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

by Andy Mulvihill

There was another problem, one that largely went unspoken but seemed to metastasize over time. In building a resort within driving distance of New York City, my father was inviting a multi-ethnic brand of tourism.

Typical

A local could wake up, drive their truck over to the gas station, and thanks to the park, encounter the first black person they’d seen in years. A contingent of citizens didn’t like these visitors and didn’t want them—“the element,” some called them—in their town.

His was free of factory pollution. (We would wind up accidentally gassing several people with ozone, but that came later.)

He knew of their whispered concerns because he had sources embedded in the community. One of them was Father Boland, an Irish-Catholic priest who bonded with Gene over their shared Irish roots.

After letting Gene spew profanities, Charlie introduced Father Boland as the new priest in town. My father’s demeanor changed immediately. He tried to make friends with priests, he once said to me, because he found their company comforting.

Thanks to chatty parishioners, Father Boland had all the town gossip and sometimes relayed which way the wind was blowing. Gene could then try to curry favor in targeted spots.

It wasn’t so much bribery as a microcosm of politics in the real world. When one of his proposals came up for a vote and there was little resistance from township officials due to his philanthropy, he smiled, knowing he had scored one over the NIMBYs and Crazies.

Father Boland sometimes found himself in the position of defending Gene, stirring into the local conversation that Gene had installed a pool free of charge for local migrant workers who worked with a group of nuns. Such information kept people on their toes. Yes, Gene Mulvihill was taking over Vernon, but he had also helped the nuns, so how bad could he be?

It was not until later that I discovered the bond between my father and Father Boland ran much deeper. A month after meeting Gene, Father Boland visited a man who was sick and dying. It was raining, and the man’s roof was leaking. Drops of water collected in cups and saucers the man had set down on the floor. Despondent, Father Boland mentioned it to Gene, who was busy directing contractors on a project near the resort. Gene huddled with his men, then sent them away. By the end of the day, the dying man’s roof was no longer leaking.

Father Boland was not Gene’s only conduit to Vernon. Often, my father would let a man named John Steinbach run interference. The two had been friends since grade school.

Soon, word spread among the town gossips that John’s stepfather was famous. This was true. He was once the biggest mobster in the state of New Jersey. Abner “Longie” Zwillman was six feet two inches tall and got his start selling produce from a rented horse and cart in Newark.

Ha WOW

A teenager during Prohibition, he imported alcohol from Canada and carried himself like a veteran bootlegger. When the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and held for ransom in 1932, Zwillman offered a fat reward for information. The police roadblocks were cramping his business.

Gene once took my mother over to John’s before heading out for New Year’s Eve. Soon, it began to snow, and the roads steadily got worse. “No one’s going anywhere,” Zwillman said. “You’re going to have your party here.”

I don’t think my father considered Zwillman much of a big deal. His own father, Dockie, was a union organizer and ex-boxer. He had no connection to organized crime but was not to be trifled with.

To add to my father’s protective umbrella, his cousin Donna was married to a West Orange police officer.

Longie’s lawless ways ended when he died under some controversy. He was found hanging in his basement, and bruises on his body indicated it might have been an “assisted” suicide, an act possibly perpetuated by those concerned he might talk to law enforcement to avoid a tax problem.

John looked like Paul Newman and was always well dressed. Women liked him. So did men. He befriended local officials. The mythology of the mob appeared to captivate people. John, for his part, would do pretty much anything Gene asked, always mindful that his old friend had never considered him a pariah because of his infamous stepfather.

In truth, my father’s relationship with the mafia following Zwillman’s passing extended to having seen the Godfather movies. But if people believed it, he wasn’t in a hurry to correct them.

When religion and implied organized-crime affiliations failed him, my father turned to the other weapons in his arsenal. His children. At the park one day, he pointed to a kid about my age. He was working on the Alpine Slide. “You see that guy?” he asked. I did. “You’d better make friends with that kid,” he said. I asked him why. “You just be friends with him,” he said, and walked away.

