SeaWorld at sixty
George Millay was a businessman, looking for angles to play. And he was quite good at it. One of his early ventures was the Reef Restaurant, located in Long Beach, CA, where he wanted to build a “submarine bar.” You’d get on an escalator that would take you down into a capsule anchored to the ocean floor. It didn’t work—you couldn’t see anything at all down there. His consultant on the project was Kenny Norris, the curator of creatures at Marineland. Ruminating on the failure, Kenny happened to mention he’d like to build a marine life park on Mission Bay, San Diego. The city was bidding for some type of entertainment project to be located there, so the site was just waiting for someone to come along. George asked why Kenny didn’t do it. “I’m a zoologist, not a business man.” Intrigued, George asked a bunch of questions and got to thinking about it.
Three weeks later an anonymous package arrived in the mail. It was a collection of receipts and other documents that revealed the operating numbers behind the Marineland park. That’s all it took—George called Kenny and asked “Do you want to build a park?” And that’s how SeaWorld began, opening in 1964.
The company would go on to open three more SeaWorld parks (Ohio in 1970, Florida in 1973, and Texas in 1988), though mostly without George and under a revolving door of owners. The full story of SeaWorld and George Millay’s colorful, industry-changing career is well-told in Tim O’Brien’s The Wave Maker. I have an early SeaWorld San Diego booklet, which I’ve scanned below. Click on each one to see the entire image.
