The Man Who Built the Big Ones

Charles Dinn doesn’t look like the architect of adrenaline jolts, the whimsical wizard of oohs and ahs.

With his silvery hair, thick forearms and big gut, with his gruff, blunt yet bemused attitude, Charley Dinn looks every bit the born-and-bred Buckeye construction boss he was back when he was building factories and hotels, before he became king of roller coasters.

If it wasn’t for the merry-go-round horse leaning against the wall of his living room inside his new split-level home in a largely rural town about 20 miles north of his hometown of Cincinnati, you’d never know.

But Dinn and his old friend Curt Summers were the premier creators of wooden roller coasters in the world.

Coaster enthusiasts comprise a cult of sorts, a rare breed who speak a special language and understand such nuances as, say, the effect a damp day has on the sidewinder (moves like a snake) inversion (only upside down) of a wooden (better than steel) roller coaster. A few years ago, they voted Dinn-Summers coasters four out of the top five in the country, seven of the top 10.

The two builders met on construction jobs at Providence Tire in Cincinnati. In the 1960s, they moved on to King’s Island, a new theme park just outside town.

Dinn, 63, built just about every ride out there. Both men formed their own epononymous firms, but they were joined at the hip. Summers’ firm designed the coasters, and Dinn, his wife, Martha, their daughter Denise and other friends and family built them. They made more than two dozen.

“Curt was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back if he had to,” he says.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Dinn and Summers were featured in fluffy news stories, television programs, magazine profiles. They were besieged by offers to build coasters around the world.

Then, two trains collided at the Timber Wolf coaster at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City in 1990, and the park blamed them. Then injuries began piling up at Six Flags theme parks in three states, and Six Flags pointed a finger toward Ohio.

Summers pumped his own money into his firm to keep it aloft as the parks peppered him with demands that he pay off the injury claims. In 1992, locked in struggles with Six Flags and insurers, Summers had a heart attack and died.

Dinn sought sanctuary in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings meant to reorganize his company, but they wound up killing it. Cedar Point, Six Flags, Worlds of Fun, Kentucky Kingdom--all old clients--came after him with complaints about unfinished work, bad design, unpaid state taxes. He was hit with more than 100 claims for roughly $11 million, and wound up settling everything for about $300,000.

Today, Dinn has a startling admission: Summers, the man hailed in countless media accounts as a coaster genius, never designed a coaster himself. He had other people do that for him.

And Dinn contends it was those Summers-supervised designs, not Dinn’s craftmanship, that resulted in curves and elevations Dinn says he realized were too dangerous even as he was building them.

Dinn filed for bankruptcy the same month his daughter, Denise Dinn Larrick, began a coaster business that quickly grew as big and as booming as Dinn’s once was.

During the bankruptcy hearing, in fact, some of Dinn’s creditors charged that the Dinn coaster business was operating under a different name. It cited bonuses paid to family members just before he declared bankruptcy, and the claims the Dinn family filed against the Dinn firm. The case was finally converted to a liquidation.

Dinn denied his daughter’s firm was a reincarnation of his own. He does admit that he broke both legs two years ago when a support beam fell on him while working on his daughter’s Hoosier Hurricane coaster in Indiana.

He also was identified in the May 25 edition of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., as a member of the crew that built the new Grizzly at the Silverwood Theme Park in northern Idaho.

“I like this kind of coaster better than the bigger variety,” he said in a story that at one point identified him as the coaster’s creator. “This one will be much, much easier to maintain.”

Dinn, though, insists his daughter is her own boss.

Her business, a photo of the Timber Wolf proudly hung in the lobby facing the entrance, is just over the stand of trees across the street from Dinn’s home, the one he bought to replace the one he got rid of during bankruptcy. Wife Martha is on Denise’s payroll.

This year alone, his daughter has taken on coasters in Idaho, New Jersey, Wales, France and Spain. When 1996 is over, she will have built one more coaster than Dinn did in his best year.

“Sometimes,” says Dinn, sipping a glass of rose as he sits back in his easy chair, “I think she bites off more than she can chew.”

Even though she’s hired one of Summers’ old designers, he said his daughter has learned her father’s lessons.

“She’s smarter than I am,” he said. “She has control. I never had control over Curt Summers.”