When my father realized Chuck and I had no interest in exchanging intelligence, he turned to Pete’s girlfriend, Ellen, whose father happened to be a state trooper who lived next door to the Kilbys. Slowly, the trooper tried to ingratiate Gene into the Kilby household, occasionally bringing his name up the same way vaccines introduce low doses of a virus. But nothing could persuade Kilby to turn away from the idea that Gene had come to swallow Vernon whole.

I had been elected class president in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades, and elected vice-president of the school that last year. It amounted to a popularity contest with a tiny voting base, but I didn’t care.

I thought I had positioned myself well, but I underestimated Grodberg’s tenacity. Knowing older kids were indifferent to school politics, he went after the six, seventh, and eighth graders, whose minds he could easily manipulate.

This platform of lies and deceit swayed people I had counted on to be loyal. Grodberg won the election, albeit by a slim margin. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Mac said, sipping a beer. “People just want a fresh face.” Despite the damage he was doing to his brain cells, Captain Heineken was sometimes capable of sage insight.

To his credit, Grodberg made good on his promise to join the board of directors. When I edited the school yearbook, I had him hold a picture frame over his face and stand next to the wall with the rest of the board members’ photos. I suppose it was my way of conceding the victory.

Because it had tolls, the Atlantic City Expressway was a good barometer of how many people were visiting the state.

The state blanketed the population with tens of thousands of brochures touting tourist destinations, including Action Park. The cover read: Jersey’s Got It!

“And this is the Cannonball Loop,” she said, showing them a picture of a giant death straw. They looked astonished. We later learned many of the journalists were actually editors of prestigious publications, and some had PhDs. Our flippant attitude toward gravity alarmed them.

I also went on road trips with volunteers to different cities, where I assisted in training college students to conduct mock elections so they could identify Reagan supporters among students who were largely apathetic about politics. With Reagan winning the school elections, and the results getting coverage in the local press, the impression would be that the youth of America was behind him. It was an intriguing sleight-of-hand that clued me in to the importance of appearances, of controlling the narrative in a way my father had perfected.

He said the system had grown fat and needed a diet. Tax cuts were necessary.

Lol

Before, I had been there on a near-daily basis and had grown accustomed to its steady evolution. Seeing it after some time away was startling. It had morphed into a mini-metropolis, with new attractions thrilling the deluge of guests my father had anticipated.

Glen corralled the rope a second time, again bending his knees to illustrate the correct posture. The next guest also ignored him completely. The kid swung, but his thin arms didn’t have the strength to hold on. He fell straight down. A girl let go almost as soon as she clenched the rope, falling into the water with the grace of a cinder block. I winced. The crowd roared. Glen used the pole to drag people back to shore. Emerging, they seemed to be shivering violently. “The water is from the mountaintop lake,” Julie said. “It’s fifty degrees.”

There, at a forty-five-degree angle, stood a massive slide surrounded by the biggest crowd I had ever seen at the park. From the top, I could see tiny figures shooting down its surface and creating a break in the water tension like a car tire zipping through a puddle.

A woman sailed down the slide and into the pool, bouncing over the water like the surface was made of rubber: plip-plip-plip. She stood up, slightly discombobulated, and waved to the cheering crowd. They seemed overly enthusiastic about her success. Through a part in the mob, I suddenly understood. Everyone could see her bare breasts. The water had blasted her bathing suit top completely off.

Men lost their loose-fitting bathing trunks, exposing their genitals to crowds as they scrambled to find them. Tops floated in the pool like water lilies. Kids passing by were fascinated by the display. From the top of the ride, I could see the whites of their eyeballs soaking in the anatomy lesson.

George Larsson was a nineteen-year-old from the neighboring town of Sparta. He had worked at the resort as a ski-lift operator for part of the winter and had come back to socialize. I had never met him but knew someone who had. He told me Larsson was a good wrestler and had gone undefeated the previous season. In the summer, he worked for his dad’s roofing firm. He spent an entire day riding down the Alpine’s fast lane.