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Four Truths Learned in 30 Days Working at a Theme Park

And one thing that keeps opportunities coming

Courtney Leigh
Writers’ Blokke
7 min readNov 19, 2024

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Photo by Chris Slupski on Unsplash

In college, I worked at a theme park for one month. I had another job at a camp in England arranged for later that summer, but it didn’t start until mid-June. It was a 60-mile round trip to the park, but gas was cheap in 1989.

The park’s theme was Europe in the days of old. Envision girls in dirndl dresses holding baskets of flowers, walking around quaint villages in the European countryside. You could drive Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cars in England, drink beer from a stein in a huge Bavarian Fest Haus, and ride the log flume in France. The park adverts promised you could, “Stop dreaming about faraway places…” and “See them right here!”

It was owned by an enormous beer conglomerate that probably got tax breaks galore by cobbling a theme park onto their main beer-making plant. And, here’s the ringer, it was the only place that would employ me for a month.

Interestingly, the beer plant was the only employer around with a union. Unions were like monarchies to those of us in the South. We’d heard of them, but usually only in movies. Because of the union, the plant had a reputation for paying unusually well. The one person we knew who worked there drove a Porsche in his thirties!

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Writers’ Blokke
Writers’ Blokke

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Courtney Leigh
Courtney Leigh

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