Class Action Park (2020) - full transcript
A documentary that focuses on a dangerously legendary water park and its slew of injuries and crimes along with child safety concerns.
♪ ♪
- It's not really fair
to ask the question,
"What was Action Park?"
Basically, so it was
a waterslide park.
But in truth, it was so much
more than a waterslide park.
- Action Park was
the chaos summer park
with very little oversight,
too much alcohol,
whistles blowing,
people screaming,
motors running.
It was an energy, you know?
You knew you were
jumping into the firepit.
- The most dangerous
theme park of all time.
- There was a waterslide
that held one person
that went in a--
like, in a flip.
- It looked like
a bunch of kids built it,
because that's what it was.
- We'll be back with more
"Headbangers Ball,"
coming from Action Park
in Vernon, New Jersey,
the biggest water park
in the world.
- I think the very reason
people were attracted
to Action Park was because
they could get hurt.
That was the allure of it.
I mean, who wants to sit
on a Ferris wheel?
- It was a place
where death was tolerated,
where death was put right
into the number situation.
- Every member of my family
was injured in that park
at some time or another.
They called it
Traction Park.
- Class Action Park.
- Class Action Park,
the lawyers called it.
- It starts out with people
having fun,
and by the end,
crimes have been committed.
Cover-ups have happened.
The story hasn't been told
truthfully.
To me, that's probably
the worst thing of all.
♪ ♪
In order to truly understand
a place like Action Park,
we need to go back to New York
in the 1970s.
Wall Street.
Everything was changing.
Bankers and brokers
were transforming
into masters of the universe.
- A ton of money starts
to enter the industry.
It is the place to be.
And that is part of
what creates the environment
that makes it perfect for
someone like Gene Mulvihill.
♪ ♪
- Gene Mulvihill
was Wall Street in the 1970s.
He was Gordon Gekko before
there was a Gordon Gekko.
- He's this mix of
P.T. Barnum, Donald Trump.
It's not just
that he's a businessman.
It's the personality
that he's bringing to it too.
Gene ran a brokerage firm
called Mayflower Securities,
and every time
he'd make a sale,
he'd blast a bugle
through the office
while the champagne bottles
crack open.
- This was the era
of the penny stock,
of the pump-and-dump scheme.
- Penny stocks?
- Yeah.
Penny stock scams
are when salesmen
take worthless stocks
and trick unsuspecting
investors into buying them.
- Come on.
Who buys this crap?
- Enters Robert Brennan,
fraudster, penny-stock king,
and best friend of Gene.
Brennan gets his start
as a salesman
at Mayflower Securities,
working for Gene,
and within a few years,
he's the president
of the company.
Under Gene
and Brennan's leadership,
it wasn't long
before Mayflower
got suspended by the SEC
for doing
what "The New York Times"
referred to
as "selling
worthless securities
in a bankrupt
electronics company."
Gene was effectively
kicked off of Wall Street.
So he did what anybody
in this situation would do:
buy up two ski resorts
in Vernon, New Jersey,
Great Gorge and Vernon Valley.
- Located within
the magic 45-mile radius
of metropolitan New York City,
Vernon Township occupies
67.9 square miles
of prime land,
with a population of better
than 20,000 people.
Also located in Vernon
is Wawayanda State Park,
and that's just the beginning.
- So many big,
larger-than-life people
looked to Vernon in the '70s,
and they saw possibility.
It's got all of this
amazing outdoor terrain.
You can ski in the winter.
You can hike or bike
in the summer.
- You would never think
it was in New Jersey.
For a country boy like me,
it was an amazing place
to grow up.
Everybody seemed
to know each other.
It was like this little
idyllic small town.
♪ ♪
In the early '70s,
none other than Hugh Hefner
opened a Playboy Club
in the hills of Vernon.
Gambling had just taken over
Atlantic City,
and Hef believed
it was on its way
up to North Jersey soon.
- And he wanted to build
the hopping spot,
the casino
that would draw people
from all over to New Jersey.
Vernon had already
been catching the eye
of outside investors,
but the opening
of the Playboy Club
took things
to a whole new level.
- Every weekend, there was
some celebrity coming.
People like Tony Bennett
would come to sing,
or Wayne Newton used to come.
- ♪ The love between
the two of us was dying ♪
- And Vernon was absolutely
poised to be the next Orlando,
even Vegas.
♪ ♪
Since he couldn't negotiate
with New Jersey weather
and its short ski season,
Gene became a pioneer
in artificial snow.
He went so far as to construct
the world's largest
snowmaking machine
out of a jet engine.
- So the thing
with Gene's ski resort is,
there were summer months.
He had downtime.
So what do you do?
Well, Gene started
building rides.
- So he was looking
for something to do with it
in the summer,
and he got the idea
of starting an amusement park,
but he wanted to kind of take
the idea of where
you get on your skis
and you go down
and you control how fast
and where you go
to the amusement park.
And we reflect
on the sounds and sights
of children's joy
at Action Park.
Everything here
is strictly do-it-yourself.
♪ ♪
To get his park built,
Gene turned to his old buddy
Bob Brennan,
always there
to find cash or investors
anytime Gene
had a wild new idea.
- They were saying
that New Jersey could compete
with Orlando
as a theme park destination,
and that's not that crazy.
Enough people
were sold on the vision,
and things started
to take off.
♪ ♪
- Action Park was one
of the very first
modern water parks
in the country--in the world.
Nobody knew what a water park
really was.
They had to invent it.
- Build it higher.
Make it faster.
Do something that nobody's
ever seen before.
That was what my father
was all about.
They were
designing it on the fly,
essentially throwing ideas
at the wall
and seeing what stuck.
Some worked okay.
Others not so much.
♪ ♪
And in 1978,
Action Park was born.
- ♪ Baby, let me take you
where the action's hot ♪
- ♪ Action, Action Park ♪
- ♪ We can ride
the excitement ♪
♪ And feel the park rock ♪
- ♪ Action, Action Park ♪
♪ The action never stops
at Action Park ♪
♪ ♪
- When we would all pile
into the car
to go to Action Park,
it was always a little manic,
everyone just kind of
on the edge of their seat,
just all jacked up
about the excitement
that was about to ensue.
- Like, older teenagers
would take you.
