Sometimes, nostalgia hurts. That’s rarely been more true than when reading Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park (Amazon) by Andy Mulvihill and Jake Rossen.
The book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Vernon, NJ-based amusement park, which was equal parts famous and notorious for my generation growing up in northwestern New Jersey in the 1970s and 80s. The park, for those who never hard of it, was famous for being a place where the attendees controlled the rides. Whether it was the Alpine Slide (a concrete and asbestos slide set into a mountain side that you rode down on a sleds), motorboats, or the Cannonball water slides, attendees were masters of their own destiny.
Told by Andy Mulvihill, the son of the park’s founder, details his father’s seat-of-his-pants approach to building an amusement park and rolling out ever wilder (and occasionally, more dangerous) rides. He also documents the rides that never made it fully into production, like the Cannonball Loop, a loop-de-loop water tube where people would actually loop upside down … if they didn’t get stuck. Or knock their teeth out when hitting the wall too hard. There’s also the hamster-ball-on-steroids that was supposed to ride down the mountain on a PVC tube-based track … except on its first trial run, it broke free of the track, rolled down the mountain, crossed a state highway, and ended up in a pond.
Written with affection for his father, Mulvihill doesn’t gloss over the park’s many difficulties, including deaths which occurred in the park, a convulsed (and ultimately illegal) liability insurance scheme, political maneuvering at the local and state levels, and the very real safety challenges that the park’s “you control the ride” philosophy.
Action Park: Bruises, Abrasions, and Too Much Fun in the Sun
I grew up in Flanders, NJ, which about 30 miles and maybe an hour travel time from Vernon Township and Action Park. As a child of the 80s, I grew up hearing stories of Action Park, and got to make a few of my own. Mine are fairly tame compared to the ones in the book; I never tried the Alpine Slide, preferring to stay on the water rides, but believe me, those were challenging enough.
I particularly remember the Cannonball chutes, which were water slide tunnels that shot you out into an ice-cold pool (all the water having been sourced from mountain springs). On a hot June or July afternoon, they’d hose you down with cold water before it was your turn to go, just so you didn’t go into shock when you hit the water.
The frigid spike to the brain that was plunging into that pool is just as vivid today as it was the first time I did it. You’d shoot out of the tube, fall 10 or so feet to the water, try not to gasp as the cold water enveloped you, fight your way to the surface, then start swimming (urged on by the lifeguards) so you didn’t get hit by the next kid coming out of the slide.
In school, you’d come into class in early May and see kids covered in bruises, scratches, and gauze (sometimes with the blood seeping through) and you didn’t have to ask: they’d been to Action Park over the weekend.
You didn’t have to ask, but you would, because the stories were part of what made Action Park so much fun. Unlike Six Flags Great Adventure in South Jersey, or boardwalk down the shore at Seaside Heights, every trip was different. Who you went with, and just how stupid you wanted to be, had a huge impact on your Action Park experience (and, ahem, how battered you were when you came back home).
As a kid, I didn’t see or hear much about the negative side of Action Park (the bruises and abrasions might horrify some, but they were rites of passage for us). I knew people had died there, and I knew some people’s parents wouldn’t let them go because it was too dangerous, but I never saw the drunken escapades that caused so many problems for adults. This also may be because they’d reigned things in a bit by the time I went there in the mid-to-late 80s.
Reading this book filled me with nostalgia for my childhood, and that long ago version of New Jersey. I remembered that icy water, plunging down Surf Hill ((imagine a giant slip and slide, with a pool at the bottom, which you slammed into going at considerable speed), and surviving the Wave Pool (a truly epic – and dangerous – wave generator).
When you went to Action Park, you knew you were going to have fun. You also knew you were going to be exhausted and maybe a little beat up.
Ok, maybe a lot beat up.
It was a unique artifact of the 1980s, and not something that could exist today. I know other peoples’ experiences weren’t as happy as mine (and in some cases, they were down right tragic) but I’m glad I got to experience it.
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Cover art for Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park. Credit: Penguin Random House.