Jimsy Jampots #176 - Action Park

In which I tell you about the world's worst theme park

Things I think

A few years ago, I did a weekly podcast with my lovely friend Becky. It was called And Then What? and it was us, sitting around a microphone in my back room, telling each other stories for 50-90 minutes a week. Sometimes the stories were amazing, inspirational tales of historical figures. Sometimes they were silly bits of fiction we’d written ourselves. Sometimes they were reviews people had written on Amazon of their experiences with hair removing cream, sometimes they were folk tales, sometimes they were funny Twitter threads about meeting the President of Ireland while on ketamine - it was a real hodge-podge of whatever Becky and I happened to find interesting that week. Occasionally we had guests come to tell us their stories, too. It was warm and it was silly, it was fiercely feminist and often quite thoughtful, and we talked about vaginas and poop a lot. It was really fun. I miss it a lot.

If we were still doing And Then What? - and what with us now living in two different countries, me having two kids, and Becky currently racing to see whether she finishes the edits on her first book or growing a baby first, we’re absolutely not - then the story of Action Park, which I stumbled across on Reddit, is definitely one I would have chosen as my story for that week.

Action Park was a water park in New Jersey, on the grounds of a ski resort. It opened in 1978 under the ownership of Great American Recreation, or GAR, and was one of the first modern American water parks, hugely popular because of the uniqueness of the attractions it offered.

You may be thinking that “uniqueness” is a weird word to use here, and you’d be right! But “unique” is probably the only way to describe it. How else can you describe a park that was nicknamed “Traction Park”, “Accident Park” and/or “Class Action Park” by local residents and healthcare workers? A family-friendly day out with a reputation for badly designed rides, underage and/or drunk staff with no training, and a safety record so bad it included the deaths of six guests? A place that inspired a film by the creators of Jackass which saw Johnny Knoxville more injured than he’d ever been in any other time in his career? Unique doesn’t cover it. It was a clusterfuck, in the best possible way.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Background

So, Action Park started in 1976, when owner Gene Mulvihill realised he could make money in his ski resort’s off-season when there was no snow by offering rides. He put in a slide down one of the steep ski trails at the ski lodge, where guests could ride on sleds controlled by nothing more than a hand-brake down a 2,700 foot alpine slope. It was immensely popular and, by some miracle, no-one died, so they added a couple of water slides and a go-kart track, and called the whole thing Vernon Valley Summer Park.

The park itself opened up on July 4th 1978, promoted with a Dolly Parton look-alike contest and a tobacco juice-spitting contest, which is possibly the most American sentence every to be written. They developed it over the next two years until they had Action Park: 250 acres with 40 water slides and 35 motorised, self-controlled rides. It was a big deal! During the 1980s it saw over a million visitors per year, with as many as 12,00 coming on the busiest weekends.

As attendance to the park grew, so did the accidents - the director of the local emergency room said on busy days they would treat between five to ten victims of park accidents, and eventually they had to buy extra ambulances in order to keep up with the volume of victims. In 1982, two guests died at the park within a week of each other on the same ride - which was, to be fair (?!) closed down. AND YET, people kept coming. Two more deaths in the summer of 1984 and subsequent lawsuits meant that the park started struggling for money, so what did the owners do? Why, they operated an unauthorized insurance company to get around it, of course. Then they got found out, struggling on for another decade or so, and eventually closed for good in 1996. The park has been overhauled and relaunched as Mountain Creek Waterpark. Fewer people die nowadays, so that’s nice.

You might think that with such a high fatality and injury rate, people would be staying well away from Action Park. But that’s because you don’t know all the details of the delights that awaited you inside, so let me fill you in. I’m not going to go into detail on every ride, because there were 75 and I have dinner to cook, but let me give you the highlights:

Action Park Gladiator Challenge: This was basically like Gladiators the TV show, with guests able to compete against other guests and park-employed Gladiators in jousting matches. On one occasion, a guest thought that the Gladiator had been too rough with him and came back with a bunch of his friends to get revenge. The Gladiator called a bunch of his friends to fight back, and a brawl involving several dozen people broke out.

Alpine Slide: The slide that started it all. As I said, this was a 2,700 foot long slide that went down a mountain underneath one of the ski area’s chairlifts. Guests rode the slide while sat on a small sled that had a stick you could slide back and forth to control the speed, but one former employee described how this actually really only offered riders two choices of speed: extremely slow, and “death awaits”.

The slide itself was made out of those famously human-friendly materials - concrete, fiberglass and asbestos. If you had even a mild fall on the chute you’d rip your skin open. Thankfully, it’s not like it’s a water park where people would be doing said rides in skin-exposing swimsuits or anything. Oh, and it eventually became a bit of a tradition for the guests queueing for their turn on the slide to shout abuse and spit at people going down the slide. Fun! The first death at Action Park happened on this slide, when 19-year-old George Larsson Jr was thrown from the track and hit his head on a rock. Gene Mulvihill said that as George was an employee, they didn’t need to report his death to state regulators, because reasons??? It was one of the most popular rides until the park’s closure.