So that right there
is already dangerous,
because they're just gonna
make you do things that they,
as 17- and 18-year-olds,
feel comfortable doing.
- I remember my parents
did not want me
to go to Action Park,
but we got lucky
because there was this family,
they grew up
up the street from us,
and their dad brought them
to Action Park.
I think my parents were like,
"Fuck, someone else
is offering it for free."
And these kids, classic '80s,
children of divorce,
they don't live with their dad,
and my parents knew,
"We can't say no.
We can't say no."
I remember my parents both,
on my way out the door,
being like, "Please be smart.
Like, please be really careful
and use your best judgment."
♪ ♪
Action Park was divided
into three main sections.
You had Alpine Center,
home of the Alpine slide;
Water World, filled with
fantastical waterslides;
and Motor World,
an area dedicated
to exhaust-spewing engines
and go-karts.
And, of course, splitting
the park down the middle
was a major highway, Route 94.
- One of the first things
you saw
when you walked
into Action Park
was the infamous
Cannonball Loop,
which for years,
it was like a myth
that the thing
had ever been open.
- Cannonball Loop was
an enclosed tube waterslide,
and you would climb to the top
of a series of stairs,
and you would ride down
the enclosed tube,
and at the very end, the tube
would go into a huge loop.
- I mean, you looked
at the thing,
and it looked like it was
something out of, like,
a Bugs Bunny
or a Road Runner cartoon,
where they just made a loop
and said,
"Yeah, there's our ride."
- Some lunatic clearly
just was like,
"Build me a slide
that's like that."
And then
they didn't consult anybody
who had a background
in engineering.
- So the story is,
they build the loop,
and they throw
some test dummies down.
Come out dismembered,
missing a head, missing arms.
"Okay, let's tinker
with things.
"Change the height.
Change the angle.
"Change the water pressure.
"Next step, let's put
some humans in this thing.
"Who we got?
How about these
teenage employees?"
So Gene's just waving
$100 bills in the air.
Any teenager gutsy enough
to go down this thing
will get one.
100 bucks, that's real money.
- I'm $100 richer
because Uncle Gene--
we always called him
Uncle Gene--
gave $100 for an employee
to test the Cannonball Loop.
- And I can remember looking,
staring down
into this black tube
and looking at the loop
and being like, "There's no way
that I would go on this thing."
- So you look down
the Cannonball Loop,
and all you see
is pitch black.
It's darkness.
- There's the water flow
at the top of it
that gets you mo--you know,
'cause you got to have water
to get, you know--
it's a waterslide.
You know,
somehow it's a waterslide.
And it's just way too steep.
- So they spray you down
with a garden hose,
and you go down,
and you're supposed to go down
feetfirst with your
arms and legs crossed.
- And then as soon as you,
like, kind of scoot forward,
it just takes you.
All of a sudden, you're going
really, really fast.
I'm like,
"I'm gonna shit my pants."
It was absolutely terrifying.
And then you feel--
all of a sudden,
you feel your feet go up.
And then as I go up,
you kind of lose contact
with the loop for a second.
It just kind of--
gravity just takes you.
You just...
Kind of flop.
The catch pond,
wherever you landed,
was way too short.
You got to the bottom,
and I'm like,
"Shit, I did it.
I made it."
The loop was fun,
and yes, it hurt.
You know,
going through the loop
and having your nuts
get smashed on a--
you know, a fiberglass tube
was not fun.
But then, you know,
Uncle Gene's standing there,
and he hands you 100 bucks.
- The first couple people
that came in came out,
and their mouths
were all bloody,
and that was before they had
put sufficient padding
in the top;
there was a little bit.
So they sent a couple
other people down,
and when those people
came down,
they came down
with lacerations.
They couldn't figure out
why these people
had lacerations
from a giant loop.
Then they took the loop apart
and they found teeth
stuck in the padding
from the first couple people
that went down the slide.
They had gotten their teeth
knocked out.
And these other people
were just going up
and ripping into it.
After Action Park
test pilots
came out woozy
and unable to stand,
Gene brought in
a navy physician
to measure
the slide's effects.
- Let me put it this way.
There's two places
that you can experience
nine Gs as a civilian.
One is the back seat
of an F-14,
and the other one
is at Action Park.
- You couldn't go down
the Cannonball Loop
if you were too small.
You couldn't go down
the Cannonball Loop
if you were too big.
Too big, you'd get stuck.
Too small,
you wouldn't get up
enough momentum
to make the loop.
There was a trapdoor
at the top that they--
that's how they would extricate
people from the loop
if they got stuck.
- So as you entered the park,
you saw this thing.
It was one of the things that,
you know,
you had kind of heard
whispers about.
So right away, you walk in,
you're like,
"Well, that's real.
This shit's real."
I did get hurt on a ride
that was called
Cannonball Falls.
And it looked like
a pretty normal waterslide.
You'd sit down.
You'd go down the waterslide.
What is not discernible
from the top
is that at some point,
you come around a corner,
and there's
this big black tunnel.
You feel like,
all of a sudden,
you're just going faster
as well.
And I'll never forget.
I'm going down this waterslide.
I enter the tunnel, and you
just hear people, "Oh, no!"
Ahead of you--
"Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no!"
So you're like, "What--
what's going on here?"
And then you'd see
this little piece of light
at the bottom of the tunnel,
and then you'd just get
shot out.
And you'd just be there in
the middle of, like, the air.
And I'm not kidding when I say
you're, at minimum,
ten feet in the air.
It shoots you out
the side of a mountain,
and you're just, like,
in the sky.
You think you're getting
on a waterslide,
and the next thing you know,
you're in the fucking sky, man!
- And yes,
you were over water,
but there was a few seconds
where you'd be like,
"I'm gonna fucking die.
What am I doing?"
And you just look around,
and then gravity would take you
down into the water.
- And you're in
ice-cold water, 17 feet deep,
so people were constantly
getting pulled out of there
for, you know,
being unable to swim
or just landing wrong
and being disoriented.
- There's nothing in the world
like Action Park.
- The rides that got built
at Action Park
would often come to Gene
through people
who just had a wild hair
and wanted to build
this crazy idea that they had.
- A certain number
of the Action Park rides
were more or less
designed in-house
by people
without engineering degrees,
and I was certainly
one of them.
