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When a yearly family
vacation turned into a family business, Peter Herschend’s
career path was set. His family owns Silver Dollar City,
a theme park that has drawn people to Branson, Mo., for
four decades. Photo by Rob Hill
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Selling
the Way Life Was
Note: This story was published originally
in the winter 2004 issue of MIZZOU, the magazine of the MU Alumni
Association.
By John Beahler
Peter Herschend, BS BA ’58, was barely
a teen-ager when he and his older brother, Jack, started making
an annual vacation pilgrimage with their parents, Hugo and Mary,
from the Chicago suburbs to the Ozark hills near Branson, Mo.
Back
in Winnetka, Ill., they lived a comfortable, middle-class life
in a neighborhood with paved streets, electricity and running
water. “When we came down here to Branson, we only had
one of those — electricity, and that had arrived only
two years earlier,” Herschend recalls. Anyone who has
driven Branson’s
neon-bathed boulevards in recent years can testify that electricity
no longer is in short supply.
Now, millions of tourists make
the pilgrimage to Branson. They are drawn by the area’s
scenic beauty as well as its star-studded country music shows,
theme parks and outlet malls. The jewel in Branson’s rhinestone
crown is still one of its oldest attractions:
Silver
Dollar City, the family-oriented theme park Herschend’s
family started in 1960.
The theme park is no Johnny Paycheck-come-lately
in Branson, and the reason for its four decades of success is
not rocket science, Herschend says. “I think what we sell
at Silver Dollar City is a way life was. Is it tongue-in-cheek?
Absolutely. But I think we all, young or old, have to have a
sense of where we came from and who we are.”
Silver Dollar
City got its start when Hugo and Mary Herschend leased a down-at-the-heels
tourist attraction called Marvel Cave. Even as youngsters, Herschend
and his brother, Jack, helped at the family business when they
weren’t exploring the Ozark
hills and hollows or rafting, like modern-day Tom Sawyers, through
underground lakes in their very own cave.
After graduating from
Mizzou and a hitch in the service, Herschend was back in Branson
and ready to help his family launch a new enterprise. At first,
the reconstructed frontier settlement they built at the mouth
of the cave was intended to be a distraction for tourists who
were waiting for cave tours.
Nowadays, Silver Dollar City’s
rides, restaurants, country music and old-timey crafts take center
stage. In the early days, everyone pitched in to guide cave tours,
clerk in the general store and add their voices to the songs
and schmaltz of hillbilly street shows.
“We learned through that experience
the value of building a culture together,” Herschend says. “It’s
a culture of family pride, and that’s not the Herschend
family; that’s the Silver Dollar City family.”
Now
called Herschend Family Entertainment, the company has grown
from a mom-pop-and-the-kids tourist cave at the end of a gravel
road into a sprawling, high-tech entertainment empire that includes
the White Water water park, Silver Dollar City Campground, Showboat
Branson Belle and the just-opened Celebration City theme park,
all in Branson. The company also operates Stone Mountain Park
near Atlanta and is an operating partner with Dolly Parton in
her Dollywood theme park and Dolly’s Splash Country water
park, both in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and Dixie Stampede dinner
theaters.
“We all did it together,” Herschend says. “I
think Silver Dollar City has been successful because it’s
a product of people’s hearts and not a product of stone
and wire and wood.”
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