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

by Andy Mulvihill

The ball was a giant plastic sphere at least ten feet in diameter. It resembled the kind of thing you stuck a hamster in, except this ball was scaled for a human. A human who would, by virtue of being willing to climb inside, presumably possess an intellect comparable to that very same hamster.

No one thought it unusual. Workers walked by it without comment. In my father’s orbit, the sudden appearance of a medieval-looking contraption was simply not remarkable.

Inside this ball was another ball, one equipped with a seat and a shoulder harness, like the kind found in race cars (just not our race cars). Ball bearings separated the inner ball from the larger exterior ball, which allowed the inner ball to swivel independently and orient itself so that the seat always remained upright.

Before Frank could protest further, my father handed him a one-hundred-dollar bill. Frank stared at the cash, temporarily placated. He opened a hatch on the ball and Charlie and Big Al helped him in. Once Frank was strapped to the seat, the two began rolling him around the grass like they were bored children playing with a toy, shoving him from one side to another. Inside, a stoic Frank remained upright. Mostly.

“You’re not gonna find this at Disney,” my father said, beaming. Rarely did he stop to consider that there might be a very good reason for that.

He trusted that people would find their way to our mountain theme park and not mistake it for one of the other mountain theme parks, of which there were precisely zero. Dismissing the Fun Farm label as too rural, he declared we would undergo a “massive rebranding.” On our shoestring ad budget, that amounted to printing up new brochures and correcting newspaper copy. He was now referring to his summer escape as Action Park and had become obsessed with locating attractions that would live up to the promise of that name.

He wanted people so drunk on fun that they would have to be ushered out at closing time, dismayed at having to return to a life of rules and regulations.

In scouting for these thrills, he became part of a national movement that had started more than twenty years earlier. The success of Disneyland, in the mid-fifties, kicked off an amusement park gold rush. Investors clamored to erect the Disneyland of the northeast or the Disneyland of the Rockies, all with singular ride experiences.

Pleasure Island opened two years later near Boston. Boasting a space rocket ride and a mechanical Moby Dick, it was hampered by Boston’s short summers and closed in 1969.

Oh that explains that

The lesson, if one could learn it, was that amusement parks were among the most volatile of businesses, prone to shifts in consumer tastes, cost overruns, hazards, weather, and even cultural context: Freedomland’s attendance was said to have plummeted following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

Though he looked for attractions year-round, his opportunity for making additions was the lull between the end of the ski season and Memorial Day. My father’s clock started when the snow began to melt.

He met inventors at industry conventions he attended in Florida and answered letters he received in the mail. He had a stack of brochures that leaned precariously from a perch on his desk, all of them full of breathless copy about “rip-roaring excitement” and rides that were “the new standard in fun.” They had names like Avalanche, Slide-a-Ride, and the Wave Pool.

He worried about capacity—the number of guests who could pass through a ride in an hour. The higher the number, the greater the admission take. Someone could go down the Green Water Slide in fifteen seconds, which worked out to 240 people an hour. This was excellent churn, reducing the amount of time they had to spend in line and increasing the overall capacity of the park.

Ken Bailey was the man who came up with the idea for the ball. He called it the Man in the Ball in the Ball. When everyone got tired of saying that, which happened immediately, we just called it the Bailey Ball.

There was no protracted deliberation or projection sheet prepared. Some of my father’s friends would later describe this business approach as Ready, Fire, Aim.

That day, I watched as Ken immediately got to work. I asked if he had built a trial ball back in Canada, maybe a smaller prototype, something to demonstrate that it was practical. “Nuh uh,” he said, tongue jutting from his mouth as he glued the PVC together. “First one.”

As Ken made major and potentially destructive alterations to the face of the mountain, no one acknowledged that my father didn’t have permits or approvals for any of this. He had absolutely no patience for things like site inspections, zoning restrictions, or feasibility studies.