- The people who were kind of
on the fringes
of the ride-design world,
people who Six Flags or Disney
wanted nothing to do with,
these guys would literally
track Gene down
at amusement industry
conventions.
- You could tell these guys
went and did bumps of coke,
and were like, "Let's
fucking-- let's drill a slide
"right through the fucking
middle of a mountain,
and it'll shoot them
20 feet in the fucking air!"
You just couldn't
trust anything there.
- Guys would come to us,
and no matter
what the idea was,
my father would try it.
- And then when each of these
rides went into construction,
Gene would change them
drastically.
Action Park's
most prolific ride designer
was none other
than Gene himself.
After designs came in,
he would almost always
tinker with them
during construction,
making them bigger, badder,
more extreme.
And the Cannonball Loop?
Its design actually came about
when Gene drew a circle
on a cocktail napkin
and hired some local welders
to put it all together.
- Many of the rides
were experimental,
and on paper,
the design looked good.
But in reality,
once the ride was turned on,
it was not fit for a safe ride
by the average person
in public.
- One of those rides was
the Man in the Ball
in the Ball.
The Man in the Ball
in the Ball
was this giant ball
that we had
with ball bearings inside it
with another ball,
and you would open up two doors
and get in the ball
to go down the mountain.
And what he did is,
the guy built it
with PVC pipe
all the way down the mountain.
- Like, it's a great idea;
you can see how someone
would think that'd be
a lot of fun,
and I think it might work
and be relatively safe.
It turned out, you know,
there were limitations to it.
- It's a crazy concept.
I mean, it's so big
and so heavy and so unwieldy
that there's no way it's gonna
stay in any kind of track.
- The day that we were gonna
put a live man in it,
it got really hot,
and he didn't realize
that PVC expanded.
So when we put the live man
in the ball
and tested it
to go down the mountain,
the ride just fell apart.
And the guy ended up
going down the ski slope,
right over 94,
into the swamp down below.
It was unbelievable.
Another
prototype waterslide
was inspired
by zero-gravity airplanes.
Riders
would actually take flight
as they plummeted downhill.
- We built this, and we tested
several versions of it,
and we started sending
employees off of it.
And it was working perfect.
But unfortunately,
after dozens
of successful test flights,
one went horribly wrong.
- This one kid went down,
and I don't know how he did it,
but he got himself going
way faster
than anybody else had.
He went way high in the air
and completely missed
the landing.
He had to be backboarded
off of the ride.
He's gone on
to lead a normal life,
but he was hurt that day,
and that was
the end of that ride.
While some rides
never made it
past the testing phase,
dozens of other
questionable ideas did.
- Right here,
that's called the Speed Slide.
It's over seven stories.
They tell me that you go
over 60 miles an hour.
So tell me,
any preparations
as we're about to embark
on the Speed Slide?
- Yeah,
Preparation H.
- There was a canopy around
the first 20 feet or so
in case you flew off.
The idea was that it would
bounce you back in.
You had a bar
you had to hold on to
and lower yourself
to vertical...
- And you just drop.
And you've got to be
free-falling
for a few seconds,
and then you actually
make contact
with the waterslide,
and you go down.
- Tops would come off.
Bottoms would be up
around their shoulders.
People would be
all disoriented.
Not the most pleasant
experience.
- What did you think
about the Speed Slide?
- I'm feeling
kind of juicy right now.
- It puts more fluids
through your system, that's--
I'm trying to think
of a nice way to say it.
What would you say?
- I'd say my fig
is puckered.
- I think the
Super Speed Slide was the one
that a lot of people would say
that it would just sort of,
like, shoot water
straight up their assholes,
that it was designed in a way
where you just--
you got your first colonic
for free
courtesy of Action Park.
- Everybody that got off
that ride walked funny.
Yeah, whether you're a guy
or a girl, you know,
you were not just getting off
and walking away.
You were, you know,
picking and prodding
and hopping and poking
for quite a while
after you got off that ride.
♪ ♪
Questionable
design decisions
weren't limited to the rides.
The construction and layout
of Action Park itself
had its own way
of leaving a mark.
- All the park was, like,
paved in asphalt.
So everywhere you went,
you had to walk around
on, like, dark, you know,
highway-grade type asphalt
that was absorbing heat
and reflecting it
back on you all day.
- So if you don't bring
your own flip-flops
or those water shoes,
you are going to suffer
from the notorious ailment
known as chopped-meat feet.
Everybody's, like, limping
around from running around
on fucking jagged
and poorly paved asphalt.
♪ ♪
- There was a great ride
called the Aqua Skoot,
which was essentially
warehouse rollers
built on an angle
like a ski jump.
You rode a plastic sled,
and then you would see
how far you could skim
across the water,
like a stone skipping
across the water.
- People didn't sit back
on the ride
and they'd lean
too far forward,
they would face-plant
into the water.
Unbeknownst to most patrons,
the Aqua Skoot was also home
to a thriving bee nest.
Guests who lingered too long
were likely to be stung.
- I'll tell you something
about the Aqua Skoot.
Took one look at that thing,
I said,
"No fucking way.
No way, man."
That just looked like a thing
where you'd get
your fucking toes
or your balls
get caught in those--
Aqua Skoot.
I'm gonna Aqua Skoot
the fuck away from this thing,
that was my instinct.
The culture, the atmosphere
at Action Park,
it's most summed up
by the Tarzan Swing.
Everybody wanted to go
on the Tarzan Swing.
That was, like,
number one childhood
test your mettle,
prove you got some guts,
go on the Tarzan Swing.
- The idea was that you would,
you know, swing and release.
The problem was,
people couldn't hold
their body weight.
They would lean out
like they were gonna swing
and then just do
a total face-plant
from 10, 12 feet up
into the water.
- People would think
on a 90-degree day
that they were gonna be
jumping into pool water.
No, no, no.
That's a spring-fed stream
that held native trout in it.
It's cold, and, I mean,
people would go into shock.
People would hit and start
to scream because of the cold,
and they would actually
forget how to swim.
Man, what a shock
to the system.
- The Tarzan Swing was cool
because there was kind of,
like, an observation deck,
and that's where everybody
was waiting on line.
- So you might have,
I don't know,
probably over 75, 100 people
at given times that could all
see you as you went.
