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

by Andy Mulvihill

Christopher, or Topher, was the youngest of the six kids. He was a cheerful optimist. The park would soon test that.

As a kid, he had made his way through Palisades Amusement Park, a cliffside destination in Bergen County across the Hudson River. Palisades loomed large for people, especially children, in the 1950s and ’60s, advertising in comic books and even leaving a small gap in the fence open for kids who couldn’t afford the admission.

The Cyclone had one mark against it. Like virtually all amusement rides, the experience was predestined. My father’s rides, whatever they might be, had to put the rider in complete control.

Another collection of spinning, mechanical rides was not in his plans. (Not to imply he had plans. That would take long-term financing and patience, neither of which he possessed.)

Where Great Adventure went awry, my father thought, was investing tens of millions of dollars in rides that didn’t provide half the excitement of attractions he could erect for a fraction of the price. He was convinced that increasing the thrill factor was the only way someone on a shoestring budget could compete with the giants of the amusement industry.

A ski-trade publication made mention of a daring new contraption that sounded intriguing. Curious, he traveled all the way to West Germany, where superior foreign engineering had triumphed in creating new ways to accelerate the human body. There, he found a majestic fiberglass slide that undulated and curved down an incline.

As somebody who got road rash at Bromeley....lol

Once seated, they plummeted down a half-mile-long chute made of durable, all-purpose asbestos. It took skill to know when to slow down around curves and when to plow forward. It was a “dry” ride that could monetize the property in the summer months, similar to a bobsled run without the snow. The manufacturer, DEMAG, called this monument to mesothelioma the Alpine Slide.

Albertsson operated the Bromley resort in Vermont

AHAHAHA HOLY SHIT

Vernon was a sleepy town and presented few regulatory obstacles to building self-propelled attractions. It was as if someone had handed my father a blank canvas.

How do you react when your father proclaims he wants to open a theme park? I imagined myself growing fat on free concession food and tumbling from one ride to the next, cutting in line and laughing all the way down. I would be Augustus Gloop, risking a combination overdose of sugar and fun.

“Dad,” I said to him one day. “Are Jimmy and I going to work at the park?” My father was silent. He did this often, staring off into the middle distance, sifting through any of the dozen thoughts going through his head at any given time. Questions went ignored until they came up in his neurological queue. “Of course,” he said, looking slightly amused, as though the idea that we wouldn’t was strange. “You all will.”

“Won’t we need working papers?” I said. My father just laughed. Later, I’d understand why. I brought up a rule as though it were an obstacle, something to be concerned with and not merely a nuisance to cast aside.

Explaining what my father was up to and meeting confusion, if not outrage, would become a recurring element in my life.

I peppered her with questions. Would she work there? (No. She had six children to raise.) Does my father know how to build a theme park? (No, but that had never stopped him before.) Would there be goats? (Ask your father.)

The next day, we were covered, head to toe, in filth, shovels loosely gripped in our blistering adolescent hands. We threw clumps of dirt and mountain rock for hours, making a trench for the Alpine Slide.

Charlie was one of three people in my father’s employ who did not have two working eyeballs. Now that I was also working for him, this gave me pause.

“That’s some good work, college boy,” he said. Charlie called me “college boy” because he once saw me reading a book.

If Charlie caught you slacking, he would fire you, but experienced workers knew it rarely mattered. He kept a bottle of Dewar’s Scotch in his desk drawer and was often inebriated enough to forget what he had said by the following morning.

One morning, I woke up sick to my stomach and walked downstairs, where my father was alone, drinking coffee. I told him I didn’t feel well and that Mom usually made me toast. He nodded and grabbed two pieces of bread. He turned on the electric stovetop and held the slices on the red-hot coils. “Faster than a toaster,” he said. The slices blackened. He doused them in sugar. I ate them. It made me feel better. I went to work.

Over time, Pete’s nickname became the Needle, because he enjoyed doing what older brothers are supposed to do: torment the smaller and weaker siblings.

Splinter, whose real name was Eugene Mulvihill III, considered such juvenile activity beneath him. Because some people knew our father as Chip, as in “chip off the old block,” people took to calling my brother Splinter,

Splinter was slightly aloof and spoke in measured tones, as though he needed to pause and consider someone’s intelligence before responding. I noticed he spoke to Jimmy very slowly.

Splinter worked with the adult laborers assembling the Alpine lanes. Pete headed for a separate section of the property, across Route 94, the main two-lane road threading through town.

At my age, he toiled in the bowels of the resort, trying to organize the rented ski boots back into matching pairs while rats leapt out of the piles and scurried up his arms. Nearby, an old resort hand smeared cleaning solvent on the skis while a cigarette dangled from his lips, threatening to send the whole place up in flames.

Despite his motivational speeches, the work stretched well past the planned opening on the Fourth of July and into August, which drove my father from rah-rah addresses to regular paroxysms of screaming.

My father had inherited an entire crew of snowmakers from the previous owners of Great Gorge. Charlie O’Brien was their leader, and his fleet consisted of men with names like Big Al, Indian, Bunk, and Wacky Joe, the lift mechanic.

