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

by Andy Mulvihill

Jimmy showed me how to tug on the strap that was mounted on the front of the carts and used to hang them on the lift, which put more weight on the wheels.

From across Route 94, I began to hear the din of motors, a hint of Pete’s mystery project. He was testing dune buggies, then putting them back into storage for next summer.

One day, late into the season, I looked up and saw someone urinating from the chair lift, the stream arcing over the grass and across the surface of the slide. A woman going down on a cart screamed, swerving to avoid the pee. She tumbled off the track and swore at the man above her, who was laughing hysterically. “You think that happens in Vermont?” Jimmy said. “No,” I said.

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The Vernon Valley Fun Farm was promising autonomy for all. I wondered if my father had considered that even though people craved control, not everyone could necessarily handle the responsibility.

He offered just one new attraction: grass skiing, a warm-weather activity where people wore boots fitted with what looked like tank treads and rolled down the slope on dirt, sometimes tumbling from an errant rock or pebble.

One ride was not enough. Expansion and growth were necessary. He believed the best way of going about this was to legalize drunk driving.

At first, Pete explained, our father had merely wanted to allow guests to traverse a wooded area on the buggies, dodging trees as they hit the gas. Over the cold months, when he incubated ideas, he plotted something far more ambitious.

Now, in the late spring of 1978, there stood a prefabricated aluminum garage that housed a small fleet of three-quarter-scale Formula One racers, the first of their kind on the East Coast. Also called Lola cars after the British car company that made them, these were slightly shrunken versions of the arrow-shaped vehicles that tore through Monaco every year. They were not toys. The engine of the Lola T506 vibrated through your stomach and made your testicles rattle.

While my friends played with Hot Wheels, plastic lanes snaking around their bedrooms, I watched as an entire automotive world was laid out before me. Big Al and Charlie supervised the paving of a huge track that wound through the field like a miniature Le Mans.

Jimmy and I both snuck in laps, but we were too young to work at Motor World and technically shouldn’t have been allowed on the track at all. You had to be seventeen years old and present a valid driver’s license to operate a Lola car.

At the time, New Jersey printed licenses on paper with no picture. Kids successfully forged them all the time by punching out the birthday numbers with a hole puncher and switching them to buy alcohol.

Taking a cue from the obedient employees at the Disney parks, my father told us that we should never utter the word no to guests. Snow White, he said, would never reject anyone.

There was also the fact that the attendants were teenagers themselves and often cowed to the adults waiting in line, forgetting that the balance of power had shifted in their favor inside the park. “Sir,” one would say. “I think you’ve been drinking. Have you been drinking?” “Move, kid,” the guest would say, ignoring the question. Then they’d climb into the Lola and go swerving along the half-mile track, narrowly avoiding mowing down the crowd standing near the edge of the asphalt.

We were not as vigilant with the dune buggies. These were off-road vehicles made by Honda that guests could take on the rougher, wooded area adjacent to the track.

Balancing a dune buggy while taking sharp turns was difficult, and overzealous drivers sometimes found themselves losing control of the vehicles. The first weekend they were available, all ten dune buggies met cruel ends, their riders pulling themselves from the wreckage, a handful sobbing as they crawled away.

Kraemer was about average height, bearded, and raced Volvo station wagons as a hobby.

It did not occur to him that they would be abused by people who considered auto accidents a recreational activity. “The fuck. . . . the fuck is this?” he said, surveying the mangled dune buggies in his shop the following Monday. The garage had turned into a junkyard. “I just got all of these ready.”

Kraemer developed a hostile working relationship with the ride attendants, insisting they didn’t do enough to protect the fleet. It was residual vitriol from my father, who hated seeing his investments mangled and yelled at Kraemer to pull it together.

On some of the karts, a design flaw caused the gas cap to come off as people drove along the track. The fuel would splash out behind them, hitting drivers a few lengths behind.

Later, we replaced the tires with metal rails, because the go-karts could sail directly over the rubber barrier if the angle was right, crinkling the nose of the vehicle as it speared itself into the dirt.

With each collision or spinout, Kraemer would become a forensic auto detective, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It was almost always the fault of the driver, and Kraemer would mutter his diagnostic finding: “These people are fucking nuts.”