- Go to do it.
Your weight would hit.
You'd flip off.
You'd, like,
hit the back of your head
on the water.
No lifeguard would jump in
to help you.
The water's ice cold.
You come up for air.
You're all shell-shocked.
You're probably concussed.
And you have, like,
150 people from New Jersey
just being like, "Pussy!
"You fucking bitch!
You fucking wiped out!
Pussy!"
And that's, like,
when it's at its classiest.
- It was like,
"You fucking pussy, just do it!
This is Jersey!"
- "Oh, you fucking suck!
Start swimming, pussy!"
You know, I mean, it was just--
it was actually--
it was a very demeaning place.
- No one yelled at you.
No lifeguard
ever blew a whistle
and was like, "Hey,
stop chanting the word 'pussy'
at this injured,
bleeding person."
Nobody did that.
- They always tell people,
"No inverted jumps,
no obscenities,"
and people would go up,
do backflips.
People were dropping
their pants.
- So you got
the people who, like,
swing on the Tarzan Swing
and just, like,
throw up the middle finger,
and everybody's
fucking flipping--
or people are, like, taking
their dick and balls out,
mooning each other.
- Of course,
girls in bikinis would go,
they'd hit the water,
and, of course,
the bikini top surfaces
before the girl does,
and, you know, you get
the big round of applause,
and you see the girl
get to the top, and...
That happened all the time.
♪ ♪
- Action Park felt,
in some ways,
like a strange
social experiment.
What happens when you take
a bunch of riled-up teenagers,
a bunch of alcohol,
bunch of dangerous rides,
and you put them into a place
where there are no rules?
- Yo, come on. Follow me.
- Action Park was run by kids.
- Hell yeah!
- Oh, my God.
- You know,
the second you turn 14,
you got your working papers,
and then you went to work
at Action Park.
You know, even the people in
the lead supervisor positions,
it's like, "Oh, you've
been here for two years.
Here's a radio.
You're in charge."
- You had 16-year-old,
17-year-old kids
with no prior management
experience whatsoever
literally managing
a third of the park.
Hazing became
a rite of passage
at Action Park.
It wouldn't be uncommon
to use a new recruit
as a victim in a drowning.
In the water, we would spin
the new employee over
and put him on a backboard,
strap him down real tight
while in the water,
and just leave him be.
There are certainly things
that happened at Action Park
that are never spoken about.
We lived through it,
we regretted some
of the things we did,
but we don't talk about it.
- I was probably
a security guard
for maybe three months,
and then they worked me up
to a supervisor
and then assistant
and then, eventually,
if you stayed there
long enough
and you had
anything going for you,
they would make you
director of security.
So it's not as impressive
as it sounded.
- Somehow I ended up
in the kitchen.
Like, all the bread products
in there--
everything was stale.
Everything was out of date.
So what they would do is,
they would put
the big pot of water on
and put, like,
a colander over the water
and then put the hot dog buns
in the colander
and cover it with a towel,
and in five minutes,
you'd have
moist hot dog buns again.
Damn, how did
we not kill people?
- I know there were people
older than them
who owned it,
but you never saw them.
Just literally imagine
teenagers you know right now
opening an amusement park.
That's what it was.
- Everybody worked
at Action Park
because you knew
you'd get hired.
They'd give you as many hours
as you wanted.
But, you know,
Action Park didn't care
about, like, labor laws.
It was like,
"Yeah, I just worked 46 hours.
Yeah, I'm 16."
According to New Jersey law,
employees had to be
16 years old
in order to operate rides.
According to local newspapers,
kids as young as 14
were, in fact,
working in these roles.
- They were kids.
They were teenagers.
So I'm sure their priorities
were on, like, hooking up
and getting fucked up.
- There was romance
between everybody.
They were teenagers,
horny teenagers.
- At the top
of the Alpine Slide,
we had a shack,
like, where we kept
our employee carts,
where you would put
your backpacks,
where you kept your water.
People would go in the shed
to smoke weed and have sex.
That's what they would do
in that shed.
Why anybody would want to have
sex in there, I can't fathom,
because it was always, like,
95,000 degrees in that thing.
And it always stunk
like dirty backpacks,
feet, weed,
and just ball sweat.
- There are definitely people
who worked at Action Park
who have stories about that's
the first time they fingered
and/or got fingered.
Like, clearly,
a lot of fingering
going on after hours,
I would imagine.
There's a child
who was conceived
at Action Park, right?
There's some kid who's, like--
you know,
his name's Adam Peter
'cause his initials are AP
'cause he got conceived
down behind the bumper boats
on one hot summer eve.
- Now, I was a good girl,
so I wasn't really involved
in much of the shenanigans
that took place.
But there were parties
that I heard about.
I may have attended one.
The Action Park
employee parties
became the stuff
of New Jersey legend.
- We would save
all the money we found
in the pools over the course
of the summer,
and at the end of the summer,
one huge all-night bash
right up in Water World
called
the kamanawanalea party.
- Everyone stayed over,
so no one was driving,
but that was back in the days
when you could get away
with stuff like that.
- You'd find anyplace
you could find to sleep--
on the mats,
under the umbrellas,
on the picnic tables.
Some days, we'd wake up
after the kamanawanalea party,
we'd put our shorts on,
put the whistle
round our neck,
and find our way
to the lifeguard chair
as soon as we could.
Of course,
leadership comes from the top.
And Action Park's
free-for-all atmosphere
was inspired by
Gene Mulvihill's disdain
for rules of any kind.
- We called him Uncle Gene
because he actually did have
a lot of endearing qualities.
I mean, he was always out
and around in the park.
You know, he was a very
personable guy to talk to.
- So I go in his office
one day for a meeting,
and he has a cattle prod.
And he goes,
"Joe, I can't do this anymore."
And he takes the cattle prod.
He puts it to his chest,
and he hits the button,
and the thing goes boom!
And I get so freaked out
that I'm like, "Oh, my God."
He starts laughing
hysterically,
and at that point,
he basically goes, like,
"Don't get nervous.
It's fake."
And then he pitches me an idea.
"Joe, the people sneak
on the lift.
"And they go on the lift
without tickets,
"and we want to make sure
they all have tickets.
