Gangs escape from jail in Marengo

MARENGO — Tom Atwood and his wife Barb, of Gilmore City, trap people for a living. The couple provides escape rooms for parties and fundraisers.

“We bring them in, and we set up a whole new room,” said Atwood as he waited for a team to escape an 1890s jail in the Iowa Valley Elementary School gymnasium last week.

Friends of the Marengo Public Library brought the escape room to town as part of the Marengo July 3 celebration. Every time slot sold out.

Friends asked for just one room, said Atwood, but Escape Room Parties could have filled the entire gym. “We have 25 different rooms,” said Atwood. “And we cover eight states.”

The Atwoods’ first escape room, created in 2014, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s underground bunker, said Atwood.

The Atwoods owned a fun park with go carts and a climbing wall, “things like that,” said Atwood. Only about 30 escape rooms existed in the U.S. when the Atwoods added one to their fun park.

“In 2018, we started going mobile,” said Atwood, transporting escape rooms to events. In 2020, they sold the fun park, but kept the mobile part. It’s been a good move.

“We had about 36 after-proms and after-graduation parties,” said Atwood.

Up to 10 people can form a team in an escape room. “They’re going to need to follow clues, work together, solve puzzles,” Atwood said.

Participants in Marengo last week had to escape a jail, but some escape rooms have different goals.

“We have a kids’ one that has a jungle theme,” said Atwood. Children have to find a beacon to rescue an explorer.

In the room with the pirate theme, children have to identify a ship that is wrecked and find a treasure.

“This was built as an adult room,” said Atwood of the jail escape, but Escape Room Parties has children’s versions for grades 4-8. Clues are based on things children would know.

“Barb designs all of our rooms,” said Atwood.

One escape room for adults is from the Cold War era. The Soviets have stolen an American submarine (the U.S.S. Unicorn) and taken back to their base (the Hornet’s Nest). The Soviets are converting the sub for their own use.

A S.E.A.L. team drops participants onto the submarine, and they have to decipher the Russian language, unlock what the Soviets have locked and escape with the sub.

The creators went to Little Rock and took photos of the U.S.S. Razorback to make an authentic backdrop for the sub.

“We tend to do a lot of research on them,” said Atwood. Especially for historical escape rooms.

“We work with museums quite a bit, so we want to make sure they’re accurate.”

The 1890s jail escape room is historically accurate, Atwood said, except for safety measures. No one is actually locked in, and the participants are monitored with cameras.

Friends of the Marengo Public Library chose to have a 50-minute escape room. That leaves 10 minutes to reset before the next group comes in.

Most are 50 minutes, but that’s too long for after-prom, said Atwood, so his company provides 25-minute escapes with five minutes to reset.

“We don’t shorten the puzzle,” Atwood said. Participants play two halves of the game at the same time.

“It’s become quite popular, and it’s a lot of fun,” Atwood said. “We’ve had eight after-proms in one night.”

The company had rooms in three locations last weekend. “I was in Elgin. Barb was in Westbrook, Minnesota.” Another team set up in Ogden.

Escape Room Parties has a team as far west at Great Falls, Montana.

Some organizations use the escape rooms as fundraisers, said Atwood, but some use them to bring in a crowd. One fair that offered the escape room for free kept track of participants. Out of 150, 80 were newcomers to the fair.

Two companies that were merging booked five rooms for five hours a day for five days so the employees of the two companies could learn to work together, Atwood said.

The escapes are monitored, but not recorded. If participants get stuck on a clue, they can ask for a hint.

“Some escape rooms are proud of how hard they are,” said Atwood. His company tries to make the escapes challenging but not took difficult.

“We want it to be fun,” Atwood said.

Mary Rusbult, of Marengo, gathered a team of family members that escaped the jail with about 14 minutes to spare.

“It was my idea,” said Rusbult. She spends a lot of time at the Marengo library and heard about the escape room.

Daughter Shannon Fruendt, of Victor, thought it was a good way to spend time with her mother.

“You always like a mystery,” daughter Shelly Van Scoyoc, of Belle Plaine, told her mother.

“It was pretty difficult,” said Fruendt, but it was fun. She’d do it again, she said.

Finding the first clue was the most difficult,” said Van Scoyoc. The team needed a hint for the first clue.

Van Scoyoc said she’s been in an escape room before. It was a team -building exercise for work in Cedar Rapids. “It was probably more difficult,” she said.

Rusbult isn’t sure she’d repeat the adventure. “My mind doesn’t work with those clues,” she said.

Rusbult did get into character, though. “I tried to tell the sheriff we weren’t with those people.”