If a similar attraction existed somewhere else, as was the case with the Lolas and go-karts, my father would make sure his went a step further—faster, more daring, bigger, better. If the Lolas went forty miles per hour in California, his would go fifty. If someone had go-karts that ambled along a serene path, he would allow our guests to race them wheel-to-wheel.

The Lolas became addictive, with people constantly repeating the track to try to beat their own best times, which were handed to them on a small ticket at the end. One man spent one hundred dollars in a single afternoon trying to outdo himself.

Part of Erin’s job was to let people know when they had reached the final lap of the four allowed on the Lola track. To signal the drivers, she waved a checkered flag. Often, people completely ignored it. “Sir,” Erin would say. “Please return the car to the starting line.” “Fuuuuuuuuuuck . . .” the drivers would say before disappearing around a curve and out of sight, then zooming back into view to add, “yoooooooooooou!” The honor system was clearly not working.

A neighborhood kid she enlisted broke into the park in the middle of the night, made off with a Lola, and took it for a joyride down Route 94. He figured out how to deactivate the governor that limited the car’s speed and tore off like a Daytona 500 finalist.

His friends later told me that, in his early Wall Street days, Gene would take the ferry into New York amid a morass of commuters. When the ferry docked, he would suddenly burst forth, cutting through the congestion of bodies, jabbing them with his elbows and shoulders like a running back so he could be the first off the boat.

Later on, he began driving to the train station to get into the city. One morning, worried he might miss the train, he sped through a school zone. A police cruiser saw him barrel through and gave chase, but had to stop for the crossing children. When the cops finally caught up, my father had left his car and was already on the train. Unable to prove he was the one driving, the police could do nothing more than issue a parking ticket. This story made the newspaper. It would be the first of many unflattering press clippings.

If my father believed he could get anyway with anything, it was because he got away with everything.

He relished our exasperation, if only to teach us that life could prove frustrating, and we had better become used to it.

For reasons we could never quite grasp, my father brought only a minimal amount of food along for the trip. He rationed out sandwiches like he expected to get lost at sea, leading to frequent complaints of hunger from all of us. “Okay, okay,” he said, capitulating to our protests. He produced a small stash of individually wrapped chocolate coins, which immediately made all of us begin to salivate. As we reached for them, he brushed us away. “We’re going to play cards for them,” he said.

Because there was always some kind of “situation,” Pete took his time returning to Motor World. When he got there, he saw a woman behind the wheel of a go-kart with what looked like a scarf wrapped around her face. She clearly had no control of the vehicle, smashed through a chain-link fence, and was careening toward pedestrians, who screamed and jumped out of the way. Unable to slow down, she headed directly for Pete. To avoid being run over, Pete stepped to the side—“like a matador,” he said—and jumped on top of the go-kart. The woman drove through another section of fencing, smashing Pete’s head on the metal bar in the process. She then drove the go-kart into a tree, wheels spinning. Pete, likely woozy from the head trauma, still had the presence of mind to hit the kill switch. When he looked back toward the track, he saw eight other women driving in the same frenzied manner.

It was not a recklessness that seized my father so much as a sense of imperviousness. He did not often stop to mull over consequences, believing they would either never materialize or that they would not be of sufficient seriousness to prevent him from doing what he wanted to do.

Attending a football game while enrolled at Lehigh University, he had a bit too much to drink and tumbled out of the stands, landing on the ground ten or so feet below. A man named Billy Porter, who would become a close friend of his, met up with him in the bathroom right after. Porter’s memory of meeting my father is watching him urinate blood, profoundly and utterly unconcerned with any possible damage done to his internal organs.

Once, we spent multiple weekends in a row putting up a ten-foot-tall metal fence around our ten-acre property, a complicated task that involved navigating trees and other obstacles. He could have hired someone to do it, but he had a fleet of perfectly good laborers in the house already.