Bailey Ball: So this one never opened to the public, but it needs to be mentioned anyway. This was a large steel ball that guests would be fastened into and then rolled downhill. It was supposed to be on a track with a PVC pipe as its outer rails, but the designers forgot that PVC expands in the heat. When the state inspector came to view the Bailey Ball for the first time it was a hot summer day and the ball, with a man inside it, went off the track. The Bailey Ball bounced down an adjacent ski slope, rolled through the car park, across Route 94, and came to complete stop at the bottom of a swamp. The inspector left without saying a word and the Bailey Ball was abandoned. Thankfully.

Skateboard park: There was very briefly a skate park at Action Park. It was so badly put together that the edges didn’t quite meet, and an employee later stated that the "skate park was responsible for so many injuries we covered it up with dirt and pretended it never existed".

Super Go Karts: This was a track where people could drive around on Go Karts With speed limiters on them so you couldn’t go faster than 20mph. Except you could if you bribed an employee who knew how to bypass the limiter with a wedged tennis ball, which meant people could (and did) play bumper-cars at 50mph. They also could (and did) have head-on collisions at 50mph which meant they shot out of their cars, cracked their skulls and had to go to hospital. Oh, and the karts were so poorly maintained that sometimes the gas fumes would billow out and overwhelm you.

Lola Cars: Because Super Go Karts went so well, Action Park also opened Lola Cars. These were little open-cockpit race cars on a longer track. They could also be hacked to go faster by employees in the know, and apparently park staff were known to break into a local microbrewery, steal the beer, drink the beer, then take the cars out of the park to ride them on Route 94.

Battle Action Tanks: Guests and park staff were so responsible with the cars that the only logical next step was to give them tanks. Guests could go into an enclosed area and operate small tanks for five minutes at a time. The tanks also had tennis ball cannons that you could fire at other players to temporarily stop them from moving. Other park guests not in the enclosure could also use cannons on the outer fence to fire tennis balls at the tanks. This was one of the least popular attractions to work on because when staff had to enter the cage to fix a stuck tank - which they’d have to do several times a day - they were pelted with tennis balls from people both in and out of the enclosure, making it one of the few places in the park that was more dangerous for staff than guests. Once, a guest poured lighter fluid on their tennis ball and set it on fire before firing it at an employee. They were, at least, ejected from the park for that. So. That’s…something.

Super Speedboats: A general boat-on-a-lake ride. Guests would play “bumper boats” with them, and once a seriously drunk rider had to be rescued by a lifeguard, but compared to the other stuff on this list, this feels like small fry.

Bumper Boats: Supposedly safer than Super Speedboats? But the engines often leaked petrol all over the riders, and tall riders couldn’t fit their legs into the tiny boats so would hang them off the side and break them during collisions so honestly, who’s to say.

Cannonball Loop: You know what this covered waterslide needs, said no-one ever? A loop-the-loop! I’m surprised that this wasn’t cancelled before opening to the public considering it was so terrifying that staff were offered $100 (about £200 in today’s money) to test it (One employee who said he was “one of the idiots” who took the offer said afterwards that "$100 did not buy enough booze to drown out that memory.") Or considering that some of the test dummies who went down the slide came back dismembered and decapitated. Gene Mulvihill’s son Andy was the first live person to test the ride and did so in his full set of ice hockey gear. He later said that “The Cannonball Loop was not fun. It was more like a ride you had to survive”.

Anyway, Cannonball Loop only stayed open for a month, for some reason. Some suggested there were “too many bloody noses and back injuries from riders". Potentially it’s because a former Navy physician found that riders were experiencing 9 Gs of acceleration as they went through the loop. Personally I think it was because people were coming out of the ride with cuts on their bodies; when they closed the ride to investigate why, they found several human teeth lodged into the walls. You don’t come back from walls covered in human teeth, do you?

The Tidal Wave Pool: Also known as “The Grave Pool”. There were twelve lifeguards on guard at all times, and they would rescue as many as 30 people a day on busy weekends. To compare, the average lifeguard might save one or two people an entire season.

The Aqua Skoot: On this, riders would go down a slide on a hard plastic sled and then skip across shallow water like a stone. Well. That was the idea. What actually happened was that if riders were leant forward, as many of them were, the sled sunk into the water immediately upon impact and riders were thrown off head-first, bashing their heads on the floor. Although if you learnt too far back you fell off the sled backwards and had serious head injuries, so don’t do that either. And it was also very common for riders to leave the shallow pool only to be crashed into by other riders coming down the slide, so you’re slightly bollocksed whatever you do on this ride.