"So what I'm gonna do is,
I'm gonna get the cattle prod,
"and I'm gonna
stand by the lift.
"We got to get one of those
real dirty-looking kids
"that work down
in the train park.
"I'll be working the lift,
"and when they come up,
I'll go,
"'Hey, where's your ticket?'
"And they'll say,
'I don't have a ticket.'
"I'll take out the cattle
prod, I'll hit him,
"he'll pass out
like he's dead,
"and then we'll have patrol
come drag him away,
"and then everyone will know
not to come here
without a ticket."
I laughed like,
"Gene, that's some idea."
While I was out of town,
I get a phone call
from the person
who runs guest services to say,
"We have an issue.
"We have hundreds of parents
who are calling
"who are very upset
"because they saw someone who
works lift today kill someone
because they didn't have
a lift pass."
- I had a friend of mine
that had worked there
for couple seasons,
and he had told me
that Gene Mulvihill
had a MAC-10 machine gun
that he kept
in his office drawer.
♪ ♪
- He was far and away
the most unique character
I've met in my lifetime.
He was big and loud
and full of ideas.
Probably 90 % of those ideas
were just so crazy
and off the wall
that nobody would get near him,
and the other 10 %
were pretty close to that.
And we actually made
a lot of those ideas happen.
Gene's rule-bending antics
may have been common
on Wall Street,
but in this small town,
the locals had no idea
how to handle him.
- Well, they obviously
didn't know
Gene Mulvihill's personality
until they got to know him.
But Vernon is a little bit
of a mixed bag.
There were those who embraced
someone like Gene Mulvihill
with open arms,
and there were those
who hated him
because they see him
as having destroyed
our beautiful, bucolic, sleepy
little town with his resorts.
- The man could wear a suit
in 90-degree heat.
I had no idea how he did that.
He just was a--
he was a cool dude.
- I think he was
a piece of shit.
Action Park's
growing reputation
posed an important question:
what insurance company
would dare cover
this creatively designed park?
- Gene didn't believe
in the concept of insurance.
He thought if you got hurt,
you should be responsible.
He shouldn't have to pay
an insurance company.
However, he needed insurance
to stay in business.
It was part of the terms
of his lease.
So he had a work-around.
He created
his own fake insurance company
based in the Cayman Islands.
Its name?
The very real
and very legitimate-sounding
London and World Assurance.
- This company's documents
were very, very homemade.
They looked like they were
ginned up in a basement.
The letterhead
was not official.
Might as well have been
on napkins.
Gene was,
if nothing else,
efficient with his schemes.
And so his fake
insurance company
wasn't just used to avoid
paying for insurance.
It also became a vessel
for him to launder money.
- I said,
"We can't do that."
And he said,
"Why can't we do that?"
And I said, "Because the state
says we can't do that."
And he goes,
"Well, who the hell are they?
They can't shut us down."
And I said, "Well, actually,
yes, yes, they can."
These crimes would attract
the attention of the state
and eventually lead
to a large-scale
investigation,
three-day hearing,
and a 110-count indictment.
- Top officials
from the Vernon Valley
Recreation Association
today refused to testify
before the State Commission
of Investigation.
Gene Mulvihill did not appear,
citing client privilege.
The outcome?
Gene pled guilty
to counts of fraud,
theft, and conspiracy
and was ordered to give up
control of Action Park,
which was partially
on state land.
But to Gene,
that would not do.
So he came up
with yet another scheme.
He decided to become
the worst tenant he could.
He stopped paying bills
and filing paperwork.
He basically did
everything he could
to antagonize
his landlord state.
- The SCI
accusing Vernon Valley
of "arrogantly violating
its agreement with the state
to lease land
for the ski resort."
Vernon Valley
allegedly diverted funds
to avoid paying the state
several hundred thousand
dollars in rent.
The SCI probe also disclosed
Vernon Valley
created a phony
insurance company
to avoid premium payments
and changed the terrain
of the ski resort
without obtaining permission.
And it worked.
New Jersey got
so fed up with Gene
that they decided
to sell him the land
for just over $800,000
just to get him
off their backs.
Gene was free from the pesky
state of New Jersey.
And so Action Park continued
to expand and grow.
And anytime Gene needed cash
for a new ride,
his buddy Bob Brennan
was waiting in the wings
to support Gene's wild ideas.
- Excellence always succeeds.
When you have
an excellent facility
run by extraordinary people,
you're able to bring out
the fans,
and the facility does well.
But things
really started to take off
when Gene started running
TV ads
created by his daughter
and starring the park's
teenage employees.
- Just go to Action Park.
There's no other park like it.
- When it's hot out,
this is a great place
to spend the day
with your family.
- Race like a pro.
It's great.
- These are the most
amazing rides in the world.
I love it here.
- ♪ There's nothing
in the world ♪
♪ Like Action Park ♪
It's absolutely insane!
♪ ♪
A lot of Gene's ride ideas
took inspiration
from natural settings
and environments
that he grew up playing in.
His thinking was,
if kids couldn't make it
to real nature, he'd create
the next best thing.
How else to explain
an amusement park
that lets six-year-olds jump
off a 20-foot cliff?
♪ ♪
- They also had a slide
you could slide off
of the same cliff
into that water.
- So the slide version
of the Cliff Dive,
I think, was also
really good for people
who wanted to treat it
like a ride mentally
and didn't want to know
the feeling
of committing suicide.
- I remember being on
the diving cliff looking down,
being scared out of my life,
and to add to that,
there were people
right down below,
and they had no idea
you were about to jump.
- Conceivably, if you
just wanted to chill out
for a minute from all
the action of Action Park,
you could just hang out there.
You could be minding
your own business,
and somebody could land
right on top of you
without any warning.
So it was not actually
a chill-out area at all.
- You could do it safely,
but people didn't.
You know,
people just didn't listen.
They would jump stupidly.
They would slip and fall.
- And people would jump, and
the lifeguards always told you
to cross your arms
over your chest,
but people didn't listen,
and they would land
on the water like this,
and their arms
would get thrown up,
and they'd dislocate
their shoulder.
So you'd see somebody
coming out of the water,
and one shoulder's, like,
six inches lower
than the other one.
And their arm would just be,
like, hanging.
