Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park

by Andy Mulvihill

I’m standing some sixty feet in the air at the mouth of an enclosed water slide, padded hockey equipment cinched tightly to my arms, legs, and torso. The artificial bulk is intended to protect my adolescent body against whatever trauma is waiting at the other end.

The hope is that, if I jump in, my momentum will push me through the improbable three-hundred-and-sixty degree vertical turn at the far end and out the other side.

According to my older sister, Julie, I’m the first human to make the attempt. Prior to this, someone had tied off the ankles and sleeves of an old janitorial jumpsuit, stuffed it with sand, and fabricated a head out of a plastic grocery bag. The makeshift dummy cleared the loop but emerged decapitated.

Today, a mechanical engineer would use computer software to calculate the exact pitch of the chute required for riders to make it through successfully. An army of lawyers would pour over the injury statistics for comparable attractions and demand changes based on risk mitigation. A feasibility expert would evaluate plans and anticipate logistical issues. This being 1980, none of that happened.

(Later, the fumes from this same glue, combined with a lack of ventilation, will cause workers erecting other rides to pass out, angering my father with their reduced productivity.)

Bellowing is a standard method of communication for him. It’s strange to see him look so small.

The Loop is supposed to be a flagship attraction. It looks like it promises total mayhem, an illusion of risk that is the backbone of any amusement park. Except that here, in the place my father calls Action Park, risk has never been an illusion.

Staring into the ABC cameras, Disney beamed. He had willed his $17 million dream into reality. Watching him, you’d never realize the shit show people were walking into.

Traffic into the park backed up for more than seven miles. When families finally pulled in, kids nursing full bladders popped out of their cars and began urinating in the parking lot. A plumber’s strike meant that most of the drinking fountains weren’t working, a problem exacerbated by the one-hundred-degree heat. The temperature was melting the freshly poured asphalt and turning the pavement into quicksand. Counterfeiters had forged tickets, so almost 30,000 people, double the expected number, stuffed themselves into the park. Over capacity, the ferryboat ride nearly capsized. It was bedlam.

Disney had no choice but to open. He had agreed to the opening-day broadcast months in advance, and there was no rescheduling. Backed into a corner, he did the best he could. When a ride malfunctioned...

Women snapped their shoes in half on the gooey paths. Children searched for water like they were stranded in the desert. On television, though, there were only smiling faces. Walt knew where to point the camera.

My father’s name was Gene Mulvihill, and, before he opened Action Park, he had no experience of any kind running an amusement operation. In contrast to Disney’s carefully conceived fantasy lands, my father pieced together a series of ambitious and often ill-advised attractions on the side of a ski mountain in rural New Jersey that he had come to own virtually by accident.

The crowds grew from a handful of curious locals to more than a million people annually. We went from selling off-brand soda and taking out local newspaper ads to getting a Pepsi sponsorship and seeing our logo on McDonald’s tray liners. My father, who had simply wanted to find a way to make money off a ski resort in the summer, found himself an unlikely pioneer in the amusement industry.

A roller coaster, thrilling as it may be, asks nothing of its occupants, and each ride is the same as the last. My father seized upon the idea that we were all tired of being coddled, of society dictating our behaviors and lecturing us on our vices.

Guests riding down an asbestos chute on a plastic cart could choose whether to adopt a leisurely pace or tear down at thirty miles per hour and risk hitting a sharp turn that would eject them into the woods. They decided when to dive off a cliff and whether to aim for open water or their friend’s head. They could listen when the attendants told them to stay in the speedboats, or they could tumble into the marsh water and risk getting bit by a snapping turtle.

They careened down towering water slides that spit them into shallow pools at such velocity that they sometimes overshot and landed in the dirt, laughing or bleeding—often both. They lost their grip on swinging ropes and plunged into freezing mountain water that made their bodies seize up in shock while their friends cheered on their encroaching hypothermia. They emerged from lakes stinking of spilled diesel fuel from overworked boat motors, too delirious with enthusiasm to realize that they were now flammable.

