Action Park
Andy Mulvihill and Jake Rossen
Penguin £14.99
As a teenager, I loved riding on any rollercoaster that guaranteed to spin me up and down and round and round 200ft in the air at terrifying speeds while my fellow passengers screamed in terror. These days, I feel woozy sitting in the front of the circle at a theatre.
Action Park gained the nickname Class Action Park, or Traction Park – a reference to the number of customers who ended up in hospital
So it is strangely comforting to read about America’s most dangerous amusement park. In all, six people were killed on rides in Action Park, in rural New Jersey, two in a single week. One was drowned in the Tidal Wave Pool; the other was electrocuted on the Kayak Experience.
On the Alpine Slide there were 26 injuries in two years. Customers whizzed along a 900-yard downhill chute made of concrete and asbestos on sleds with two speeds, classified by one former employee as Extremely Slow or Death Awaits. ‘If you stuck up your arm or leg to balance yourself, it was like holding your body against a sander,’ recalls the author, whose father was the owner of the park. ‘On busy days, the area around the slide looked like a leper colony.’
Customers who fell out of their sleds and skidded across the concrete found their skin ‘peeling like potatoes’, he says. ‘People flying off the track could smash into a tree or find themselves falling into a pile of rocks… Unprotected bodies were travelling at 30mph and occasionally getting shot into the sky like they had been ejected from a fighter-plane cockpit.’ One fun-lover ended up needing 200 stitches.
Small wonder that Action Park gained the nickname Class Action Park, or Traction Park – a reference to the number of customers who ended up in hospital. In fact, visits to A&E were so frequent that the owner felt obliged to donate new ambulances to the hospital, with one based permanently at Action Park. Photographs of injuries sustained on the Alpine Slide were placed on a board beside the entrance, ‘a visual reminder of the potential carnage’.
The effect was immediate: the queues increased. Most amusement parks sell the illusion of danger, but Action Park’s creator, Gene Mulvihill, sold danger itself. He was convinced that people were sick and tired of being coddled. ‘People like not being restricted,’ he said. No hypocrite, he applied this dictum to family life. When the family car was full up, he made any remaining children sit on the roof and cling to the luggage rack.
Even the park’s mildest attraction, the Human Maze, came with an element of peril. The attendant recalls hearing pleas for help from people who couldn’t find their way out. Some were trapped inside for nine hours. On top of this, snakes would occasionally slither into the hay bales, ‘popping out and causing people to sprint away in a mad panic, getting themselves even more lost than before’.
The Colorado River Ride (left); The Cannonball Loop (right)
Mulvihill bought the site for a pittance in 1972. The previous owners had attempted to develop it as a ski resort, but a series of warm winters meant that they faced bankruptcy. Mulvihill planned to turn it into an all-weather amusement park. Having started with fairly conventional rides, such as go-karts, he soon grew more ambitious, tapping into his customers’ thirst for thrills. ‘He sold adrenaline,’ recalls his son, ‘And people were buying.’
The Kamikaze was a huge slide set at a 45-degree angle, which shot people out into a pool. The force of the splash often sent bikini-tops for a burton. ‘Tops floated in the pool like water lilies. Kids passing by were fascinated by the display.’ Another water feature, Surf Hill, had a similar effect, attracting crowds of viewers. ‘The water acted as a power washer, stripping them of bathing suit tops and bottoms… With ten lanes of people going down at once, it became a startling display of synchronised stripping.’
As the son of the owner, Andy Mulvihill was recruited to test-drive new rides, including The Cannonball Loop, which looked like a giant drinking straw with a loop in it. The idea was that the customer would jump into the tube, hurtle down 60ft, and then perform a 360-degree loop-the-loop before being ejected at the bottom.
It had been tested before with a makeshift dummy, stuffed with sand. The dummy had emerged decapitated. His father kitted young Andy with a bit of protective clothing and then made him take the plunge. ‘It was like jumping into a cement mixer,’ he writes. He emerged intact, but the next guinea pig, less protected, smashed his face into the wall of the tube and lost two front teeth. A third person then gave it a go, and cut his arm on the teeth, which were still stuck to the slide.
In 1986 there were 330 injuries. The Tidal Wave Pool created such huge waves that the team of teenage lifeguards rescued 100 people over a single weekend. Over the years, three people were to drown in it.
By now, waggish graffiti artists had changed Action Park’s slogan, WHERE YOU’RE THE CENTER OF THE ACTION, to WHERE YOU’RE THE CENTER OF THE ACCIDENT. But this only served to entice the uninitiated. ‘It was not unusual for guests to consider a broken nose part of the price of a fun Saturday,’ says the author.
Others were less amused, put off by the mess, the drunkenness (the park boasted an on-site brewery), the poor hygiene (a batch of cheap chicken had caused a pandemic of diarrhoea) and the broken bones. For a brief while, the owner distributed comment cards, asking for customer feedback. ‘They read like a haiku of criticism,’ recalls Andy Mulvihill:
Rides are scary
Lost my teeth
Bees
Lewd bathing suits
Almost drowned and lifeguards laughed
Needless to say, it all ended in tears. Personal injury claims climbed to $3.5 million, and an investigation discovered Action Park was not insured. By sleight-of-hand accounting, Mulvihill had invented a trusty-sounding insurance company – London and World Insurance – and then paid all the premiums to himself. He was duly charged with 200 acts of fraud, theft, embezzlement and forgery.
Andy Mulvihill’s account of Action Park is ghost-written by a comedy writer called Jake Rossen. Often, the two of them seem to be undermining each other. The book has an odd tug-of-war feel. Most of the time, it is darkly comic, laughing at all the broken bones, but then it suddenly starts downplaying the casualties, arguing that most customers emerged intact.
So the book starts as a succession of merry anecdotes about daft people behaving badly and ending up in hospital. But then it goes into reverse, and starts preaching about the importance of a man being a man. ‘Here was a place to navigate danger, to test your constitution and sharpen your judgement… Life doesn’t follow a preset path… You have to be tough. You have to hang on. You have to learn how to steer, bank, and navigate the curves.’
In the last chapter, Mulvihill goes on the defensive, complaining that when people associate Action Park with death, ‘I want to tell them the park admitted millions of people across decades and we failed only a few of them’. Furthermore, he claims ‘people had heart attacks they would otherwise have had at home’ and 20,000 visitors a day ‘meant we were going to experience a certain number of medical incidents’.
A prototype of the Bailey Ball, a giant plastic sphere into which people climbed before being rolled down a mountain
Odd, then, to subtitle it ‘the untold story of America’s most dangerous amusement park’ and to put a cartoon on the cover of a flame-haired skeleton riding a souped-up buggy.