THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Fall 2018 33 TheCoastalBend.com Read the whole story about Jeff Henry and the tragic death of 10-year-old Caleb Schwab at Schlitterbahn Kansas City, and the charges of 2nd Degree Murder and others that followed. ICouldDieGoingDownthisRide in our Early Summer 2018 Edition TheCoastalBend.com Love him or hate him, Kanye is allowed to be eccentric. He has the talent to back it up. Did Steve Jobs have the right to be a reprehensible human being for most of his adult life? Sure, he did. He invented the friggin’ iPhone! And to be sure, being a total jerk can be called eccentric. They got away with it—Mel Gibson the Jew- hating drunk, but one hell of an actor/direc- tor—made millions, billions maybe, for movie studios and hundreds of workers. That feeds people, and when you feed people you can damn-near get away with murder. Jeff Henry fed people—thousands of them in any given year—including those who were employed at his family’s business, Schlitter- bahn Waterparks & Resorts, his construction company, Henry & Sons, on his ranch, oper- ating his private planes, or indirectly at any of thousands of waterparks across the world, where his water ride designs entertain and thrill millions. Over a career of some 40 years, Henry earned his spot at the top of the water- park industry through the success of rides and features that he developed at Schlitterbahn in New Braunfels, then duplicated and sold to other operators around the world. Henry’s single, wealthiest client was probably the Sultan of Dubai, for whom he conceived and built Aquaventure, the water- park at Atlantis Dubai, one of the world’s most luxurious and exclusive beach resorts. Henry also created the astonishing underwater public spaces and hotel rooms at Atlantis, considered a cornerstone accomplishment in the hospital- ity industry. Those who met Jeff Henry in a private set- ting (not in front of a crowd or cameras) were, by intention, not disappointed with the man whose reputation preceded him—that of the renegade autodidact who wore as a badge of honor the resume of a kid who dropped out of high school so he could work full-time building the original Schlitterbahn on the Comal River in New Braunfels. The Henry’s family-owned campground that had quickly become one of the top tourist attractions in Texas, putting the sleepy Hill Country town of New Braunfels on the map in the process, was Jeff’s destiny—and he knew it as a teenager. It was a career gamble that paid off, and by the time we met him in 2015 in Corpus Christi, Henry was already a reality TV star in addition to being the crown prince of the waterpark industry. He carried around a large sketch pad onto which ideas bled from his ro- bust imagination, and on almost any topic, the one most at-hand at the time being the final stage of construction on Schlitterbahn Cor- pus Christi Waterpark & Resort on North Pa- dre Island. The pad was his tool for pitching ideas as well. In one sitting Henry described and visually depicted his plan for the final build-out of the Corpus Christi park, which boasted the longest man-made “Lazy River” feature ever made—over 8,000 linear feet. He was looking for $20 million or so to construct 200 “Tree Haus” cabins, similar to those at the New Braunfels resort, along and over the Lazy River. Later in the same conversation, Henry de- picted on his sketch pad his idea for a floating, offshore hotel, casino and fishing resort com- plex, to be built in international waters in the Gulf of Mexico. He told us how he was purchas- ing and accumulating dozens of retired drilling platforms at a shipyard up the coast, and how they would be used as the infrastructure for his oceanic mega-resort. He figured the cost at about $900 million, a tad more than the Schlit- terbahn build-out, in case we knew of any in- terested multi-billionaires. He joked that he might pitch the idea to his buddy the Sultan— after all he had CAD drawings with him of the next world’s tallest waterslide that he wanted to build in the dream city of Dubai. A year earlier, Henry had opened the then- current world’s tallest, and fastest, and most thrilling, waterside ever built—Verrückt—at Schlitterbahn Kansas City. For a man who kept a daily count of the estimated remaining days of his life, and who outperformed, and out- accomplished, every expectation of him after he dropped out of high school to work in the family business full time, Jeff Henry was a man fully focused on building a legacy as an inven- tor and entertainer. Many folks in Corpus Christi and on North Padre Island, however, we less impressed and not as interested in Henry’s history and as- pirations. They were interested in the new Schlitterbahn waterpark that had promised to ECCENTRIC. NO DOUBT. HEWAS QUITE ECCENTRIC.WHAT GIVES A GUYTHE RIGHTTO BE ECCENTRIC,ANYWAY? HE’S GOTTA HAVE SOME KIND OF GAMETO BACK IT UP, OR IT’S JUST A STUPID ACT. Left: Brother Gary, Dad Bob and Jeff Henry in happy times building Schlitterbahn. Above: Underwater hotel room created by Jeff Henry at Atlantis Dubai Resort.