Volume 2, No. 18. September 27, 2002
Gee,
Whiz
This week’s
news that Six Flags Great America is taking down the Shockwave to make
room for a new attraction in 2003 (see Extra! Extra!) concluded a figurative
coaster ride for the Gurnee, Illinois, park’s public relations crew in
which prompt forthrightness may have saved the park from negative PR backlash.
The landlocked Six Flags needed to remove something before it could build any
new significant ride. Speculation long centered on Shockwave and Whizzer,
and on August 6 the park announced that the latter would be vacated. The Anton
Schwarzkopf coaster, with the bobsled type trains circling through a seven-story
spiral lift and speeding around a track of 70-degree banked turns, opened with
the park in May 1976. Originally named Willard’s Whizzer after Willard
Mariott, the park’s original owner, the ride introduced many Chicago-area
children to coasters.
At the time of the announcement, the park had planned a farewell party for the
coaster that upcoming weekend and had mounted a publicity campaign to that effect.
“Saying we were taking it out was supposed to be a publicity bonanza; that
was our goal,” said Susie Storey, the park’s public relations manager.
“We wanted to get as much coverage as we could because it was a favorite
ride here and we wanted people to know they had a last chance to come and ride
it. What we did not anticipate was the public going the next step, responding,
‘Don’t take it out.’”
That response manifested in children writing letters to the park, and parents
calling Six Flags’ corporate office begging them to keep the ride. Corporate
acquiesced, leaving the park’s PR team scrambling to notify the press that
the decision to remove Whizzer had been reversed. “We announced
(the ride’s closing) that Monday,” recalled Storey, who joined the
park’s team in the spring. “The story ran on the front page of the
Chicago Sun-Times—it was my first-ever front page story—and
people started calling. Late Wednesday night we were making phone calls (to
the press) saying ‘It’s staying, it’s staying.’”
Some reporters questioned whether the sequence of events was nothing more than
a ruse, a publicity stunt. “I think that was a legitimate question,”
Storey said. “We said, ‘We are responding to our community and to
the people of the Midwest,’ and we had letters from kids to back it up.”
The key, she said, was notifying the press of the change as soon as she got
the word. If the park had celebrated Whizzer’s “final weekend”
knowing it really wasn’t, and then announced it was staying on Monday,
she feels the media would likely have dismissed it as a stunt. Instead, that
weekend brought the park a flurry of good-news stories as the media portrayed
the reversal in heroic terms, a David-and-Goliath fable. “The public spoke
up and the big park listened,” Storey said.
That, it turns out, gave Six Flags Great America long-term public relations
equity. “We just got a letter from one father who wrote in and said, ‘You
made my daughter happy by keeping it,’” Storey said.
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