Roller-coaster designer delights screamer fans

HERSHEY, Pa. - Some little kids dream about a baseball game or coming to school in their pajamas. Mike Boodley, snug in his West Windsor, N.J., bedroom, dreamed about roller coasters.

Some kids while away the time during class by doodling monsters or flowers. Boodley doodled roller coasters.

Some kids build a playhouse in the back yard. Boodley, armed with old planks and a laundry basket, built a roller coaster, and 33 years later it turned into this:

The Lightning Racer, 90 feet tall and more than half-a-mile long, launches 48 people at a time into two minutes of pulse-racing, bone-rattling, screaming pleasure. It was built from 1 million feet of lumber, 2 million bolts, 7,000 feet of steel track, and the twisted dreams of Mike Boodley.

Boodley has grown up but his dreams have not, to the delight of roller coaster fans from coast to coast.

The Lightning Racer opened last month, the newest ride at Hersheypark in this town. The delicate wooden lattice seems like an anachronism in an era when amusement parks advertise the latest steel coaster as higher, faster and loopier. But Mike Boodley is on a mission to send the old-time wooden roller coaster hurtling into the 21st century.

Funny thing is, Boodley hated his first coaster ride.

"When I was just 4 years old, I saw a soda commercial with a roller coaster from the rider's point of view. I thought, `I don't know what that is, but I gotta get on one of them,' " Boodley recalls. "So I started pestering my father, and at 6 years old he brought me out here to Hersheypark.

"But when I rode the Comet, it scared me so bad I wouldn't get on another coaster for about two years."

Still, by age 9 Boodley was not only riding coasters but building them in his yard. His first effort consisted of some old boards held up by a sawhorse and cinder blocks.

"He took my laundry basket and put roller-skate wheels on it," recalls 73-year-old Bess Boodley. "The little kid next door came down all white-knuckled."

Boodley's designs quickly grew more sophisticated. He once constructed a scale model that took over his family's dining room for eight months, until his mother delivered an ultimatum: "Take it out or else."

It didn't dent his enthusiasm. The following year, at age 17, he decided to ride the Cyclone at Coney Island a record-breaking 1,001 times in a row. As his schoolmates were landing in top colleges, Mike Boodley was landing in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's reigning coaster fanatic.

Boodley later earned a mechanical-engineering degree from Pratt Institute, but then drifted around the amusement industry for nearly 20 years - doing everything from taking tickets at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J., to working on high-tech simulator rides at Universal Studios in California.

Then in 1992, he ran into coaster construction ace Clair Hain Jr.

The two met working on Boodley's first design ever built - the tame Sky Princess at Dutch Wonderland in Lancaster, Pa. - for a company called Custom Coasters.

A year later, they labored to create something more unusual, again for Custom Coasters - this time a true Boodley design. Though modest in size, the Outlaw at Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa, was twistier than any wooden coaster built for more than a half-century.

The Outlaw was so serpentine that it caused plenty of construction headaches. After long days of frustration, the two would meet for a beer and fantasize about going into business for themselves.

Great Coasters International was born in December 1994.

After hearing that Hersheypark was looking for a wooden coaster, the pair submitted a proposal for a "spaghetti bowl twister" that would later be dubbed the Wildcat. It looked just like a teenage Boodley doodle, but not like anything park officials had ever seen.

"We pitched a really acrobatic ride," Boodley says. "I remember when Jeff Budgeon (then managing director for planning at Hersheypark) took it to the board, they looked at it and said, `That guy is crazy!' And Budgeon actually said to them, `Well, this guy is a little closer to the edge than the others.' But he knew what we were trying to do."

The Wildcat was Boodley's big break. It proved that his twister designs could deliver both the classic "jiggle" of an old-fashioned wooden coaster and the smooth, high-speed acrobatics demanded by modern coaster junkies.

It was a smash hit. In quick succession, Great Coasters was asked to build the mammoth Gwazi - a double or "dueling" coaster - at Busch Gardens in Tampa, Fla., the Roar at Six Flags America near Baltimore, and the Roar at Six Flags Marine World near San Francisco. The Lightning Racer, another dueling coaster, marks the fifth Great Coaster in as many years.

"At the end of the first year, I remember saying to Clair, `At least a million people rode our coaster this year.' At the end of this year - because Busch Gardens is open year-round - I'm gonna say, `At least 9 million people rode our coasters this year.' "