The summer of 1972. That’s when it started: my fascination with roller coasters. I was five years old and the only thing I knew about roller coasters could be said in two sentences:
1. My mother was so terrified after just one ride on the Cyclone at Coney Island, she swore never to ride another one, and
2. There weren’t any near me, except for a kiddie coaster called Serpent at Astroworld in Houston, which I had been on already.

That changed in 1972, when Astroworld opened a strange coaster with an even stranger name: Dexter Frebish’s Electric Roller Ride

I say it was a strange coaster, because it was essentially a mine train coaster - boxy, mine cart style vehicles meant to hug the ground and do lots of sharp turns and tunnels and such. But this one didn’t bother with the “close to the ground” part and it had a legit “big drop” right at the beginning.

…and the name was strange, too. The coaster sat in a section of the park called “County Fair” and it was mostly games of chance, bumper cars, and a handful of other stuff you might find at a fairgrounds. The man the coaster was named after was a showman and is only notable for being the first person ever to ride down a ski slope in a covered wagon.

Needless to say, five-year-old me had to ride this thing. We got in the queue and the height-check guy put the measuring stick up to me. Even though he let me keep on my Gilligan hat, I was a tad too short to ride. Seeing the disappointment on my face, he said “stand on your tiptoes!” I did, and squeaked by. I’m still amazed that this was a thing that happened and nobody blinked an eye at it, but 1972, amirite? Anyway, we hopped in and off we went.

I learned something that day I didn’t know about myself before that ride: I’m afraid of heights.
I lived in the very, very flat coastal plains of Texas in a small town where the tallest building was three floors. I had never seen the world from 80 feet in the air before. I discovered that I didn’t like it - and I liked it even less sitting in that boxy little car with the lap bar a good six inches above my lap. When I saw the front cars disappear over the top of the lift, I freaking lost it. I don’t remember the ride at all. I only remember my mom, who had sworn she’d never ride another coaster, trying to calm me down. I remember the attendants in the station rushing over to us to see if I was OK. I remember shaking uncontrollably for several minutes on the steps of the exit ramp. But I don’t remember the ride.

The next four years were spent learning everything I could about coasters. What made them go? Why don’t they jump off the track? Why are the biggest hills at the beginning? Who designs these things? How many different kinds are there? Can they go upside-down?
At the midpoint of this dive into information, we took another trip to Astroworld and my cousin Larry and I (he’s the one next to me in the earlier photo) queued up to ride the coaster. I was scared, but I was also armed with knowledge and so I knew that even if it scared me, I’d be safe. That’s not information I had the first time! Unfortunately, a Texas summer rainstorm moved in before we were able to ride and the whole park shut down for the day. It just wasn’t meant to be. Not yet.
Then, in the 1970s, Astroworld decided to open a new section and it was themed around Coney Island. Of course, Coney Island isn’t Coney Island without the Cyclone, so Astroworld attempted to buy it and move it to Texas. Don’t laugh, they actually tried to do that. New York City had planned to scrap the ride to make room for an expansion of the New York Aquarium (something that seems unfathomable now) and Astroworld was a willing buyer. The coaster was saved, however, so Astroworld decided to build a replica, but mirror-imaged so it looked better from inside the park, and slightly taller and faster. They dubbed it Texas Cyclone and it opened in 1976.

Our neighbours were heading to Astroworld that summer and asked if I wanted to tag along. They had planned to ride the new coaster. My mother saw this as an opportunity for me to ride it without her having to go along, so she was ecstatic about shoving some money in my hand and telling me to have a good time. I was nervous, but excited.
The first stop was my old nemesis, Dexter Frebish- although by this time, the “County Fair” section had been re-themed to “King Arthur’s Court” and the oddly-named oversized mine train coaster had been renamed Excalibur.

We rode it - my second-ever ride on a full-sized coaster - and I survived. I’m not sure I’d call it “fun,” since I was afraid of being afraid. I didn’t want to cause another scene like the first time, certainly not in front of a classmate and his parents. But I was fine. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared.
When we got off the ride, my friend’s mom asked how I was doing (I think she’d been prepped by my mom). I said I was fine.
”Then we’re heading for the Cyclone!”

