The attraction that began Morey's seaside amusement business was discovered beside a Florida shopping center. John Margolies photographed Morey's Pier in Wildwood in 1978, nine years after its first summer.[1][2] The business grew by adapting ideas encountered elsewhere to the concentrated leisure of the boardwalk.
The company's 2019 employee handbook locates the beginning in an encounter elsewhere. In 1968, brothers Bill and Will Morey saw a twelve-lane fiberglass slide near a shopping center in Fort Lauderdale. Bill already ran boardwalk concessions; Will worked in construction and development. Their amusement business began in 1969 with the attraction known as Wipe Out.[2]
That origin is an instructive reversal of the usual souvenir story. The novelty did not simply arise from something unique to Wildwood. An idea traveled from one commercial setting to another. On a boardwalk, the slide could become a destination in a different arrangement of movement, leisure, and neighboring businesses. The underlying apparatus might travel, while its place in a visitor's day changed.
An interview-based account in Family Business Magazine corroborates the Florida scouting trip and summer 1969 opening. It describes continual additions and reinvention in the family enterprise.[3] At an amusement pier, the familiar promise is that there may be something unfamiliar to try.
The company's handbook describes a major expansion at Mariner's Landing in 1985, including a large Ferris wheel and the Raging Waters water park.[2] The slide had established an enterprise that could expand into several kinds of amusement, from brief descents to an extended afternoon in the water.
The most revealing detail may be the first slide's ordinary point of discovery: beside a Florida shopping center. A roadside archive is full of places that appear singular. Their histories sometimes reveal exchange, adaptation, and alert observation behind the spectacle. Morey's offers one such case, in which an attraction encountered on a trip became the starting point for a different seaside landscape.
