative, a reactionary. “A lot of us thought of him as our General Patton,” said Dick Evans, who worked on an early feasibility study for Wet ’n Wild. Millay kept a carving of Attila the Hun behind his desk. In letters to friends, Millay referred to the Japanese as “Japs” and the Cold War as the “World Bolshevik Expansion.” His birthday was the Fourth of July.

Millay hated long hair. It was the badge of the nitwits who wanted America to lose in Vietnam, a generation that was taking the country straight to hell. In 1974, Millay asked for a meeting with Rolly Crump, the famed Disney Imagineer. “I went over to his condo,” Crump remembered. “It was my beatnik period, and I had a beard and wore a bandanna and had rings all over my fingers. I was walking down the hall. George comes out of the door with a cup of coffee. The first thing he said was, ‘We don’t allow beards in this building.’”

“I said, ‘I’m Rolly Crump.’”

“He said, ‘Oh, god. OK. Get in here!’”

Another time, Millay walked into a bar, sat down, and told the man next to him: “You have a beard. You don’t belong in this restaurant.” The man ignored him. Millay stood up. He warned the man he had been a boxer at UCLA. The man rose, coldcocked Millay, and walked out of the bar. That was George Millay: a man who’d offer to fight on behalf of civility.

Millay could yell. Boy, could he yell. When an employee dared to tell Millay he couldn’t do something, Millay’s cheeks went red and his sonorous voice began to boom. But to reduce Millay to his outbursts was to sell him short. Millay had considerable charm and was known for his enormous generosity among pals and employees. Hours after a tirade, Millay could be found in a bar drinking vodka with the object of his scorn. He believed that the most essential thing two men could do together — other than argue — was to get drunk.

In 1976, Millay was diagnosed with skin cancer. The resulting surgeries chipped away at his face. A doctor removed part of his right ear. The nerves on the right side of Millay’s face were severed, causing his mouth to sag. Another time, a divot was taken from his temple. “It looked like someone had taken an ice cream scoop to the side of his head,” said Gary Zuercher, who sold Millay the technology to build the wave pool. “It would have killed a normal man,” said Fred Brooks, who worked with Millay on the planning of Wet ’n Wild. Yet Millay was only embarrassed by having to grow out his hair and beard to cover the scars. “He was just a bull, just god-awful tough,” added Brooks.

The night Millay spotted the Alabama wave pool became a turning point in his career. In the 1950s, Millay had made a smallish fortune with a harborside restaurant in Southern California. A decade later, he struck it rich when he took the age-old concept of the oceanarium, added showbiz flair, and created the park we know as SeaWorld. Under Millay’s tutelage, Shamu the killer whale became a mononymous international star. But in 1974, Millay lost a power struggle with SeaWorld’s board and angrily left the company. Wet ’n Wild would be his comeback.

Millay had gotten the idea for a water park one summer at SeaWorld, when he realized he had brought visitors to the water but not into the water. He explained to a reporter years later, “All you have to do is spend some time in Central Florida in the summertime — it’s hot and muggy — and ask what does a person want to do in his spare time. The answer is either sex, booze, or go swimming, right?”

“When they heard us say we were charging money for people to go swimming, they held the door for us as they chuckled,”

Millay’s gamble was that people would pay to swim. Bankers thought he was nuts. “When they heard us say we were charging money for people to go swimming, they held the door for us as they chuckled,” said John Shawen, Wet ’n Wild’s first general manager. But Millay managed to raise more than $3 million.

For a site, Millay selected Orlando. It was beachless. It had legions of existing tourists. Initially, the water park was not a go-to attraction; it was an add-on for families who had turned over their wallets to Disney. The 15-acre tract Millay leased on International Drive sat at a spot former Universal Orlando president Bob Gault called the city’s “50-yard line” — right where the airport expressway met Interstate 4, the road to the Magic Kingdom.

Naming the park proved simple. Rolly Crump remembered, “One day, at a meeting, George said, ‘We got to come up with a name. It’s got to be wet and it’s got to be wild.’

“I said, ‘Well, George, that’s it. Call it Wet ’n Wild.’” Later, the name would be as soothingly generic as the chains on International Drive: the Red Carpet Inn, the Western Sizzlin’ steak house. Yet for the men standing on the threshold of a great invention, Wet ’n Wild almost sounded dangerous. They made sure the opening round of ads emphasized that the park was safe.

About that: A few days before Wet ’n Wild opened, in March 1977, Millay invited the Orlando hotelier Harris Rosen to watch the first teenager test the Whitewater Slideways. These were the concrete slides Millay had seen in Placerville, California, now rebranded and lengthened. (They measured 400 feet.) The teen folded his arms across his chest, slid down the flume, skipped right across the surface of the splash pool, and landed in a heap on the concrete.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it, George?” Rosen said.