“People like not being restricted,” my father told reporters who inevitably asked why his customers were bleeding. “They want to be in control.” His philosophy became the park’s identity. My dad didn’t have the budget to stand out from an increasingly crowded amusement industry. He set himself apart by promising guests that they were in charge of their own thrills.

The New York Times called my father’s creation “the area’s most distinctive expression of the amusement park in our age.” They also called it a “human zoo.” Both of these things were true.

Two of my brothers met their wives there. I spent ten summers walking through a tangible manifestation of our father’s psyche, every ride and attraction a tribute to his impulses. I bled into the dirt as it erupted around me. I watched it grow from a small assembly of modest attractions to a sprawling adventure land that even the mighty Disney attempted to emulate.

Action Park has become a campfire tale, an urban legend, a can-you-believe-this snapshot of our culture that seemed to predate liability laws and lawyers. The state of New Jersey had never seen anything like it and had little idea how to control it. My father loomed large in the small town of Vernon, keeping hundreds of people employed and using his political savvy—as well as his sometimes-questionable legal means—to make sure his passion project remained afloat.

The price for its success was sometimes paid by visitors, not all of whom came out alive, and sometimes by my father. The state once held a three-day hearing to discuss his outlandish approach to business and how best to deal with him. I’m pretty sure that never happened to Walt.

It is like jumping into a cement mixer. The blackness envelops me, the momentum pulling my body down the slide as though it were vacuum-pressured. There is a brief sensation of being upended by the circle, my back sliding along the foam surface before it levels out, and I’m returned to an upright position. There is no sense of up or down, only the g-forces tugging at my limbs the way one would torture a Stretch Armstrong doll.

I want to tell him it felt like being flushed out of a toilet bowl, that there is nothing pleasant about it. The creases around his eyes and the smile taking over his face make me swallow my words. “It’s great,” I tell him. “It’s awesome.”

After my triumphant test ride, the next person to slide down the Loop without padding or a helmet smashes his face into the wall of the tube when he hits that first terrible corner, losing his two front teeth. The guy after him isn’t much luckier. He cuts his arm on the teeth, which are still stuck in the slide.

No one would hear of this for years. Like Walt, my father knew exactly whe...

Years later, when Vanity Fair profiled him for allegedly swindling the US ambassador to France in a real estate deal that went south, they referred to him as a “rural schemer” and a “minor legend” on Wall Street. He took offense to both labels. “Rural?” he said. “Minor?”

He erected a gymnasium with an indoor basketball court. We had a pool and a tennis court, the latter of which was lit so he could play at night, striking balls with Bruce Lee–like groans—ki-yahh! Ay-yahh! There was enough land for impromptu baseball, football, and soccer games, and enough trees to get away with hiding Playboy magazines in hollow trunks.

When my mother was pregnant with their first child, he began selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door-to-door. He would barge into homes, launching into his sales patter and demonstrating how easy it was to assemble the cleaner. (It was not easy at all without practice, as customers soon found out.)

When he realized he was better at the stock market than his boss, he decided to go into business for himself. His staff ballooned, filling up multiple offices in New York and New Jersey.

The secret to his success, he said, was motivating his salesmen by stoking their egos. There were lavish parties with nine-hundred-pound ice sculptures and car giveaways, trips and flowing booze, competitions and trophies. Once he gave a six-foot award to a salesman less than five feet tall, the gathering erupting in laughter as the man tried to drag it back to his seat.

“You have to call him the Great . . . Joe Stone,” he said. “What?” said my younger brother Jimmy. “The Great . . . Joe Stone,” my father said. “The Great Joe Stone,” I said, happy to help. “No!” he snapped. “A pause! The Great . . . Joe Stone.” We did as we were told. Joe Stone beamed the entire night.

My father was strict about schoolwork and chores. The Marine Corps instilled in him a love of militant structure. He wore a buzz cut for most of my early childhood, letting his hair grow out only when the culture of the ’70s demanded it.

