Six Flags Great America in Gurnee will open its 50th season on June 20 with a slate of anniversary events built to lean into the park’s history, from a nightly stage show and parade to a legacy museum, a memory wall in Carousel Plaza and the return of the Ice Cream Parlor in Hometown Square.
The celebration comes as the park prepares to mark 50 years since it debuted on May 29, 1976, and it still carries much of that original identity. Visitors are greeted by the Columbia Carousel and a reflecting pool at the entrance, while the park still features the Whizzer, Hometown Park with three original kids rides, a scenic railway and Looney Tunes characters that have outlasted decades of change.
For Bob Bendorf, the anniversary makes the place feel different in a way that numbers alone cannot. “Just knowing it’s the 50th year, it is a little more special seeing how the park has evolved. It’s our happy place,” he said. The park now has 17 roller coasters and counting, but its legacy still reaches back to the era when families came for strolling minstrels, circus performers and dolphin shows before thrill rides became the main draw.
That evolution has mirrored the growth of Lake County itself, where the annual tourism economy is now nearly $2 billion and the park has long been one of the destination drivers behind it. Six Flags Great America, which calls itself the Thrill Capital of the Midwest, remains one of the county’s most recognizable attractions because it has managed to update itself without erasing its beginning.
John Maguire remembers that beginning clearly. In 1976, when Marriott’s Great America was hiring, he interviewed in the living room of an old farmhouse on Washington Street and then started a shift after gathering with other workers and staff around the reflecting pool for an iconic photo opportunity. He was a soon-to-be Mundelein High School senior at the time, and he said, “Every kid in Lake County wanted to work there.”
Maguire also recalled how the first jobs were not always the glamorous ones children imagined. “Everybody wanted to be a character, but we all ended up in food service or sanitation,” he said. That gap between the park’s fantasy and its day-to-day work is part of what makes the 50th season more than a nostalgia exercise. It is a reminder that the place was built by people who watched it change from the ground up.
The anniversary programming begins June 20, and the park’s mix of throwbacks and new spectacle is meant to make that history visible again to the visitors walking through the gates. The Whizzer still serves as a first thrill ride for many junior coaster fans, and its status as a designated landmark by American Coaster Enthusiasts underscores how much of the original park remains woven into the present. For six flags great america, the next chapter starts by celebrating the one it never fully left behind.