The floor
of the pool below the cliff
was eventually painted white
to make it easier
for lifeguards
to spot any bodies below.
And this wasn't
the only attraction
that was to feature cliffs.
The original concept
for Surf Hill,
which was basically a giant
Slip 'N Slide on a mountain,
was to have guests
jump off a cliff
before the mat
would catch them.
This idea was abandoned
due to space limitations.
- Staff members started
building up the jump
by sliding the mats
underneath,
making it bigger
and bigger and bigger,
until eventually one of the
guests got seriously injured.
We had been told
the person broke his neck.
Roaring Springs
was an expansive collection
of tube rides designed
to mimic the experience
of a mountain swimming hole.
- I remember this guy
coming up behind me.
He hit my tube
right before the tunnel,
and I went off to the side,
and I slammed my head
into the center of this tube
that you were meant
to go through.
- Some of the padding had got
torn away and exposed a bolt,
and one of the guests
came down,
and they basically
got impaled on the bolt,
and it tore a nice gash
through their midsection,
and they had to be evacuated
off the ride.
- Those ride attendants,
they spent their time
twisting their whistles
and then just going,
"Go, go, go."
And a lot of the time,
those tubes would bunch up.
And then what happens
when you get to the bottom
when you have to squeeze
into a particular area?
People were crashing
into each other,
slamming on top of each other.
One person would be
in the water.
The next person coming down
would then dunk
the next person and go under.
And if you couldn't swim well,
yikes.
CFS stood for
"can't fucking swim."
- Security guys, lifeguards,
they carried Sharpies.
Action Park gave out
daily wristbands,
and they would write "CFS"
on the wristband.
If someone had CFS
on their wristband,
that means they probably
had gotten saved already
at some point in the day,
and it was a warning
to other people.
Like, if CFS
was on your wristband
and you knew
you couldn't swim,
what the hell are you doing
jumping off a 20-foot cliff
into a deep pool of water?
But people just--you know,
they thought, like,
this was some magical place
where all of a sudden,
they would have
the ability to swim.
- We should talk
about that other ride
that's right near there,
the Colorado River Ride.
Holy shit, dude.
I will say everybody talks
about Tarzan Swing.
Cliff Dive, Cannonball Falls,
you hear about those.
Colorado River Ride
may have been
the most underrated
dangerous ride.
- You would load in,
and they would just let
the laws of physics
take over from there,
which sometimes meant
that you would fly really fast
and also sometimes meant
that you would get stuck
at certain points of the ride
that they hadn't designed
all that well,
and then you would get punted
by another tube.
- That thing was just
a fucking whiplash machine.
You're going up on the side.
Your raft is getting stuck
on the wall.
You have to all team up
and push off the wall,
and now you're going backwards.
Like, this is clearly not--
there's no rhyme or reason
in this.
The Colorado River Ride
actually began life
as a lazy-river ride.
But during construction,
Gene decided
he wanted a realistic
simulation of Class IV rapids.
Early test pilots reportedly
came out unconscious,
forcing him to turn down
the ride's intensity.
- There was one section
where tubes tended to go
right up an embankment,
and everyone was
looking at it expectantly,
waiting for them
to fly over the side.
You would hear people
audibly go, "Oh... aw,"
when they didn't actually fall
to their doom.
- I mean, we're holding on,
getting slammed into stuff,
the thing's getting stuck,
we have to kind of
stick our own legs out
and push our way off,
and then we go past
a lifeguard chair that,
you guessed it, is empty.
Nobody there
keeping an eye on anything.
- Gene got involved during
the construction process,
and he said...
"Look, when you go down
"the Colorado River in a raft,
"there's not some guy
in a lifeguard shirt
pushing your raft
down the river."
And I said,
"Look, Gene,
"this is not
the Colorado River.
It's a water park."
- A lot of fights
on the Colorado River Ride
for the dumbest thing ever--
you know,
rafts bumping into each other.
And then people would get out
and just start having at it.
Some of the worst fights we had
were people standing
in the Colorado River Ride
punching each other.
It was just dumb.
You would be like,
"Really? Why here?"
- There's morons
in the pool with us,
morons in the pool with us.
Action Park was like
the movie "The Purge."
Thousands of kids
with pent-up aggression
and a healthy dose of alcohol
were given a space
where they could do
whatever they wanted.
- You know when you were
at pool parties or things
when you were a kid and there
was always those idiots
who were like, "Let's jump
in the pool off the roof!
"No, let's get higher!
Let's do
the second-story roof!"
And you're always--you know,
you're kind of on board for it,
but then at one point,
you're like,
"Ah, I got to pull out
at this point.
This is where it's getting
too dangerous."
It was all those kids
in one park with no rules.
There were no rules.
And for a lot of kids,
that was heaven.
- Action Park was basically
the only water park
within the New York City area.
And it was a place
that filled a void for people
who weren't spending
their summer vacation
at a beach house.
They weren't going
to Cape Cod.
They weren't going to Florida.
They were going
to Action Park.
And I think because of that,
it might've attracted
a more, say,
working-class clientele.
The more
news reports warned people
about Action Park's
potential danger,
the more adrenaline-fueled
teenagers flocked to it.
It became
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In a world filled with people
telling you no,
Action Park became known
as the land of yes.
- I'd work the front
of the lot
to let people know
the lot was full.
And what would happen is,
people would come
to try to get in the lot
after it was full.
And one of the ways they would
try to get in is, they'd say,
"Hey, I'm from New York City."
And I don't know
what they meant by that,
but I think they didn't realize
that everyone here
was from New York City.
So as a 14-year-old, I'd say,
"Oh, my God.
"Are there big buildings?
"What is it like there?
You think one day,
I can go there?"
- There were a lot of people
that came up there,
usually younger guys,
that were just coming up there
for the idea
of starting trouble.
- It didn't always bring
the best.
It did bring sometimes
a criminal element.
I once heard
a police officer tell me
the majority of their calls
during the day
were for Action Park.
- There were a lot of fights
at Action Park.
You know, hot, in the sun,
lots of places to buy alcohol,
people that don't know
any restraint.
- Trying to start fights
with each other,
trying to start fights
with the ride attendants,
pulling the ride attendants
into the rides themselves.
- We used to call it
a Code Brown.
That was the code for
"somebody shit in the pool."
