Thomas Etheredge hit Wichita with equal parts bang and bluster in 2004, and that’s probably why the rise and fall of his western theme park reached almost mythical proportions in the past year.
But there’s nothing mythical about what happened at 77th Street North and I-135. In fact, entrepreneurial experts don’t see anything particularly unusual there.
To the tin-foil hat crowd: If you know where this mythical bag of money Etheredge gleaned from Wild West World is, call me. There isn’t a shred of evidence, either anecdotal or in court documents, to suggest anything but the obvious: Etheredge saw the future a year ago when he told me his family would be ruined if the park didn’t succeed. Like most entrepreneurs with a dream, he went all in. And like about 80 percent of them, he lost.
In fact, Wichita entrepreneurship guru Fran Jabara sees Etheredge in the same light as a whole raft of entrepreneurs who’ve succeeded and failed.
Entrepreneurs are “idea people,” Jabara said, not detail people. They live on a tenuous razor’s edge, with success as close as the expertise they surround themselves with and failure as close as their own egos.
When you look at Etheredge in that light, he drifts toward a sympathetic figure: a man scarred by his past business failures to the point that he was unable and unwilling to hear the voices around him urging a different path for the park.
Etheredge isn’t the only person who lost in the Wild West World saga. But he did indeed lose.