An Insurance Company Invented a Saturday Night
For 26 seasons, a theme park grew up around a radio show that an insurance company started in 1925. It closed on the last day of 1997, still profitable, and a shopping mall took its place.
Kettle Corn and River Water
The smell reached the parking lot before the gate did.
Kettle corn and sunscreen. River water sloshing off the rafts and drying on hot concrete.
Somewhere past the turnstiles, a banjo was already playing. There always seemed to be a banjo playing.
The rides were real rides. One roller coaster was named for an old train song.
A rapids ride soaked whoever sat in the back of the raft.
But families stayed for the stages. Bluegrass in one corner, gospel in another, young performers in matching outfits singing to rows of folding chairs.
At dusk, many of them walked past the gift shops to a brick auditorium at the edge of the grounds. Saturday night was the reason they had driven from Alabama.
The park was called Opryland. The show in the auditorium was the Grand Ole Opry.
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The Station Was Named After a Sales Pitch
The show was older than the park by nearly half a century. It was also older than the idea that it was entertainment.
The company behind it was founded in Nashville in 1900. It sold sick and accident insurance, and an early policy cost about five cents a week, collected in person by an agent at the door.
It had customers across the South and very little money for advertising. In 1925 a young vice president named Edwin Craig pushed for a radio station on the fifth floor of the home office. Some executives called it his toy.
The call letters stood for the company motto: We Shield Millions.
That November, the station put an old fiddler on the air.
Agents carried free tickets to the show. A farmer who had heard the station on Saturday night already knew the name printed on the agent's card.
The music drew the listener. The listener let the agent in.
The most famous stage in country music was built to help a man with a premium book get past the screen door.
Listeners Became Visitors
The signal did the traveling. In 1932 the station went to 50,000 watts, and at night its clear channel reached much of North America.
Radio made the show famous. Fame made people want to see it in person, and the old downtown hall was hot, cramped and too small.
So the company built a destination around the broadcast. The park opened on the edge of Nashville in 1972. A new Opry House opened beside it in March 1974, and a sitting president played the piano on opening night.
A hotel followed in 1977. The trip had a shape now: rides in the afternoon, the show at night, a room down the path.
By the late 1980s, the park drew nearly 2.5 million visitors a year.
The New Owner Had No Policies to Sell
In 1982 a Houston insurer won a hostile takeover of the Nashville company. It wanted the policies. It had no use for a barn dance.
In 1983 the show, the park, the hotel and the radio station went to an Oklahoma broadcasting family, for a price reported at roughly $250 million.
The new owner was in the entertainment business, and that changed the arithmetic. The show no longer had to open doors for agents. Each piece had to earn its own return.
Measured that way, the park looked different. It ran from about March to October and sat dark in winter. It needed a new ride every few years to bring families back, and it had no land left to grow.
The hotel, meanwhile, had grown to almost 2,000 rooms and filled them with conventions all year.
The park had been built to bring the radio audience to Nashville. Now it was being compared with a building that never closed.
A Mall Where the Coasters Stood
The closing was announced on Halloween 1997. The park was still profitable and still drawing about 2 million people a season.
It closed on December 31, 1997. The rides were sold within weeks for about $10 million.
In May 2000, a shopping mall opened on the land where the coasters had stood.
The Opry House stayed where it was.
Entertainment That Pays for Something Else
The method outlived the park.
A tire company publishes a restaurant guide. A toy company makes feature films.
A drink company runs a media house and once filmed a man jumping from the edge of space.
The show is the gift. The product is somewhere else.
It holds for as long as the owner remembers what the show was for.
The policies were paid out long ago. The fiddle is still on the radio.