Tarzan Swing: This was a steel arch (why is everything in this death park made of steel?) hanging from a 20 foot cable over a pool where you could swing high in the air and then into the water. The very, very cold water. The water that was so cold it gave at least one person a heart attack due to the shock when they hit it.

Roaring Rapids: A normal whitewater ride that resulted in fractured femurs, collar bones and noses, plus dislocated knees and shoulders. Despite most of the park being closed down, this is somehow still open?

Surf Hill: A big wet slide split into multiple lanes that you’d go down on while riding mats. The seventh lane was known as the “backbreaker” . Employees liked to eat at a nearby cafe that had a good view of the ride because they knew they’d be able to watch people either getting seriously injured or losing their bikini tops. Eventually, the owner built a viewing platform specifically to watch this happen. I wonder just how many drugs the owner was doing during the operation of this park.

Diving Cliffs: The pool at the bottom of the diving cliffs was part of the way out of other attractions, and had absolutely no signage to state that other guests at the park might be landing on top of them. There was only one lifeguard on duty, and they would spend their whole day at work rescuing people as a result of these crashes. Eventually the bottom of the pool was painted white so that it was easier to spot bodies there.

There were also raft rides with sharp rocks on the side guests would crash into, and rock walls guests would slam into and break bones. There was alcohol on sale throughout the park and the age restrictions around it were observed about as closely as the ride safety restrictions around height, age and weight, so guests and staff were often very, very drunk.

Because of this, fights frequently broke out. I’ve already mentioned the gladiator one, but there was also an instance where bodybuilders threw lifeguards into the pool so all the lifeguards got together and tried to beat them up, resulting in the police being called. On top of that, queueing systems seemed in places designed to get people fighting. And the staff were also not hugely prepared for such fights - Jim DeSaye was Security Director for the park, which was a job he got aged 21 after working at the park for a whole two years.

And how did people respond? Guests who complained after injuries, including broken bones, would often happily accept free passes for more visits as compensation. Because nothing makes a fractured wrist feel better than the promise of more opportunities to fracture your wrist.

Action Park was infamous. So much so that Johnny Knoxville, Jackass star/co-creator, made a film inspired by it, Action Point. Seems like he did a decent job of capturing the spirit of the park, too: Knoxville said that during filming he injured himself more times than in any film he’d made before. During filming a sequence on the Alpine Slide, he landed on his face and was so badly injured that when he blew his nose, his left eye popped out of its socket.

The slogan for Action Park was, at one point, “There’s Nothing In The World Like Action Park!”. Quite frankly, I think we should all thank Christ for that.

Things I’ve done

I played a bloody football match on England’s training pitch. I didn’t throw up. I didn’t make a twat of myself. I didn’t have hoards of angry gamers on the livestream screaming that I dared to exist in a gaming space while being a woman and over a size 12. I managed to piss off a gazelle-like woman who I was marking to the point she snapped “I just can’t get away from you!” at me. I had a heartwarming moment with a different woman when I fully bodied her to stop her from getting the ball (this is apparently allowed?) and then we had a little hug afterwards. The commentators got a chant of “Amy with the sports bra, Jo with the shoes” going. It was about as wholesome as I could ever hope for it to be.

I was in agony for three days, and I still have two pulled crotch muscles today. It was all in aid of SpecialEffect, a wonderful charity that helps people with disabilities access games. I would be honoured if you’d donate here, and if you want to watch back the stream is here.

Things I liked

Garry and I devoured the first three series of Barry, and then it went off all of our streaming services. We started watching S4 yesterday and it was about as funny as a heart attack, but I mean that in a really good way? If you’ve not watched Barry it’s written by and stars Bill Hader as a Marine-turned-assassin who starts taking acting classes. It’s a masterclass in black comedy. Also stars The Fonze, and Anthony Carrigan as an adorable, completely fucked-up member of the Chechen Mafia called NoHo Hank who I would quite happily devote my life to were he real. Watch it. It’s on NowTV I believe.

I have been lusting after Deakin & Blue swimsuits for years, but they’re pricey and so I always saved them up for a special event or as a special reward. Well, I got my special event this week - a closing down sale. I am truly, truly sad for them, and for the world that’s going to lose them as an option: founder Rosie has been a delight every time I’ve spoken to her, and really believed in her mission to make comfortable, well-fitting swimwear and encourage women into the water. So many of her swimsuits were made with deadstock fabrics or other ways to be more sustainable, and I loved how you could get a swimsuit to fit both your body and your boobs. I bought this Daisy and Cobalt one piece and the Liberty print bikini, and I encourage you to take advantage of the shop while you still can.

That’s me for this week. I hope you’re alright. Look after yourself, yeah?
Love, Amy xxx

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