How angry do you have to be
on vacation
to just shit in a pool?
- The average customer
at Action Park was just insane.
And they just didn't care
half the time,
and, you know, combine that
with liquor, and anything goes.
- I lived through it, man,
I lived through it.
- There was a big fest tent.
That's where the beer
used to be.
And they would have, like,
Summerfest, Oktoberfest.
- My father was crazy
for that kind of stuff.
I mean, we had
a German brewer.
We had a German baker.
We had German bands.
- And I remember them doing
a big Polish festival,
Irish festival,
German festival.
- Anything you could put the
word "fest" on the end of it,
Action Park did it.
And they were
kind of free-for-alls.
- Jump, jump, jump, jump!
Come on, jump, jump!
Gene took
this stuff seriously.
He went so far as to literally
dismantle an entire brewery
from Germany
and have it sent
to New Jersey.
And during festivals,
such as Action Park's famed
Oktoberfest celebration,
Gene would be
front and center,
wearing lederhosen
and dancing to polka music.
♪ ♪
- Now, anyone who worked
at Action Park knew
Water World
was for the daytime,
and then at some point
around 4:00 or 5:00,
the adults would have
a little fun in the bar area,
and then they'd make their way
over to Motor World.
One side of the highway--
you have 94 that runs
through the middle,
and you have Water World
on one side
and Motor World
on the other side,
with all the racing cars,
the racing boats.
And that was usually
after they had a few drinks.
♪ ♪
- The design was flawed
because the Grand Prix cars
were right next
to the beer tent.
- So at 5:00,
guys would come up.
They'd get a bunch
of beers in them.
They'd go down to Motor World
to drive the cars.
- Out of all the rides,
my opinion,
that's the craziest one
because it's not the ride
attendant's fault, you know?
You can't always tell
if someone's been drinking,
and if you didn't stink
like booze,
they would never know.
- Gene said to me one day...
"You know what we need here?
"When somebody comes in
under 55 seconds,
"we got to have these girls
in bikinis come running out
"and a huge champagne bottle
that pops the top off
and shoots champagne
up in the air."
And I was laughing
when he said it.
And I looked at him,
and he had a straight face.
He was dead serious
about doing that.
- Occasionally
with the LOLA cars,
we would get a guest that,
instead
of following the course,
would decide he wanted
to make his own course,
that he would just start
driving around on the course,
drive off the course.
- I watched a guy
go off the track
and start chasing one of my
employees around in the field
with a LOLA car.
And so this kid
was running around
kind of like a bullfighter,
like, trying
to make tighter turns
than the car could make so
the car couldn't run him over.
- I'd heard the employees
figured out
how to override
the speed governor
so that the go-karts could go
as fast as 50
or 60 miles an hour.
And I'd heard that they would
then take those go-karts
on the highway that ran
through the middle of the park.
- Yeah, I took a LOLA car
on 94.
It has a top speed
of over 60 miles an hour.
It was worth it.
Many amusement parks
feature bumper boats.
Action Park had full-on
"Miami Vice"-grade speedboats,
where riders
regularly tempted fate
by treating them
like bumper boats,
a common action
that would send many a guest
tumbling into a pond
murky from leaked gas and oil
and known by employees
to be infested with snakes.
- Like, you'd be driving
a power boat,
and you'd see something
slither out
from, like, in the high grass.
- Oh, yeah, there were
big black snakes.
Motor World had lagoons
and swamp,
and there must've been
four-foot snakes.
Used to scare the hell
out of the New Yorkers.
- The things would flip,
I mean, on a regular basis.
If I stood there for an hour,
I could almost guarantee
I was gonna see one flip.
- Well, if you were a lifeguard
in Motor World,
you were being punished for
something, for the most part,
or you were somebody
who didn't know anybody.
You know, it was not the place
you wanted to be.
- I worked at Speedboats,
and everyone would get
three times around this pond,
this gas, oily pond...
That was just loaded
with dead fish.
I remember that.
One day, we had
a group of people.
I think you had about eight
boats going at the same time,
and they did
their three times around,
and they would throw
a red flag.
And this one gentleman
is coming toward the dock,
and he comes up,
flies forward,
up and over the small dock,
and on top of this other boat.
I thought this gentleman
was decapitated.
And I walk over,
and I see that he's--
you know, he's stuck forward
and his neck is bleeding,
but he's breathing.
I'm shocked, and I'm afraid
that this guy
is going to get his hair
pulled into the prop.
I remember taking my rod
and slamming
on top of the boat
to get the guy to let go
of the throttle,
for--you know, for God's sake.
And the gentleman
who was on top of the boat
just jumps off the ride
and just heads to the monorail
like--as if he hadn't done
anything wrong.
- One of the coolest
attractions
I've never seen anywhere else,
the Battle Tanks,
you know, kind of homebuilt
tanks where you drove around
and shot tennis balls
at each other.
And if it hit a target
on the tank,
it would be disabled
and spin in a circle.
- I got a call down there
one time,
and one of the guests
had gotten hold
of one of the gas cans,
and he poured gasoline
on his tennis balls
and was putting them
into the air cannon,
lighting the balls on fire,
and was shooting them
at the tanks.
So he wound up getting ejected
from the park.
♪ ♪
- At Action Park, the most
dangerous ride, probably,
from sheer amount of injuries,
would be the Alpine Slide.
♪ ♪
- People would get
on the chairlift,
and this was crazy,
but they would actually take
the carts that were on
their cart and pull them off
and throw them off the cart
and try to hit people
that were coming down
underneath them.
- With just a little nudge
of your elbow,
it was pretty easy to knock
the cart right off the ski lift
down on to the track where
people are riding the ride.
- There were some times
it happened
a couple times in a day.
It certainly happened
a few times a week.
Once they reached
the top of the Alpine Slide,
parkgoers were greeted
with signs
bearing bloody photos of
the ride's previous victims,
a grim warning that what
they were about to endure
was, in fact, truly dangerous.
♪ ♪
- It had a stick,
and, ostensibly,
you were supposed to be able
to pull up on the stick
as a brake,
push down on it to go faster.
But one thing that I learned
was very true:
the sleds were often broken.
- I didn't know it
at the time,
but the Alpine Slide was made
of fiberglass, concrete,
and mostly asbestos.