“Oh my god,” Millay said.

The centerpiece of Wet ’n Wild was the wave pool — now called the Surf Lagoon. Millay’s pool was nearly identical to the one he’d seen in Decatur: It held 570,000 gallons of water and measured 8 feet in the deep end. Millay placed it right inside the entry gates, so that as you walked into the park you saw waves rolling at you, just like at the beach.

The original Wet ’n Wild in Orlando — note the wave pool facing the entrance. Photo courtesy of the University of Central Florida

When you turned left, you came upon the children’s play area. The name revealed its provenance: Canadian Water Caper. Wet ’n Wild’s footpaths were hot asphalt. An admission ticket cost $3.75 and you could rent a locker for 50 cents.

For Millay, Wet ’n Wild stood as a corrective to ’70s hedonism. According to his biographer, Tim O’Brien, Millay prohibited so much as a single piece of litter to hit the ground. The park’s lounge chairs were red, white, and blue.

In the first days of the American water park, Millay was known to glance out his office window and count the cars pulling into the lot. An employee would climb to the top of the highest structure at Wet ’n Wild, like a Navy man on a conning tower, and scan the horizon for rain clouds. Millay liked to say, “When they’re nipple-to-nipple and bun-to-bun, we know the turnstiles have really spun!”

New Braunfels, late 1960s

When he was still in his teens, Jeff Henry became an inventor. His family had moved from Houston to New Braunfels, Texas, a sleepy river town between Austin and San Antonio. The Henrys bought Camp Landa, a collection of 34 wood cabins that stretched along the Comal River. On Christmas Day, Jeff and Gary and Jana would open gifts, then put on wet suits and jump in the river.

Camp Landa was a refuge for Houstonians, who would come to New Braunfels to ride inner tubes. As an afterthought, the Henrys installed an old playground slide on the second story of the lodge building. The slide was very fast, and riders would often shoot off the bottom and go skipping across the grass. Jeff Henry had an idea. He put a dip into the bottom of the slide and filled it with water. Now, when the rider came down at high speed, he fell into the water and slowed down. This technology — known as a water brake — is still used in parks today. Jeff Henry had invented a waterslide.

Across America, late 1970s

George Millay lifted ideas so successfully that it wasn’t long before Wet ’n Wild became a target for larceny. The culprits were roller coaster people — the men who’d watched with raised eyebrows while Millay created a new kind of amusement park. Now they were coming to Orlando and looking the place over. Millay prohibited his employees from giving tours to potential competitors. It hardly mattered that his own staff’s tours of other parks had provided the inspiration for several rides at Wet ’n Wild.

Millay knew this was coming. He had planned to open Wet ’n Wild, make a killing, and then quickly build seven more water parks across the country, essentially claiming the territory as his own. Cities north of the Mason-Dixon Line didn’t interest him. Millay wanted hot, beachless places that could become mini-Orlandos. He considered Dallas–Fort Worth, St. Louis, Nashville, and Atlanta.

Problem was, the public was slow to embrace the Orlando park. “No one knew what we were,” said John Seeker, who handled Millay’s marketing. The park took a $400,000 loss in its first year. The following November, Millay wrote to his investors, “Who would be dumb enough to buy stock in Wet ’n Wild?” Millay began to wonder if the park would go the way of failed Orlando attractions like the replica Great Wall of China and Hurricane World. “George never ran out of ideas,” Shawen said. “We just ran out of money.”

A typical roller coaster guy was Pat Cartwright, who had worked at Busch Gardens and Opryland USA. Cartwright came to Orlando in 1981 with his wife and two children. At Disney World, he trudged from ride to ride with sweat pouring off his brow. Then he went to Wet ’n Wild. His kids played in the Canadian Water Caper while Cartwright and his wife sat in the shade and watched. “You didn’t see lounge chairs at Disney World or Six Flags or Busch Gardens,” Cartwright said. “But at a water park you could sit on a lounge chair for an hour.”

The water park’s role as a babysitter was central to Millay’s vision. “Our type of park is the one that the tourist will visit after he’s fought the crowds and heat at the other places,” he once remarked. In fact, an early problem Wet ’n Wild faced was that people were lying on its beach chairs for so long — sometimes 12 hours at a clip — that the chairs were bursting under the strain.

Millay’s idea had escaped. Cartwright went to Williamsburg, Virginia, and built a park called Water Country USA. More water parks opened in Oklahoma City and Branson, Missouri. Still more in Tampa and Silver Springs, Florida. That made Millay really angry — competitors right in his backyard. In 1983, just six years after Millay had created the genre, America was home to 29 large water parks and 38 wave pools, according to the World Waterpark Association.

