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

by Andy Mulvihill

even though people craved control, not everyone could necessarily handle the responsibility.

Maybe it was then that I began to wonder whether the park was broadcasting on a frequency only a special kind of lunatic could hear.

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

To my father, fun had winners and losers.

Skiers had to assess their own experience and choose slopes wisely. It fit my father’s philosophy. He believed every person was the architect of their own fate. Specifically, he believed a court would agree every person was responsible for themselves.

“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.

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.

“This is an action park where people are doing physical things to themselves. Their situation is not totally in our control.” It would become a mantra.

A horrible realization came over me. The Wave Pool’s occupants had taken on a collective, stupid consciousness, one that paid no mind to the threat of drowning.

The commercial had sterilized the park. Nothing on television could be hazardous. Nothing could happen to them.

Why didn’t you let me warn them?” I looked out at the replica of the Jersey Shore my father had erected, everyone floating freely and soothed by their expectations of rescue, beckoned by a commercial that had sanitized the danger. I told him I didn’t know, but I did. Their obliviousness and freedom from consequences had worn on me. For one brief moment, I wanted them to feel as accountable for their own lives as we were.

The full extent of our legal problems was still unknown to me and to most of our visitors. That would soon change.

I marveled at how nothing in the park remained impervious to tinkering. If something was safe, someone felt compelled to amplify the risk.

My father would not pass up a ride that required good judgment simply because some people might exhibit poor judgment.

The legal theory that the rider, not the operator, was negligent held water most of the time.

Everyone was quick to blame someone else. No one wanted to declare anything an accident if it wasn’t or take responsibility if they didn’t have to. The

This, I believe, is what bothered my father the most. If the blame couldn’t be placed on the rider, then it had to fall on him.

When people remember, I want to tell them the park admitted millions of people across decades, and we failed only a few of them. I wish it were none.

In promoting risk, we could not cry foul when it sometimes proved to be consequential.

There were always ways to make it safer. But safe is not what theme parks sell. They sell excitement and the promise of a break from the mundane.

An admission ticket was like a waiver from responsibility. Admit one. Admit nothing.

Who would insure a park designed by an amateur with no previous water ride experience? That served beer? That was effectively run by area high school kids?

My father was cryptic on the topic of London and World. “Just because they can’t find it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” he said, as though it were common for insurance companies not to have telephone numbers.

was again confronted with the question of why people behaved the way they did—why they would be well behaved on rides elsewhere, but would wreak havoc on our grounds.

My father, who often prioritized fun over profits, stuck it out for a while.

Perceived as one of the most dangerous activities in the country, the bungee was actually the safest thing we had ever installed.

Not once but twice, federal marshals stormed the gates of the park, seizing admission revenue in order to pay someone who had won a lawsuit. If there is one certain sign of a business in distress, it is multiple police raids.

The park had become a symbol for a generation that didn’t need warning labels on its hair dryers.

Enough years had passed that people could look beyond some of the more sensational headlines and see it for the innovative creation it truly was.