Adventureland is an amusement park in Altoona, Iowa, whose seasonal workforce included hundreds of workampers recruited from the mobile-living community. Its bright promotional images presented the job as a blend of camping, work, and recreation, but the reported experience also involved modest wages, demanding schedules, complaints about conditions, and, ultimately, a fatal workplace accident. The park offers a concentrated view of how seasonal tourism employment could rely on older workers whose apparent freedom to travel existed alongside economic need and workplace risk.

Recruitment and Seasonal Work

Adventureland sent recruiters to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous to hire about three hundred workampers for jobs operating rides, games, and concession stands. Its display showed older employees enjoying park attractions and carrying prizes, with slogans that made the arrangement look less like ordinary employment than a summer of fun. The park’s human resources director praised workampers’ sociability, describing them as people who could sustain a conversation with almost anyone and suggesting that guests appreciated that ease of interaction.

The terms were more concrete than the promotional imagery. Wages at recruitment ranged from $7.25 to $7.50 an hour. Adventureland owned a neighboring mobile-home park where employees were encouraged to stay, paying $160 a month from June through September. Workers who remained until the season ended had their August and September rent waived. The arrangement joined a job to a place to live, while making the cost and timing of that housing part of the seasonal employment decision.

The park had hired transient older workers for nearly two decades by the time the book describes its recruitment. That practice belonged to a wider system of itinerant labor: seasonal employers drew workers who could travel to jobs, while workers depended on temporary wages and parking or housing arrangements. Mobile life did not eliminate administrative obligations, either. Nomads had to maintain an official domicile for matters such as vehicle registration, taxes, voting, and insurance, even when they spent much of the year moving between jobs and campsites.

The Workampers’ Experience

A woman who had previously worked at Adventureland described her experience in sharp contrast to the cheerful recruitment display. She recalled poor management, difficult interactions with the public, oppressive heat, and coworkers who felt mistreated and quit. She also recounted one worker leaving abruptly in a motorhome while its awning remained staked out. The episode conveyed frustration through an observable act of departure, rather than through the park’s carefully staged images of employees enjoying the attractions.

When the author visited during a cross-country trip in mid-July the following year, the employee campground held recreational vehicles bearing license plates from Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and South Dakota, along with a few tents. Some vehicles appeared to have been stationary long enough for weeds to grow around their tires; tomato plants grew in five-gallon buckets nearby. The setting reflected a work arrangement that could become a temporary home for people whose travel was structured around a season of employment.

Inside the park, staff included both local high-school students and older adults. A clerk in her sixties said that a wage increase had brought pay to $8.50 an hour, which she and her coworkers speculated might reflect competitive pressure after Walmart began paying $9 an hour. Although she had come for part-time work, understaffing had put her on a full-time schedule, and hiring notices remained posted in the middle of the season. Her joke that a ride home by golf cart would be her favorite ride offered a dry counterpoint to the park’s image of work as recreation.

Older Workers and Retirement Insecurity

Adventureland’s reliance on older employees was part of a broader pattern in which retirement increasingly failed to mean a complete withdrawal from work. By 2016, nearly nine million Americans aged sixty-five and older remained employed, a figure reported as 60 percent higher than a decade earlier. The book connects this trend to declining retirement security: the traditional combination of Social Security, private pensions, and savings had weakened as many households lost assets and employers shifted from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k) plans that place more financial risk on individuals.

The consequences appear in the lives of other seasonal workers in the account, though the book does not identify them as Adventureland employees. David Roderick, a seventy-seven-year-old workamper, recalled carrying and loading Christmas trees for long shifts while in his seventies. His pension had been cashed out early during a divorce, and later teaching opportunities abroad were rescinded after employers learned his age. His experience makes visible the pressures behind older adults’ participation in mobile seasonal labor: enthusiasm and adaptability could coexist with lost retirement assets and age barriers to other jobs.

At Adventureland, a seventy-seven-year-old former recruiter took pride in the range of older colleagues she had seen at work. She described employees with age-related disabilities performing assigned tasks, including an employee who used a wheelchair and counted riders with a clicker at the water park, and a one-armed ride supervisor. At the Tornado rollercoaster, the author met an operator who said he was eighty-one. These examples complicate any assumption that an older workforce was uniform, while showing how individual workers’ abilities and the tasks assigned to them varied.

Accident and Aftermath

Less than a year after the author’s visit, Steve Booher, a sixty-eight-year-old retired postal carrier and pastor working at Adventureland, died in an on-the-job accident at the Raging River ride. He was helping passengers disembark when the conveyor belt carrying the rafts started before the process was complete. The book identifies the accident as a workplace tragedy but does not present it as evidence that every job or ride at the park was unsafe.

Adventureland reopened the Raging River the following day. Two months later, after an investigation, state workplace regulators issued a violation notice requiring safety upgrades and imposing a $4,500 fine. The sequence places the park’s upbeat recruitment imagery beside the consequences of a workplace failure: seasonal amusement employment was not simply a chance for older travelers to remain active, but a job with responsibilities and safety obligations. The notice and fine established a concrete regulatory aftermath, even as the ride’s prompt reopening underscored how quickly the park resumed its operation.