Park owners didn’t just pillage Millay’s park design. They looted each other. Their brochures came to resemble a hydrodynamic Mad Libs, with a ride-naming lexicon ranging over — and nearly limited to — words like Water, Raging, White, Wild, Hole, Storm, Splash, Toboggan, ’Boggan, River, Typhoon, and Niagara. Disney’s River Country had a ride called White Water Rapids. Millay’s knockoff was Raging Rapids. Years later, Disney repaid the theft with a new attraction: Runoff Rapids.

The men who built the early water parks found they were managing things they did not understand. Climate permitting, a roller coaster park could operate year-round. The water park season ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day. You had 100 days to make your money. “In the first years, we tried being open weekends in September,” Cartwright said. “It didn’t do any good.” Even if hot weather persisted into the fall, the customers had moved on to diversions like football or the homecoming dance.

Rain was a constant threat. A wet summer could wipe out 5 to 10 percent of profits. “Pray for good weather,” Millay once wrote to a friend. “If it is not forthcoming soon, all is lost.”

Water park visitors were just as baffled. It’s now possible to look at these pilgrims as we would a jerky silent film of men test-driving a Ford Model T. In the early days, beachless people who’d never shared a body of water with hundreds of others showed up at water parks. They quickly discovered that their bathing suits were too tight, too old. Women who wore bikinis found that their tops flew off when they came down a speed slide. “The gift shops were big bucks,” Shawen said. “We sold a phenomenal amount of bathing suits.”

Water park creators began to lay out the parks to help visitors understand them. They put their tall rides at far corners of the park to disperse the crowds that congregated around the wave pool. Concession stands required another fix. “You almost had to put anything that required money within a certain distance of the lockers,” said Chip Cleary, who opened Long Island’s Splish Splash in 1991. “Because people in bathing suits can’t carry money around easily. That became the mother of invention, and out came the water wallet.” It was a little plastic pocket you hung around your neck. When you got off a slide, you could walk over to the concessionaire while you were still dripping wet and buy a Coke.

“I wasn’t impressed,” Millay told O’Brien, “with most of the junk being built by dentists and real estate promoters and guys who thought they could run a waterpark.” That didn’t mean, however, that Millay was above stealing an idea he admired. He went to Cartwright’s Water Country USA and fell in love with the park’s corkscrew ride.

Millay’s water parks combined high (fast slides) and low (Lazy Rivers and pools). Photo courtesy of the University of Central Florida

Millay took the basic design of the ride, combined it with that of another from Tampa’s Adventure Island, and added a fog-and–strobe light–filled “mystery tunnel” at the end. The newly christened Corkscrew belonged to Millay. “He told me he was going to copy it,” Cartwright said. “As he said, everybody copied him, so that was only fair.”

Orlando, 1977

Jeff Henry visited Wet ’n Wild shortly after it opened. He brought a girlfriend. “She was cute,” he told me. “Her name was Mary. I married her and had two children with her. We met in my bar in San Marcos, Texas. She was a coed and I snuck her off. A little Dallas girl. I was a little old country boy from New Braunfels. Those little Dallas girls, they were something. They shined up awful purdy.”

Henry rode Millay’s Whitewater Slideways and paddled in the Surf Lagoon. But something nagged at him. If Henry is right that water parks are art, then his was an aesthetic objection: that Wet ’n Wild was a concrete playground, a “parking lot water park,” as one of his employees would later put it.

“Wet ’n Wild, I considered to be an abomination,” Henry said. “I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like the wave pool and I didn’t like the concrete rides. I thought I could do it better.”

Arlington, 1983

By the late ’70s, Wet ’n Wild had finally become profitable. “We seem to be out of the ‘poor house,’” Millay wrote to investors. He set his sights, finally, on expansion. Dallas–Fort Worth was the best beachless market not yet conquered by his competitors. But another developer, the Herschend family of Missouri, was also eyeing the area. The Herschends sent a message through Rick Faber, the new general manager of Wet ’n Wild Orlando.

“George, they’re coming,” Faber told Millay.

Millay growled. “We’ll build the park bigger!”

Millay was spurred to innovate by a mixture of genius and fear. “Scripture tells us, ‘Fear of the Lord is the first step towards wisdom,’” he once noted in a speech. “But in Orlando, fear of the Mouse is the first step towards financial well-being.” Millay’s next two rides would push the water park to new heights and establish him as its undisputed king.

Every few years, Millay liked to travel around the world to search for inspiration. In 1974, while riding a cab in Tokyo, he had spotted a tall waterslide called the Heiwajima Slide. The slide had fallen into disuse, but in its sheer size Millay saw potential. A slide like that could tower over a beachless city, waving in every visitor who laid eyes on it. My god …

Waterslide makers would come to call this kind of slide a “skyline.” The term had been used by roller coaster parks for decades. The “skyline” is often built along interstate highways or major roads for easy visibility. It needs no marketing. It is marketing. It can be described in a single word: Ahhhhh!

