Colorful passenger cars sit vacant. Photo by Urvi Dalal.
Understanding the 50 years of Joyland Amusement Park history helps explain why its future is murky. This is the first part in a series about the park’s past and failed sale.
By Reece Nations, Graduate Editor
MACKENZIE PARK — The gates of Joyland Amusement Park will remain closed this spring for the first time since the park was purchased by Jimmy and Katie Dean in 1973, effectively marking the end of a Lubbock family entertainment era that spanned generations.
The park’s second generation of owners announced it had seen its last season less than one year after celebrating 50 years of operation on Sept. 12, 2022. Difficulties with staffing, recurring floods and keeping the books balanced had made the situation untenable, the Dean family said in a social media post. In addition, instances of vandalism made park maintenance even more difficult than it otherwise would have been.
David Dean, who gradually took over for his parents before becoming president of the corporation in 1993, told The Hub@TTU that the decision was an agonizing one to make because of everything they had withstood.
“Getting through [the COVID-19 pandemic] was really tough, especially for a small business,” Dean said. “It almost wrecked us. But we cussed and we prayed, and we prayed and we cussed, and we got through it. We survived that.”
The business was dissolving mainly because positions were unable to be filled in the post-pandemic economy, he said. It takes considerable effort to keep a park like Joyland up to its standards, and seeing the amount of work it requires discourages some who otherwise would be good candidates. When the writing was finally on the wall, David and his wife Kristi Dean decided to make the news public.
In their post, they thanked the employees who had worked to keep the park running for so many years. Their devotion was one of the reasons for the business’s longevity.
“Never forget the importance of having fun,” the Deans wrote, “for the greatest legacies we can leave are happy memories.”
Photo by Urvi Dalal.
David Dean still felt this way about his business’s history when The Hub talked with him months later. It was worth it for him to struggle to keep operating for so many years to see the smiles it put on peoples’ faces.
That was another reason why he and his wife were ecstatic to learn that investors were willing to step in at the eleventh hour to save Joyland. Suddenly, the auction scheduled for Oct. 10, 2022, was called off after an offer to purchase the park was made.
On Oct 21., 2022, local business owners Jim and Kai Evans along with Darryl and Stephanie Holland announced their intention to take over the park and implement some changes. Joyland would remodel and reopen under the management of another group of people for the first time in more than five decades.
The couples described their collective excitement over the acquisition in joint remarks issued to media outlets.
“We are excited about continuing the Legacy of Joyland and are thankful to have the Dean’s help to guide us through the first season,” Kai Evans said in a written statement.
In another written statement, Darryl Holland said the group’s “combined experience in preserving and promoting legacy businesses in Lubbock” was instrumental in saving the landmark.
It would now be David’s turn to pass the torch along to an energetic, motivated group of people who signaled they were willing to tirelessly dedicate themselves to Lubbock’s only amusement park. Because of this, he thought it’d only be fair to properly outline what they were getting into.
Mackenzie Park Playgrounds becomes Joyland
The sale would have marked the first time the park had new owners since the Deans’ 1973 acquisition.
Previously, the park had a different name: Mackenzie Park Playgrounds. City of Lubbock documents, obtained by The Hub, show that the tract of land was leased to Sam Caplan for a 15-year period that began on Jan. 1, 1956, until Dec. 31, 1971. Like himself, David said, Sam had help from his spouse running the business for many years until it was their time to hand it off.
“Obviously Sam and his wife had some passion,” Dean said, recounting to the best of his ability the park’s pre-Joyland days. “Now they ran the park differently, but everybody’s going to run a park differently. But they were here, and they ran it for all those years.”
Because the city owns the land on which the park sits, the Caplans would have to intermittently renew their lease. Eventually, they relinquished their rights to the lease to William H. “Bill” Plummer in 1971. Plummer, despite his short tenure as its owner, took the initiative to form a corporation for his amusement park business, thereby dubbed “Mackenzie Park Playground, Inc.”
Signage denoting Joyland’s location. Photo by Reece Nations.
When the Deans were first transitioning into the lifestyle necessitated by the business, Plummer stuck around to help them get settled in. David distinctly remembers Plummer managing certain aspects of the park’s operation before leaving.
Ground maintenance was a responsibility delegated to sheep grazing wantonly around the tract. David was an adolescent at the time and recalled an incident involving those sheep and the park’s train.
“It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was running the train that day,” he said, pantomiming. “I took off down the track and all those sheep had settled in the train tunnel. So, I blare my horn at them and almost had to stop the train because those sheep didn’t want to move. It’s where they would settle in on hot summer days. You can imagine what the train tunnel smelled like for years even after the sheep were gone.”
At the time, Dean said the “low-scale and run down” park was comprised of only 13 rides. Over the years, he would watch it blossom into one of Lubbock’s most well-known small businesses. Jimmy, the Dean family’s patriarch, gained experience in the amusement park business through profit-sharing agreements before acquiring Mackenzie Park Playgrounds and repackaging it as Joyland Amusement Park.
“He would buy a ride and he would have it put in whatever park, and either you got a percentage on every ticket sold, you were paid x amount … or whatever happened to be worked out in the details,” he explained.
This facet of the amusement park industry has largely disappeared with the rise of big park chains like Six Flags and Seaworld. In many ways, Jimmy’s fascination with the industry of family entertainment centers paved the way for his son David to take the reins at some point. Once, after quarreling with his dad, David struck out on his own and went to work in a machine shop.
“I loved it out there, but it didn’t have any soul,” Dean said, admitting to being an avid gearhead who enjoys tinkering with machinery. “There wasn’t the smell of cotton candy over there. There weren’t as many smiles on people’s faces. Those things stuck in my mind and kept telling me ‘Hey, you may want to go back to Joyland.’”
Eventually, the number of rides more than doubled and ended at 30 in total by the end of the park’s run. They expanded the midway and introduced water park aspects like the slides, water wars and the log ride. Some things that might seem innocuous to parkgoers have rich, detailed backgrounds.
Take the lion water fountain for instance.
“The lion’s got big history,” Dean boasted.
Purchased around 1974, the lion originally belonged to someone who owned and operated a putt-putt golf course that was going out of business. Jimmy felt that an item with as much character as this particular water fountain shouldn’t just be tossed aside, so he swooped in and added it to the grounds.
Those kinds of things — the lion water fountain, the turtle statue, the toy soldiers guarding the spinning plane ride — were the small touches that left an imprint on people’s memories. Today, all these items are listed for sale as “thematic scenery” and the park’s liquidation website.
There, the park’s oldest ride — a 1917 model “C.W. Parker Historic Carousel Merry-Go-Round” — is listed for sale for $109,000. Arcade equipment, back-of-house items, and many rides and coasters are all still up for grabs as of the time of this writing.
Every ride at Joyland has its own backstory, Dean said. Each one was acquired over time and attempted to supply visitors with newfound exhilaration, stimulating a satisfaction that had not previously been present on the grounds. Each year they would try to add something new to drum business up with.
Kristi, meanwhile, said she would consistently have to rein in David’s ideas whenever they would visit other parks just for fun. His first order of business whenever they would take their family on holiday trips would be to look up amusement parks in the phone book for inspiration they could bring home.
“It’d be like ‘You know we’re on vacation, right?’” Kristi said. “And of course, I’d do the books and always have to remind [David] that we probably couldn’t afford whatever caught his attention.”
Check back with The Hub@TTU for part two of this series on Joyland Amusement Park.
About Reece Nations