After finishing the excavation of the holes, Jimmy and I were tasked with manning them. They turned out to be skateboard bowls, making the park one of the first in the country to have a dedicated skate area in 1978. My father hired Bobby Piercy, a professional skateboarder from California, to oversee its design.

we agreed it was better than Topher’s role. He wore the dog suit. No one was sure where the dog suit had come from, but it was a clear attempt to mimic the costumed Disney characters. The dog costume helped foster a kind of alternative reality for parkgoers, one in which they could fancy themselves Formula One drivers while interacting with a non-copyrighted dog.

It was stifling hot, and my mother refused to let him launder it in the washing machine, insisting it might harbor actual fleas. It was dark brown and hung listlessly from his eleven-year-old frame, which was tall but thin. He looked like the world’s saddest McGruff.

The costume was so saggy, and Topher so unimposing, that he became a target. Once, I came upon him wriggling against a light pole. A group of drunks had taken the arms of the costume and tied them around the fixture, trapping him in the afternoon heat. Guests walked right past him, oblivious to his struggles and muffled pleas for help.

In this hazy tract, Motor World’s atmosphere was different from the one surrounding the Alpine Slide or even the skate park. From across Route 94, my ears partially obscured by a skate helmet, I could hear the chants: “Wreck the boats! Wreck the boats!”

The relative sophistication of the motor-powered rides didn’t prevent us from installing low-cost attractions as well. Adjacent to the speedboat lake was a giant pile of hay bales that stretched more than ten feet in the air. They formed a winding labyrinth that resembled an obstacle course constructed for a rat in a laboratory. A sign next to it read: HUMAN MAZE.

Snakes occasionally made their way into the bales, he said, popping out and causing people to sprint away in a mad panic, getting themselves even more lost than before. In the middle of summer, the bales trapped heat, effectively turning the maze into a suffocating furnace. People emerged from the exit soaked in sweat and gasping. “Water, water,” they whispered, dry lips cracking. One of these disappearances actually made the local newspaper.

Water slides were a relatively new phenomenon in the country. In 1971, a California campground owner named Dick Croul laid out the first one, a concrete trough covered in resin. People liked it, and soon slides were popping up on the West Coast, where the weather generally cooperated. George Millay, the guy behind SeaWorld, had opened Wet ’n Wild Orlando in 1977. No one thought much of doing anything similar on the East Coast except for my father, who again saw an opportunity to cede control to the guests.

Our first, which was later known as the Green Water Slide, was made from fiberglass and had two lanes that curved to a pool at the bottom. Julie spent days filling the pool with water she siphoned from one of the lakes and carted over to the job site using an old fire truck my father had bought from the Vernon Township Fire Department

Compared to the demolition derbies in Motor World, the potential for misadventure on the slide was minimal, though it still harbored hidden dangers. The snowmakers had not done the best or most complete job of connecting the joints of the sections, causing some to jut out.

The slides also angered anyone who rode down with the paper driver’s license needed for Motor World: The paper would get soaked. We charged two dollars for twenty minutes of this.

Kraemer devised what he called Battle Action Tanks. These were small, engine-powered four-wheelers with a protective chassis built over the driver’s seat. A cage crafted from chicken wire allowed people to see out of the camouflage-colored body. Inside, a joystick triggered a series of tennis balls, which shot out of a custom-made cannon at an absolutely ridiculous one hundred miles per hour, allowing the drivers to fire upon one another.

Along the perimeter of the area, mounted tennis-ball guns allowed spectators and people waiting in line to attack the tanks. Kraemer rigged them to go into a tailspin when someone scored a direct hit, the balls making a satisfying and foreboding donk against their armored panels.

The problem was that we had no efficient system for retrieving the ejected tennis balls. A Roomba-like machine that was supposed to canvass the area and vacuum them up was often broken. Employees would wait for lulls in combat, then sprint into the battlefield to retrieve them. The drivers would immediately tu...

As my father soaked in the atmosphere, an attendant absorbed a shot directly to his groin. The worker groaned, folding into himself and falling over, the tennis balls continuing to bounce off him. “Wonderful,” my father said, taking in the landscape of warfare, largely oblivious to the wounded.

Attendants at the Alpine would take the carts to his shop, where mechanics fixed the broken ones and modified others to fly down the chute faster by giving them four wheels instead of two.