not so long ago i managed a jb robinson jewelry store (summer '93) and one of my employees mentioned how much fun she had visiting cedar point...well i said if she wanted the summer off to work there it was fine with me 'cos she would have the time of her life...kelly worked at the bar near the breakers hotel and she said everything i told her was true...i guess i let her do that so she could tell me about all the experiences during the x-mas quarter...she had an absolute blast and i was happy that she did it...ill never forget those nasty dorms, the b-wing of the cedars(yes we are talking summer '80), the lovely gold dorms, the white dorms...and those really awful rotunda dorms in the breakers..omg they looked like they were constructed by "fire-traps-r-us"....i lived in the commons in what is now an older section...i remember having so much trash in my room that the fire man gave me a written warning to clean it up...so naturually i did...put it all in a nice heavy plastic trash bag and tossed it way into the attic...the attic door was in the bathroom and you could really heave the trash, food, ect if you stood on a chair...i wonder if it ever got cleaned up??? my roomies were not exactly stellar individuals...we started the season with 10 and ended with 4...most quit or were fired for stupidity....cedar point does not bonus hunt...the bonus in 1980 was a whopping .25 an hour..whee!!!..i had one roomie that got put on some awful trash pickup shift that ran all nite...he was a nice enough guy but he had "problems" with authority..thus the trash hauler job, he would turn his stereo on, country music of course, lock the door and leave for work...all nite johnny cash ect....that problem was solved real fast as security would turn it off for me...my roomie had a frig(which was great)!!! i would go to parties and snag a brewski, walk it up to the room and go back to the party...every other beer...free beer all summer..as long as you were not picky about the brands, anything from falstaff to heineken.. iwuld take some and i could use the frig...worked out ok because you could not leave anything in the main frig and expect it to be there an hour later...thats one of the downsides to living with strangers...one of my favorite tricks was to put a pack of fire crackers on the electric stove, turn the stove on and leave for work....i created a tad bit of ill will with every one...oh well....i got along well with my co-workers and supervisors...im sure this saved my job a couple of times...i got caught telling some park guests that they could feed the carp the plastic sipper tops that we snipped off of the sipper containers at the time..naturually i profusely apologized to my zone manager and it all blew over...well the carp really would eat the darn things and who was i to deny a "fish" its dinner.....at the frontier inn we had to begin opening by 8 am and some days i would simply run to work down the frontier trail and write in my time later...thus i was never late...i never liked that shift so loren moved me to the 11-7 shift most of the summer...good hours for obvious reasons...one of the unique things about the frontier inn was the open door design that let everything in, yes moths, muffleheads, flies, ect..."would you like pizza with your muffleheads mam?"...one of the things that we had in abundance at the time were these really nasty aggressive geese.....one of the jobs as on opener was to clean off the patio which i did not mind cos it was easy and mindless..plus i could hose down the geese that made the mess...well one day in late july '80 i think a goose had waddled up the steps and some idiot lady was feeding it a piece of pizza...my buddy said "loren we have a special guest in the dining room" so loren and i took after the goose with a couple of broomsticks and it tumbled down the steps with some "help"...yes i did crack it over the skull with the stick......later on that week i was talking to a group of girls in the out door table area and one of the geese ran up and bit me in the bum....the girls laughed and i found something to do that evening....finding girls for an employee of cedar point is like shooting fish in a tin can....its not even fair...fun though!...one party in particular that i went to was a "cheap sunglasses" party..cheap sunglasses to get in...i had the kind cardboard from the eyedoctor so i qualified....that was the era when cp was marketed as the "amazement park"..some artful individual at the party changed the poster to the "abusement park" and everyone including several zone managers got a kick out of it....the parties were absolutely rampant...just listen and knock was the rule of the day...went to a costume party with no costume...ray and i decided to become pirates...took off our t shirts, tied them around our heads, rolled up our jeans, took off our shoes...instant pirate....i think it was at the costume party that i was introduced to the concept of "harry buffalo"...or in other words a trash can party...i also learned at the same party to look at what i was drinking as the ciggarette butt i chugged along with whatever was in the brew came back up as fast as it went down...i made it out side though...laughed about that one for a decade...sandusky has to be satans armpit...it is the worst place to live on the planet...its a combination of economically depressed constantly fighting minority groups and what seems like hundreds of motorcycle gang members...i mostly stayed on site