They say a personal library is like an amusement park for your mind. If that’s the case then my personal library is like Action Park in New Jersey. It’s a place that’s exciting, maybe even liberating, because all caution gets thrown to the wind. It’s a place that’s entertaining because it’s full of unsavory characters and being out of control is the whole point. But the real Action Park existed outside of New York City, not in the pages of my book collection, and Andy Mulvihill’s Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park tells the whole story of this notorious business dedicated to rowdy leisure time and the total suspension of self-preservation or common sense.
Andy Mulvihill is the son of Gene Mulvihill, the visionary and evil genius who put together Action Park in a bid to be the Disneyworld of the Northeast. While renting and operating a ski slope on a hill in New Jersey, he schemed up ways to use the hill and its empty surrounding areas during the summer season. Initially he started with the Alpine Slide, a concrete track that could be navigated by fearless but not-too-wise people in sleds using a foot pedal and brake to control the speed. Injuries like bruises and abrasions were common, but as long as people knew the risks before going down, Gene Mulvihill had no worries. Throughout the 1980s he expanded Action Park to include race cars, go karts, water slides, a wave pool and all kinds of other attractions that were enticing because they were dangerous. They even boasted of having one of the first bungee jumps in America. Mulvihill’s whole philosophy was that he put the individual in the center of the action. Other amusement parks would strap people into rides like roller coasters or tilt-a-whirls that were controlled by ride operators. Mulvihill, on the other hand, believed in giving control of the vehicles over to the participants while letting each individual decide on their level of comfort and safety.
As you can guess, things didn’t always work out for the best. Action Park gained a reputation for being treacherous and people jokingly referred to it by names like “Traction Park” and “Class Action Park”. Injuries of all kinds were frequent. Food and beer from vendor stands were poor quality, restroom sanitation didn’t meet minimum standards, and sometimes gang fights broke out. Safety regulations were posted, but Spanish speakers couldn’t read them. The park’s most notorious ride, the Cannonball Loop, barely made it past the experimental stage. It was a waterslide in an enclosed loop and people often got stuck somewhere inside due to lack of momentum. Those who did make it to the end came out with broken bones, head wounds, or missing teeth. Every now and then, people even died on various rides, though ironically most of those cases were found to be the fault of the deceased for not following safety guidelines. Most injury cases were settled out of court and the ones that did get adjudicated were often won by Gene Mulvihill because he had an ultra-slick lawyer. The one case that almost did Action Park in involved Mulvihill taking out a fake insurance policy with a company that didn’t exist.
The patrons and employees could be a sociological case study unto itself. Due to a successful advertising campaign that was innovative for its time, Action Park attracted huge weekend crowds of working class families and teenagers from inner city Manhattan and the outer boroughs of Queens and the Bronx. New York City in the pre-Giuliani 1980s was nothing like it is now. It possibly was one of the most dangerous cities in the world at the time. So it was a pretty tough crew that came out to New Jersey for fun in the summer. Employees trying to limit overcrowding in the wave pool were often greeted with a middle finger in their faces when they tried to prevent too many people from going in. Fights were common and many children were conceived at various places away from the park. It was a popular hangout for knuckleheads.
The employees could be interesting too. Lifeguards at the wave pool were overworked since so many of the people there did not know how to swim and were often on the verge of drowning. Injuries happened when clueless people with dove into the shallow end and the wave maker was cranked up to the maximum so that people, especially young kids, kept going under after being whacked in the face by a high-intensity wall of water. Due to overcrowding, they often struggled to get back up to the surface. Meanwhile, one of the lifeguards had decked out the wave control shack with a cot, a mini bar, and a stereo system so he could use it as a shag pad. Gene Mulvihill came up with the great idea of hiring underprivileged kids from the hood as employees, but they refused to do any work and spent all their time smoking weed and going on the rides.
Action Park reads like a memoir put together by Andy Mulvihill. Although he does include some anecdotes about his life and the family business, its central theme is not him but the park itself. Gene Mulvihill gets plenty of biographical attention too as he should. Outsiders to this story may think he sounds like little more than a sleazy creep of a businessman, and they might be right, but this is also a portrait of an artist and a visionary. The way son Andy portrays his father Gene is as a man who thought of this pet project as so much more than a way to make money. He went about building Action Park the way some hobbyists build model railroads. Ultimately he loved seeing people having fun and, believe it or not, the park’s patrons did just that. Kids in the 1980s were a lot tougher than they are now and bruises, fractured bones, and bloody cuts were worn as badges of honor. Veterans and survivors of Action Park used to show off their wounds the way soldiers show off their battle scars after a war. I can relate to this mentality myself considering the time I fell off a motorcycle in Phuket and slid down a rain-slicked hill; afterwards I photographed my bloody arm and posted it on Facebook to the delight of some of my friends. Some might criticize Andy Mulvihill for being too sentimental and painting an overly rosy picture of his father, but the guy does come off as quite a character and a fun, charming guy with warm personality. Really though, it is Andy Mulvihill’s gallows humor that makes this book so much fun to read. It’s packed from cover to cover with the grim ironies of growing up and working in such a place. Any attempts at describing his hilarious dark comments would fail. You just have to read it to see what I mean.
Action Park is an easy, engaging, and fun book. Maybe it will even make you think about what it means to be human. If you need a break from reading heavy or serious books, or if you are in the mood for some kind of nostalgia trip, taking you back to a time before Americans became safety obsessed and the bland culture of corporate sterility set in during the 1990s, then it is a great diversion. It definitely reminded me of what it felt like to be young, reckless, carefree, and a little bit stupid. Life is more fun and rewarding when you take risks. Damn the consequences.