Big Al was a member of the Laziers, a family made up of roughly twenty people that lived near the resort in a cluster of blue-collar houses known as Lazierville. Big Al, their patriarch, could pull wooden fence posts from the ground with his bare hands.

The men often piled into old army trucks the resort kept on hand, faces dirty and tools stacked up in the back, dispatched from one operational emergency to the next. In the years to come, they would be the hands that helped shape the park, like the workers who dynamite-blasted Mount Rushmore. No task was beyond their reach, from welding to painting to plumbing.

It took a special breed of human to be able to scale a mountain in the middle of the night, clothes soaked through with water in sub-zero temperatures, to shoot a blend of water and freezing air to overrule Mother Nature. My father grew to see them as a unit he could deploy no matter the season.

He treated these laborers no differently than he would affluent business partners or neighbors. He threw elaborate parties for them. He handed out Thanksgiving turkeys to their families. Once, he gave Charlie a car (which Charlie promptly wrecked, but that was beside the point). My father seemed to sense when his workers needed reinforcement and when they needed material goods.

As he argued with Charlie one afternoon, I gazed up at the mountain, this massive natural formation onto which he was projecting his imagination.

In the days leading into the opening of the ride, just before Labor Day weekend of 1976, my father must have had some inkling of what poor Walt had endured more than twenty years earlier. Sensing his concerns, we kept our distance from him.

Heading for a ski resort in warm weather was a foreign concept for people, so my father took out newspaper ads that trumpeted live music, beer, and events like tobacco-spitting competitions to stir up the town’s rural demographic.

The guests stood in line for two hours to fork over two dollars and fifty cents (a dollar fifty for kids) and jump on the ski lift to be transported twenty-seven hundred feet up the mountain to the launch station. At the top, attendants, including Splinter, nudged them into motion.

My father had settled on two lanes for visitors. One was designated the slow lane for overly cautious beginners with an iron grip on the brake (“scaredy cats,” he sniffed). The second was for the adventurous. A parent might be riding down with a ten-month-old on their lap on one track. Next to them, a teenager would be speeding like he was on the Autobahn and laughing maniacally.

As far as he was concerned, once they paid, people could do whatever they wanted. This was a basic tenet of his philosophy on life, which mandated minimal intervention from any kind of non-familial authority.

People who stood listlessly in the hot sun waiting their turn grew excited as soon as they sat on the seat. They snatched up discount ticket books for repeat trips and wore digital watches so they could time their runs and brag to friends about their personal records.

The control granted by the Alpine was accompanied by a measure of risk, much of it self-imposed. Attendants would tell guests to go slow and mind the brake until they got used to it. The guests would nod, completely oblivious to the safety instructions, then proceed to make every mistake they were warned to avoid.

The surface of the track scraped off your flesh, leaving an oozing, blistering wound. For superficial injuries, we sprayed a pink iodine liquid that bubbled up like acid and made the tender skin flare with pain. The teenage boys took it stoically. Younger kids hissed through their teeth. On busy days, the area around the slide could look like a leper colony.

If you went down too slowly, someone behind you would smash into your cart, creating a brain-jarring collision of bone, plastic, and fiberglass. Dads, not realizing the consequences of their greater mass, playfully rammed into their kids, sending them tumbling into the air like rag dolls.

Mischievous guests would wait until they were farther down and then stop, hoping their buddy would blindly ram into them. Others took note of slow patrons in the fast lane and punished their hesitation by spearing them from behind.

If you wiped out, the cart—which weighed twenty pounds—could come crashing back down on you like an anvil in a cartoon. Because of the slide’s proximity to the woods, people flying off the track could smash into a tree or find themselves falling into a pile of rocks.

We quickly put in hay bales to cushion the falls, only to realize they created even more of a hazard. People flicked their used cigarette butts everywhere. We had two fires before we realized we had created a tinderbox.

Only a few stopped to consider what was actually happening—that unprotected bodies were traveling at thirty miles per hour and occasionally getting shot into the sky like they had been ejected from a fighter-plane cockpit. Those who did backed away, holding their children behind them in a protective posture.

If the track was wet, the carts would hydroplane when the brakes were applied, and the guests would skid across the water. A gathering storm meant we had to shut it down.

My father ushered Jimmy up to a newspaper reporter covering the ride, boasting of his son’s fifty-five-second record. (It normally took an average of three minutes to go down.) Charlie O’Brien’s son, Kelly, was in second place. My father tried to get them to race to settle it.

An employee chasing Jimmy’s record streaked down the slide at such velocity that, when he was thrown clear, the momentum had caused the track to gouge the back of his legs and butt so badly that he needed two hundred stitches.

The boy’s detached rear end became legend, and the Alpine ended the season with something of a reputation. Nevertheless, it was a resounding success. My father spent that fall repeatedly handing Wacky Joe bags stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash.

Worried about being robbed, my father would lock the weekend’s profits in his car until there was no more room for them. He sold adrenaline, and people were buying.

Riders discarded the equipment all over the slope, leaving them at the scene of a crash. Jimmy made periodic visits to heckle me. So did John Thornton. The first time John got on the Alpine, he tried to slow down using his bare feet, Fred Flintstone-style. He wept.