cept for beer runs and such for this reason...i dont really have a high opinion of sanduskys' police force as they love to pick on cp employees...so stay the heck out of trouble...i got a ticket for running a red lite that wasnt even there...he hauled me into the station and made me pay the fine immediately....i wonder where the cash went......im sure it went to fix up the fine sandusky street system....working with food has its up and downsides..as long as you get some interaction with the park guest( we called them animals in those days) it was ok...hot, smelly, dirty it certainly was...especially around a 450 deg pizza oven...i never really got burned..singed abit but i was used to the work having done a stint at pizza hut...the pizzas were a frozen crust (in reality i think they were wood pulp/cardboard) that we would spread a mixture of 80% artificial cheese and 20% real cheese on the crusts along with some tomato paste/sauce and rosemary to spice it up, slap it all together and the animals would pay good cash to eat that garbage!...i also had the dubious pleasure of working a sipper stand, working at the round up, the happy friar.....i really hated the happy friar as i had seriously burned my right hand in a fryer accident in high school...even that was ok cos they let me stay away from the grease...i was amazed at how the potatos are peeled...just dump em in, flies, hair, saliva and all and let em rip!!! and then slicing the darn things with a manually operated slicer...i got real fast with that thing...still have the skill to cut fries to this date!...the popcorn stand was nutty...just a trashbag full of day old popcorn sometimes...i tried to make new and toss the old as it was only useful as carp food...i think that same popcorn stand is on the trail...memories...this was the summer after they killed the monkey that got loose from jungle larrys...'79 and there were still alot of "they shoot monkeys dont they" t-shirts running around...those were the days of 3.2% beer and we had bands in the convention center every other week or so on a sunday night (a god awful nite to do that as well) and .50 cent cans of miller....5$ went a long way at that rate....my buddy and i tried to see who could wear the same pair of pants the longest without laundering them...changing the shirt was fair game as the smell after a couple of days was rather noticeable...i think i went 2 1/2 weeks before i packed it in...the pants were a brown polyester with all the pockets save one sown shut(to make it harder to steal cp nickles) that could have survived a nuclear blast at ground zero intact...of course the occupant of said pants would have been vaporized....any way they were not built for comfort.....mike hastzo beat me in that contest fair and square, i was not man enough to wear a pair of trousers that i stood up in the corner of my room as testimony to my "manhood" and "bravery"...just imagine 20 days of pizza sauce, sweat, grease, bodily fluids, ect....i had to take the pants to the laundry center in a garbage bag because i did not want to handle them....the laundry lady was not very pleased..they got 'em clean tho...that laundry always seemed to work miracles with the scroungy clothes i would bring them.....and do it fast...sometimes i would purposely spill grape syrup on mi clothes after work just to see if the laundry could get it out...man they were good...alot of times i had to simply change clothes right at the window cos i was running late...they only gave you 3 days clothes so it paid to be prompt to the laundry...if i wanted to play in the park i would turn my shirt inside out and go play or wear a wind breaker...i remember dragging my shirt behind me to see how dirty i could get it b4 laundry time...the shoes that we got the summer of '80 were of course paid for with a deduction out of our pay....they were a really cheap pair of new-balance type running shoe that seemed quite comfortable..until they literally fell apart around your feet...i think cp got a grade b run of shoes and bought em up...almost everyone who bought them had them fall apart...since i was a runner at the time i had a supply of "shoe goo" and the shoes stayed together till the bitter end until i tossed them out the window of my car on the way home from working my last bonus weekend...i stayed in touch with mike for a couple of years until i relized the obvious: the man was a psychotic...if masturbation were a crime he would have been on death row! he had a massive nasty porn collection that rivaled the kinsey istitute......of course i never looked at it........mike lived in the b-wing of the infamous cedars with another straight roomie...all i remember about his roomie was that he was taking some type of anti-depression meds....great huh? smoking hemp was fairly rampant and well tolerated at that time by cp management (cos they all did it as well!)...i dont imagine its that way anymore...kegs were not allowed in the commons but if you brought in conceled materials no one would search you....in other words we would put in some cases what amounted to a dish cloth over the top of the keg to "conceal" it...imagine wheeling a full keg and tapper on a hand truck past the front desk and concealing it with a shop rag...natureally the front desk girl was invited to said party....cp was a special place to work...its hard and fun...i hope the "book" i just wrote gives some personal insight into some of the minor insanity that takes place there..ken