Millay built a fiberglass prototype, in 1979, in Orlando. The introduction of fiberglass changed the course of slide-making. In the old days, to build a slide you had to first build a small berm and allow the concrete flume to trace its slope. Fiberglass was lighter and allowed you to build slides straight up into the air.

Millay reserved the naming of slides for himself, and he had a name picked out for his new one: the Kamikaze. His staff cringed. It wasn’t just that the name was offensive. According to O’Brien, 12-year-old George Millay had been living at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He watched Japanese bombers attack the USS Arizona, and he slept that night with a loaded BB gun. But to tell Millay the name Kamikaze was un-PC would be to risk a tantrum. The slide opened in February 1979. Soon, American kids were leaving Wet ’n Wild with buttons that bragged, “I Rode the Kamikazeee.”

Kamikaze, based on a Japanese slide, gave water parks their “skyline.” Photo courtesy of the University of Central Florida

I rode the Kamikaze as a kid. The slide rose six stories — twice as high as any existing slide, Millay boasted — and I reached it by climbing stairs covered in wet carpet. At the top of the ride, I lay on my back and put my hands behind my head as if I were relaxing on one of Millay’s lounge chairs. I got a this-thing-is-moving-faster-than-my-adolescent-brain-can-process feeling. I remember a lot of water in my face, and then landing in a pool 300 feet away.

The Anatomy of a Water Park

The drawing power of a “skyline” was enormous. Forty thousand people rode the Kamikaze in its first four months of operation, Millay estimated. He would later credit the slide with boosting his Orlando attendance by 25 percent. But Millay also realized that not everyone had the stomach for such a ride; today, “skyline” slides typically attract only about 10 or 20 percent of park visitors. Millay knew he needed a relaxing alternative. A ride that would attract not just teenagers but the people who brought the teenagers — the people with money.

Millay’s next great theft came in Jakarta, Indonesia. He and Zuercher were walking through a theme park called Ancol Dreamland when they noticed something odd. “There was a circular canal with people in it,” Zuercher said, “a bunch of women dressed modestly in Muslim garb.” The river’s jets were broken — Millay found the manager drinking a beer and watching TV — and the water was disgusting. But none of the women seemed to care. My god …

Millay got his hands on an aerial photograph of the river and brought it back to Wet ’n Wild. “It was like the Ganges,” Seeker said. “It was so full you couldn’t see the water.” Millay insisted that was the ride’s genius. This river would take people out of the endless lines; it would save them from walking up six stories on wet carpet.

Build me a river, Millay commanded his engineers. The engineers scratched their heads and said, Sure, George. People will make one loop, get out, then reenter…

Millay wouldn’t have it. He wanted a ride that was continuous. As a kid, the Lazy River was notable for its lack of screams. You didn’t even have to swim. You could walk into the river and be tugged at low speed around the circumference of the wave pool, a distance of about one-third of a mile. It gave you that people mover–at-the-airport feeling.

Millay built his first Lazy River at his new park in Arlington, Texas, right between Dallas and Fort Worth, in 1983. Crowds loved it. “Just lie back and enjoy getting a wonderful tan!” the brochures boasted. Now, when a Wet ’n Wild visitor walked through the park entrance and crossed the first bridge, she could see both waves rolling in her direction and happy people floating beneath her.

Millay’s pitchmen found the Lazy River to be almost inexplicable in television advertising. It hardly mattered. The Kamikaze was the ride that brought people into a water park; the Lazy River kept them there. Soon, Wet ’n Wild’s marketing photos had swimmers paddling in the river, gazing up at slides that towered above them like the beehive towers of Martian civilization.

The Kamikaze was the ride that brought people into a water park; the Lazy River kept them there.

Millay would invent more rides, like the six-story drop slide Der Stuka. He named it, with characteristic indelicacy, after a Luftwaffe bomber. But this was a comparatively minor innovation. For with the Kamikaze and Lazy River — along with the wave pool and children’s playland — Millay had laid down the template of the great American water park. “The George Millay formula was taking certain ideas and concepts that were out there and reconstituting them into something that was greater than the sum of its parts,” said his son, Pat Millay. These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a water park in America that doesn’t have its own versions of these four rides.

By 1985, Millay was experiencing “that rapturous, transcendental feeling that tells you that you have a winner.” He bought the Herschends’ competing parks in Dallas–Fort Worth. He kept one in operation. The other he tore down. When no one was paying attention, Millay had concrete poured into the pipes and pools so nobody would compete with him in that muggy, beachless paradise again.