In the summer of 1994, 18-year-old Robert Bustle followed his family to Ohio, where his father had just been stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He had just graduated high school, and Bustle needed a way to spend the summer while saving up for his freshmen year at the University of Cincinnati.
Most kids in the area spent their summers working at Kings Island, an amusement park in Cincinnati, but Bustle wanted nothing to do with the park.
“I did not want to work there, primarily because my parents met working there the year that the park opened in 1972,” Bustle said. “I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
But he had a hard time finding a job that summer, so he walked into the employment office at the park and asked for a job operating rides. All the ride operator jobs were taken, so they offered him a job in merchandising where he sold cigarettes, lights and disposable cameras out of the guest service gift shop.
The summer came and went, Bustle started his freshman year of college, thinking he was done with the theme park business.
“I went to school that fall and did not intend to go back, but they called me that next spring,” he recalled. “They offered me a job to come back as a lead. So I did, and then I think it was probably sometime in the middle of the summer of ’95 that I realized I was kind of hooked.”
Thirty-two years later, Bustle was hired as Six Flags Fiesta Texas’ top on-site leader, overseeing a sprawling operation of roller coasters, restaurants, live entertainment and hundreds of employees.
“It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. It was just a summer job,” Bustle said. “That’s all it was.”
Life in a theme park
Bustle describes his role less as directing every part of the park and more as making sure those teams have what they need, keeping them thinking months ahead and preserving an experience that, once the gates open, should feel effortless to the people visiting.
Bustle took over this summer after the departure of former park president Jeffrey Siebert.
“I truly am just a caretaker for the park,” Bustle said. “I just view my responsibility here as being one that continues to progress what Fiesta Texas means to our employees, to our guests, and to San Antonio.”
In practice, that means Bustle’s days are a mix of meetings, calls and walks through the park, while keeping an eye on everything from finances and season pass sales to ride operations and events still months away.
It also means living on the park’s schedule.
When most people are off, Bustle and his team are often at their busiest. They work weekends and holidays, start early and stay late. During Fright Fest, when Fiesta Texas can remain open until 11 p.m., some employees arrive before sunrise and others remain hours after closing to reset the park for another day.
“It’s super rewarding, but it’s not easy,” Bustle said. “There’s a lot of sacrifices that all of the employees that work for us, especially the leadership team, make.”
Spending so much of life at a theme park also means the people working alongside you can become a big part of your life. His parents met working at a theme park, he met his wife at a theme park and his sister also met her husband working at a theme park. Bustle said that experience is not unique to his family.
“A lot of times your circle of influence or your circle of familiarity really is at the park,” Bustle said. “So if you’re going to meet anybody, sometimes it’s just at the park.”
Bustle said that closeness is the norm in an industry where many of the people running amusement parks today started much like he did — as teenagers looking for a first job or a way to spend the summer.
At Fiesta Texas employees are hired as young as 15. Some will work a season and move on. Others will begin climbing through the ranks, eventually becoming the next generation of park leaders across the country.
Bustle has a simple explanation for why people who enter the industry as teenagers sometimes never quite leave it.
“It gets in your blood,” he said.
It’s all in the details
While a small army of employees keeps the park running, Bustle wants most of the work happening behind the scenes to be largely invisible to guests.
Walking through the park, he keeps his head on a swivel, scanning for anything out of the norm, from missing signs and open doors to ride sound effects that have become etched into his memory.
“If Doctor Diabolical is not screaming from the top of Doctor Diabolical every time a train gets hung up there, I’ll notice that,” Bustle said. “A guest won’t notice it’s not there because they don’t know it’s supposed to be.”
Those details help preserve what Bustle sees as one of the central purposes of a theme park: giving people somewhere to escape everyday life for a few hours.
At Fiesta Texas, that idea is built into the park itself. Los Festivales draws from the state’s Spanish heritage, while Spassburg reflects the influence of German settlers. The Boardwalk evokes the Texas Gulf Coast, Crackaxle Canyon takes visitors into the Old West and Rockville recreates a 1950s American town.
“It’s one thing to say that you have those areas, but then it’s another thing to go in and say that they truly are thematically true to what it would be like to be in that time period or be in that area of Texas, and to feel that,” Bustle said.
Even lunch gets a backstory.
Walking through Crackaxle Canyon, Bustle stopped at La Cocina de Cobre, a Tex-Mex restaurant the park opened this summer in the former home of Bubba’s River Cafe. In the fictional world of the park, Bubba retired and his cousin came to town to open something new, Bustle said.
“We try to make sure that everything’s intentional,” Bustle said.
Changing with the seasons
Keeping that illusion intact becomes more complicated when the park itself is constantly changing.
When Bustle walked through Fiesta Texas in August, Fright Fest was still weeks away. Behind the attractions, however, the park’s entertainment and theming teams were already building the sets, props and environments that would transform it for the Halloween season.
Much of that work is done in-house, allowing the same employees who help maintain Fiesta Texas’ themed worlds throughout the year to temporarily reinvent them for the season.
One of the more elaborate projects was a haunted house built around a fictional movie theater. The team created six fake horror movies, complete with trailers, then turned each into a different experience inside the attraction.
For all the work he now oversees for Fright Fest, Bustle was never much of a Halloween person himself. He largely avoided haunted houses until becoming park manager made experiencing them, as he put it, “part of the job.”
Last year, he went through all of Fiesta Texas’ haunted houses and began visiting others at different parks.
“That’s probably the biggest surprise to me in this role,” Bustle said. “That I’m OK with haunted houses.”
By the time guests are walking through those finished attractions, however, Bustle and his team are already thinking about what comes next.
After Halloween decorations come down on Nov. 1, the team has roughly two and a half weeks to finish transforming the park for Holiday in the Park. Meanwhile, planning is already underway for next year’s Mardi Gras and Viva La Fiesta celebrations.
The future of the park
Some changes made at the park last only a season. Others will reshape the park for years to come.
On the outskirts of Crackaxle Canyon, one of those changes is already taking shape.
Werewolf Gorge, a new family roller coaster scheduled to open in 2027, represents the largest single-attraction investment in Fiesta Texas history, according to Bustle. The coaster will debut as the park celebrates its 35th anniversary and stretch 4,120 feet, making it the longest coaster at Fiesta Texas.
But just as with the restaurant, haunted houses and themed lands elsewhere in the park, Bustle said the attraction is being designed as more than a ride.
“The experience really starts when you come into the area, when you enter the queue,” Bustle said.
Werewolf Gorge will extend the fictional world of Crackaxle Canyon through the story of Jasper Bunyan, who has turned his encounters with mysterious creatures into a roadside attraction and Museum of Cryptids. Guests will encounter artifacts and pieces of that story while waiting in line before onboard audio continues the narrative once they board the coaster.
For Bustle, Werewolf Gorge is one piece of what he hopes Fiesta Texas becomes over the next several years.
He wants the park to remain true to the worlds that have defined it for decades while improving its rides, food and entertainment. More than any new attraction, though, he wants Fiesta Texas to be known for its employees.
“I want us to continue to be one of the friendliest, if not the friendliest, theme park in the country,” Bustle said.
As for his legacy, Bustle has one goal in mind.
“Its about ensuring that, when I’m done with my time here, whenever that may be, that I’ve left the park better than I found it,” Bustle said. “Which is a big task because the park was left to me in a really good place.”