Here’s the thing: in 1976, wooden coasters were extremely rare. NEW wooden coasters were almost unheard of. A renaissance of sorts had begun just the year before with Kings Island’s Racer twin-tracked woodie making park owners stand up and take notice that wooden coasters could bring in visitors by the droves, but that wouldn’t take hold for another couple years. Thus, when this bigger-badder-taller-faster Cyclone opened up in Texas, it wasn’t long before it was proclaimed to be the best coaster on earth. By today’s standards, that seems like hyperbole, but it was very likely true back then. And I was about to take my third-ever ride on a full-sized coaster. My first-ever ride on a wooden coaster. And it just happened to be the best one in the world at the time. To say that I was intimidated by this set of facts is an understatement. We got to the queue and discovered that you had to be five feet tall to ride in the back car. In those days, each car had four rows of seats, so that meant that rows 9-12 were off-limits to me and my classmate. His parents grumbled a bit and muttered something about “coming back later without the kids to ride in the back seat”. We did managed to get as far back as we could, though, with my classmate and his dad in row 7 and me and his mom just behind them in row 8.
Big, clunky, boxy 4-bench vehicles made by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company with a single buzz-bar lap bar, no seat belts, no headrests (except the back seat), and no seat divider. I wouldn’t understand how awesome that was until many years later. I just knew that I seemed to have a lot of ‘wiggle room’ in that seat! Flashbacks to my first coaster ride began to flood my mind and the fact that this coaster was not only significantly taller and faster than the other one, but it also had a much different layout. Instead of a single big drop followed by lazy spirals like Excalibur, this coaster was all about the drops. Eleven of them.
We rolled out of the station around a small turn, then headed up the lift.

It only took around 20 seconds to climb the hill, but it seemed like forever. A recorded message played some safety spiel over and over on the way up. What it actually said was “Remain seated at all times. Keep your hands and arms inside the car. Do not stand up.”
What I heard in my head was “you’re going to DIE!!!!!!!!!”
When we finally got near the top, we actually began to accelerate. Armed with my four years of research into all things coaster, this didn’t phase me at all. I knew that we were far enough back in the train that the front cars had already crested the hill and the weight of those cars was pulling us near the back up and over the top. Yay, knowledge! It was the last thing on the ride that any of my research had prepared me for.

The first thing that I wasn’t ready for was the little jog to the left right at the top of the hill. I thought it was a straight line, up-and-over thing, but when we got pulled over the hill, the cars went left just a bit before they went down. It caught me off-guard and took me right out of whatever comfort zone I had managed to cling to. Then the drop happened.
Unlike Excalibur’s rolling-down-a-hill sensation, Texas Cyclone felt less like rolling and more like falling. The steepness of the drop plus the speedy start we got from the lead cars pulling us up and over gave me my very first moment of airtime. That’s a term used to describe a point in a coaster ride where your body experiences a sensation of weightlessness and the seat cushion decides to separate itself from your butt. This particular moment of airtime happened nearly nine storeys above the earth, facing the ground, at nearly 60 mph. In addition to feeling weightless, it felt like I was falling. I had no sensation of actually sitting in a vehicle and if I hadn’t been clutching the lap bar, I could’ve easily convinced myself that I had been flung from the car. It was, at that point in my life, the single most terrifying thing I’d ever experienced on purpose.

I say “up to that point in my life” because literally five seconds later, there was one that topped it. After that mind-numbing first drop, you got a slow turn, way up in the air, a chance to look back at what you’d just done (hey, there’s that jog to the left I didn’t notice before!), and the gut-wrenching knowledge that there were ten more drops to go. Oh, and get this: the second drop was even steeper than the first one. This time, the lead cars pulled us around the last of the turn, so we were sandwiched against the side of the car before it fell out from under us. Two drops led to another slow turn in the opposite direction and the slight reprieve gave me a chance to make two observations:

1. My classmate was completely losing his mind in the row in front of me, much like I had done four years before on Dexter Frebish

2. I was having a freaking blast.

The drop off that turn led to the next thing I hadn’t anticipated: track buried inside the structure.

Even though the second half of the ride was slower than the first half, due to the drops all being smaller, it felt just as fast because of the visuals you got from racing through a maze of wooden structure. Sight lines were very short and you never knew what was coming next. That culminated in one of the best coaster moments ever devised: Texas Cyclone’s infamous ‘post turn.’
It began with a turn underneath the first slow turn, nearly hidden inside the structure.
Then, as the turn nears its end, the track overhead becomes suddenly right there next to your head, the train drops down at the last second, and you got a bizarre combination of laterals, airtime, and ‘OMG we’re going to hit something’. There’s nothing like the sensation of feeling that you need to duck to keep from hitting your head while simultaneously being catapulted up out of your seat. Even seasoned riders, who spent the entire ride with arms in the air, would yank them back down at this point. It was deliciously evil.

From there, the drops got smaller and smaller until a final u-turn pointed the trains back at the loading station. My classmate was done for the day. He literally couldn’t be talked into riding anything else, so we just left after one ride on Excalibur and one ride on the Texas Cyclone. And yet, it didn’t feel like the trip was wasted. I knew even then that I could divide my life into the part before I rode the Texas Cyclone and after. It was the start of a life-long obsession that would eventually take me all over the world to places that I never thought I’d go just because they had a coaster I hadn’t been on yet. As of this writing, I’ve been on nearly 900 different coasters in 15 different countries.
Sadly, Astroworld closed forever in 2005 and the Texas Cyclone was torn down.

I will always remember the good times I had on that coaster, the people I met (I was an unofficial ‘seat filler’ for the years when Astroworld didn’t allow single riders and they needed another single to fill the empty seat), and the more than 10,000 laps I took on it in the 29 years it operated.

If you want to see the running list of coasters I’ve been on so far, you can see it here.