There was really no infrastructure in place for the state to cope with any of it, either. New Jersey’s Department of Labor was responsible for granting permits for amusement rides, but my father argued that he wasn’t installing “rides” in any conventional sense. They were “sporting attractions,” and thus the state had no actual jurisdiction.

My father boasted of coverage from London and World Assurance, Limited, a company bold enough to cover his liability-prone participation park. He would proudly hand over proof of insurance to skeptical state regulators. No one bothered to question London and World’s endless confidence in him. That would come later.

In 1975, the state had passed the Carnival and Amusement Ride Safety Act, which mandated annual inspections, maintenance records, and liability coverage, among other things. New Jersey was one of the few states that bothered with such legislation. In two-thirds of the country, there was nothing at all regulating rides.

When the CPSC wanted information from Disney about the Skyway tramway rides following three deaths on a similar gondola ride at an Illinois park, Disney management revolted, getting a court injunction that barred officials from investigating it.

Most of what he was installing was new to the East Coast, if not the entire industry. Early on, it was difficult for inspectors to gauge potential dangers because they had no idea what they were looking at. As a result, they were just as inept as my father believed most government agencies to be.

We would watch as officials from the state eyeballed the Alpine, looking at the track for any obvious cracks. They stood on the carts to make sure they would bear their weight. Then they’d stack sandbags on them and send them down the chute. When the carts didn’t fly off the track, they appeared satisfied. The whole exercise was pointless, since no two rides on the Alpine were ever the same. Give those sandbags two beers and control of the joystick, and things would be much different.

It could be difficult to persuade him to refine or perfect rides that were in operation. Once something was up, it was considered done.

If there was an immediate issue, like a nail sticking out of a railing, he would have it fixed. But maintaining attractions was not as interesting to him as building new ones. Part of it was his desire to have a sprawling park. Part of it was that he had waited all winter to begin playing with his toys. And part of it was the thought of people walking by a ride bearing a Closed sign and coming away disappointed.

When he was ready to begin building, he looked for investors. Some capital came from park profits. Some came from his other businesses, which were wildly eclectic and ranged from real estate investment to smelting silver on a hunch it would rapidly increase in value. Others were more pragmatic, like magnetic imaging used in medicine and, later, a wise bet on the future of a personal cell phone network, which he correctly believed would revolutionize the world.

GAR had an eclectic board of directors, including a man named Amos Phillips, who was well connected in Vernon and very wealthy from his steelmaking business but incredibly frugal. Missing an eye like Charlie O’Brien, Phillips opted to cover the empty socket with a Band-Aid, which would flutter as he inhaled. It was quite horrific, but you got used to it.

Gene was equally devoted to his friend, even when Bob later went to prison for bankruptcy fraud.

Anything my father dreamed, anything he found, he could fund and build. No inspectors would oppose it. His army of mountain men would build it in record time, and it would open before the industrial glue could cure.

Charlie and some out-of-work welders began assembling an enclosed slide with a loop at the bottom. It was one of my father’s ideas. He had sketched it out on a napkin. He called it the Cannonball Loop. “That’s fucked up,” Jimmy said, staring at it. My father offered some of the employees one hundred dollars to try it out. No one would.

In reality, trips to the park in the spring were discouraged, and working there after school was out of the question because of the hour-long commute each way. Instead, my parents expected me to be a studious tenth grader. My brother Pete was at Dartmouth. Splinter was studying engineering at Lehigh. My father took education seriously, as though one generation of wayward Mulvihills would turn the whole family tree into the shanty Irish.

Fast Eddie, whose older brother bounced at the hottest bar in New Jersey, the Final Exam,

I managed to get Fast Eddie hired for one summer, but he kept people slightly on edge. He carried a water jug filled with juice to work but wouldn’t let anyone drink from it. The working theory was that he didn’t want what he considered the unhygienic trash of Sussex County giving him some kind of disease.

“Well,” I said, “I think he sees potential in the recreation business.” I said this as though my father had ever consulted a projection or had any kind of long-term plan other than getting people inside the park and letting them run amok.