Once, on a family trip to Colorado, he visited a friend who raised organic, grass-fed lamb. We brought home metal suitcases full of frozen raw meat, our clothes shunted off to the side, the meat’s juices beginning to drip as it thawed on the drive back home. Our car smelled like a butcher shop for weeks.

One February, he was playing a highly competitive game of tennis with a friend of his named Bob Brennan in New York City. With the score tied after two hours of play, the club closed. My father tried to persuade the staff to leave the lights on, but they refused. It was snowing, and no other indoor club was open. “What we’ll do,” my father told Bob, “is we’ll go to Puerto Rico.”

There never seemed to be a barrier between his impulses and his actions. The voice in our heads that says stop or wait or let’s think this over was silent for him. Which explains the mountain.

The town covered sixty-eight square miles, most of it connected by roads that wouldn’t allow vehicles to exceed forty miles per hour. No one seemed to mind. The atmosphere was relaxed and unhurried. There was one high school, one bank, and no fast-food restaurants.

Legend had it that when George Washington’s troops passed through hills thirty miles south during the Revolution, they began constructing a barricade at Washington’s behest to stave off the boredom that permeated the area. The sign read: FORT NONSENSE. It was a hint of things to come.

Fearing an exodus, Great Gorge countered by opening a petting zoo. It was a mistake. A worker fended off an attacking ostrich by stuffing a paintbrush in its mouth. It died of lead poisoning.

At one point, someone brought in a kangaroo that would box the maintenance workers. The kangaroo went undefeated, a marsupial George Foreman.

While my father looked forward to a return on his investment, he was almost as enthusiastic about getting free admission to the resort. Soon, we were all careening down the mountain, the entire family ebullient that this bastardized version of Vermont was so close to us.

Eh it was probably similar

In the arms race to compete with Great Gorge, the Vernon Valley people overextended themselves. They had spent too much and endured too many warm winters. The banks commenced foreclosure, and my father, smelling blood, bought the resort for pennies on the dollar in 1972.

A large chunk of land running through the top of the mountain was leased from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, a fact that would later come back to haunt him.)

“Guess what?” he told my mother. “We own Vernon Valley.” He might as well have said that we now owned a salvage-diving operation or a circus. “Why?” she asked. “I decided it might be fun,” he said. That was all the explanation she was going to get.

He offered night skiing, with trails illuminated by floodlights, and kept the slopes open twenty-four hours for all-night ski parties. He hired Suzy Chaffee, an Olympic alpine ski racer later known for her ChapStick commercials and made-for-TV movies like Ski Lift to Death, to perform demonstrations. During a fuel crisis and the resulting gas shortages, he partnered with the local pump station and bought tanks of fuel so no one would be stranded if the stations decided to close on the weekends.

“We’re taking the risk out of skiing,” he told the press. “Not the risk of personal injury, of course. The risk of the weather not cooperating.” He mastered the weather. People came.

He kept the booze flowing in the Hexagon Lounge, a six-sided bar that allowed the unpolished locals to mingle with families from the Upper West Side.

Amid the increasing flow of customers, it was easy to get in the lift line without a ticket. During one busy Saturday, someone cut in line wearing an old pair of wooden skis. An employee asked where his lift pass was. When he didn’t produce it, the employee ran to a utility room and burst out wielding an ax, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

Guests screamed and fled the scene as best they could, their feet bolted to giant sticks. My father had put two of the maintenance workers up to it, both for his own amusement and as a cautionary tale for line cutters. The story spread. People paid.

By the mid-1970s, more people were learning to ski at Vernon Valley than anywhere else in the country.

Despite the success of the resort, my father could never come to terms with the idea that he owned something he could monetize only a few months out of the year. Even at its zenith—with the ski parties and the corporate retreat specials—the best he could hope for was one hundred days of business, and even that was only by openly defying the laws of nature with snowmaking.