Worlds of Fun: A Chiefs Owner's Big Bet
Near Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City's biggest theme park was conceived by Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt and his business partner Jack Steadman, who is said to have been inspired by a trip to Disneyland. They hired the firm that had built Six Flags and AstroWorld, themed the whole park around Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days, and broke ground in November nineteen seventy-one. Worlds of Fun opened May twenty-sixth, nineteen seventy-three, with a twenty-million-dollar price tag.
The water park Oceans of Fun followed in nineteen eighty-two. Cedar Fair bought the complex in nineteen ninety-five. It remains the major regional amusement park for the Kansas City metro, still operating fifty years after Lamar Hunt bet on a Disneyland dream.