We played teams that appeared to have a surplus of resources, including their own home rinks and sparkling equipment. We were like beer leaguers playing the Soviet Red Army.

The descent through darkness, my body contorted by centrifugal force, was unpleasant in the extreme. Space and time ceased to have meaning. The enjoyment came not from the experience but from the bragging doled out thereafter.

The Loop would require another trial without the benefit of armor, as we could never mandate that guests wear padding to descend a water slide. Like someone who had already broken the sound barrier, I watched from the sidelines as a new maverick ascended the hill.

We gathered at the foot of the mountain—me, my father, Charlie O’Brien, Dr. Sugar, and Ken Bailey. Also present was an inspector from the Department of Labor, who seemed to recoil at the sight of the mountain track. That he was there at all was something of a formality, but the Bailey Ball would nonetheless need to demonstrate some basic regard for human life in order to be rubber-stamped.

When everyone was in place, Ken gave a thumbs-up. Big Al pushed the ball from its starting position down the graded slope. Things went well for the first fifteen seconds or so, with Frank remaining upright in the center of the ball. But on the first turn to go back across the mountain, the ball didn’t stay in the groove. It broke free and began rolling straight downhill.

When the contraption made it to the bottom without any visible damage, and Frank still appeared conscious, I exhaled. But it didn’t stop. It began rolling at high speed toward us like the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. We scattered, my dad and I scurrying to the left, and Ken and Charlie to the right. Dr. Sugar and the inspector were frozen, each of their faces a rictus of terror.

We gave chase as Frank and the ball rolled through the parking lot, narrowly missing the inspector’s car. It spun past construction workers, who looked up from their shovels and heavy machinery to see a man bouncing around inside what appeared to be a diving bell. It cleared a small hill, briefly going airborne, then zipped right across Route 94, the two-lane road splitting the park. Cars honked and slammed on their brakes. If there had been opposing traffic, Frank would have become part of a real-life game of Pong, volleying from one bumper to another.

We did not ask for the inspector’s report, nor did we ever hear of it being filed. Ken Bailey returned to Canada. The snowmakers cleared away the PVC. Told to dispose of the Bailey Ball, they rolled it into the woods, where it remained for many years.

Of the many inspirations my father took from the Disney parks, he held a special affection for their monorail.

As Action Park began to grow and expand, the problem of what to do with locomoting guests became more and more pressing. To get from Motor World to the aquatic area dubbed Water World, you had to hike up a big hill and then cross Route 94 on foot, dodging traffic and hoping a distracted driver in an AMC Gremlin wouldn’t turn you into paste.

My father’s solution was the Transmobile, a three-thousand-foot-long electric artery running from Motor World across the road to the ski lodge and on to the entrance to Water World. It would, he said, revolutionize how people maneuvered around the park.

the Transmobile featured small, open-air carts that held four passengers over a raised track and moved at four to seven miles per hour. Given its considerable height of ten to twenty feet, it was one of the few rides in the park that came with a safety belt.

(The Club was a hotel once earmarked for the legalized gambling that had failed to spread across the state. Now, it lurked in the margins of the area like a blacked-out adult bookstore.)

The People Mover had one issue. In order to fulfill its practical function, it needed to cross Route 94 via a bridge. While only a narrow two-lane path, Route 94 was nonetheless subject to the jurisdiction of the New Jersey Department of Transportation, as well as Vernon’s own supervisors. These were entities whose gears turned slowly or not at all.

Vernon’s population had blossomed in the 1970s, with more and more people from the tristate area considering it a slice of Vermont within driving distance. They bought up homes and filled its single high school with their children. From some of the windows of those homes, they could not see any cars or roads. Vernon had all the charm of a rustic scene in an oil painting.

Vernon was a bedroom community, and it wanted to remain that way. People didn’t usually open or operate major businesses in town. Most commuted to the city for employment. My father was introducing a new industry—recreation—that threatened the serenity of their quaint little utopia.