- Cement track.
It's summertime.
People are in bathing suits,
and they're flying down
this path at full speed ahead,
and they would just tumble off.
- I wasn't particularly excited
to go on the Alpine Slide.
I knew it was unsafe.
- One of the reasons the
Alpine Slide was so dangerous
is because it wasn't designed
to keep you on.
If you didn't touch your brakes
in a couple of key spots,
you were going to fly off.
♪ ♪
- You'd go up into this lip,
and if you didn't know
how to distribute your weight
when you came out
of that bank turn,
the thing would flip on you.
And when the thing
flipped on you,
that's when it started to hurt.
- You had kids breaking
their collarbones,
their skin ripped off.
And when I was in high school,
you would come back to school
in the fall,
and you'd see
all these kids bandaged up.
And you'd walk in the hallways,
and they were like,
"Yeah, Alpine Slide, huh?"
"Yeah."
- Kid shows up back
in the neighborhood,
and, like, he's got a big burn
on his thigh and his hip.
You assume, "Oh, you fall off
the Alpine Slide?
Oh, when did you go
to Action Park?"
Like, that--
He'd have to correct you.
He'd have to--
"Oh, no, I had surgery."
- The area around the slides
was just rock,
so, I mean,
everything from broken bones
to concussions.
On an average day, you would
have 50 to 100 people injured.
On a weekend,
you could double that.
- When I was a kid,
I was extremely law-abiding,
so every single time
that I saw a sign
that said "slow down,"
I would slow down.
I hit a bump,
and I was sort of airborne,
and I looked to my side,
and I saw that the slide
that I had been riding on
was rolling down the hill
next to me.
And I was taken
to the infirmary,
which was
this unsettling-looking
sort of shed.
They took a look at my wound,
and they told me
that they needed to spray
some sort of stuff on it
so that it would scab over
and heal.
And then, unlike a doctor,
the person who was
administering this stuff
said to me,
"This is gonna hurt."
- First aid had this spray.
It was a little squeeze bottle,
like a Windex bottle,
and it had
this orange solution in,
which I've been told
years later
that it was alcohol and iodine.
I know it was an orange color.
And they would spray the person
with this thing,
and from the looks of things,
this was the most incredible
pain this person had ever felt.
I can specifically remember
one time where we had this guy
come in, and this guy
was a bodybuilder.
I mean, this guy was jacked.
And he had friction burns
on his arm and his leg,
and this guy was in tears.
We told him, "Okay,
now we got to do the leg."
And he was like, "No."
We're like, "Dude,
this is gonna get infected
if we don't spray it."
And he's like, "I don't care.
I'd rather have an infection
than go through that again."
- They had a circle drawn
on the floor
in the first aid room.
And while they were cleaning
your slide burns,
if you managed to stay in
the circle, you won a prize.
They said over, like,
two or three years,
only two people actually stayed
in the circle,
and the best they could produce
was an Action Park pen.
- You could walk
around Action Park
and just see the people
with the orange spray.
It was like
an Action Park battle scar.
- Action Park
was this litmus test that--
it was very clear
from the time
I was eight or nine years old,
like, you got to go there,
and you got to come back
with some scars.
You got to go take your lumps
at Action Park
if you really want to be able
to kind of grow up
and be a young man
in this world.
- After a while,
the town couldn't dedicate
its ambulances to Action Park
because, you know,
Vernon was a small town,
and we had two
volunteer ambulance squads,
and Action Park would
keep them busy all day long.
So there was a meeting,
and, you know, the town said,
"Look, you got to buy
your own ambulance."
And they did.
They had either one or two.
I think at their height,
they might have had two.
- My wife, she worked--
she was one of the admins.
One of her jobs, it took her
an entire week, 40 hours.
She made an Excel spreadsheet
of all of the injuries
for one season at the park.
And it was a lot
of dislocated shoulders,
broken arms, wrists,
slide abrasions
from the Alpine Slide.
It was just a crazy,
crazy amount of injuries
at this place.
It's impossible to say
exactly how many people
were injured at Action Park.
The state only required
that they report
"serious injuries."
Of course, that left it
to Gene to decide
what he viewed as serious,
meaning that unless you
left the park in an ambulance,
it was almost certainly
not going to be reported.
- If the government
doesn't require you
to report something,
there's no way
that someone could determine
how many injuries occurred
on a daily basis.
And if Gene wanted
to cover that up,
it'd be very easy to do so.
Amusement parks
often embody their creators.
They are the personification
of some individual,
some auteur's worldview.
Walt Disney looked
at the world
and wanted it to resemble
turn-of-the-century America
with a hint of fantasy
and the Wild West.
And thus, you have Disneyland.
Gene Mulvihill had a vision
of a place
where there were no rules,
something between Ayn Rand
and "Lord of the Flies."
- My father wanted
to give people the freedom
to control the action,
to control their speed.
He loved to have fun,
and so the park reflected that.
- The way things were done
in the '80s,
it seems to me,
created this situation.
You have this sense
of not being bridled
by a federal or state
or local government
that's trying to keep you
from having fun.
So Mulvihill created
a business that allowed people
to thumb their nose
at conventional norms
and thumb their nose at people
who worried about danger,
and they put themselves
in the teeth
of a dangerous situation.
And while regulators
may have been tough
on other amusement parks,
Gene had friends
in high places,
and Action Park suffered
virtually no fines
or citations.
- In the Reagan years,
there was this idea
that people
should govern themselves,
that red tape got in the way
of innovation,
that American capitalism
was at its best
when it was unregulated.
And it's in this environment
that Action Park
is allowed to flourish.
It turns out
that Gene was friends
with future president
Donald Trump.
According to park employees,
Trump was actually very close
to investing in Action Park
at one point
and even dropped by the park
to check things out
and have a look around.
When he saw Gene's vision,
he realized it was too wild,
too nuts, even for him.
- Trump found Gene's vision
too unhinged.
Fuck yeah, dude.
Good for Gene.
So what would happen
if you sued Action Park?
Well, Gene would refuse
to settle.
He'd force you to trial
almost every single time,
and he'd make that trial as
long and painful as possible.
- Gene's philosophy was,
"We fight every case.
"We don't settle it.
We bring it all the way
to trial."
And we won 93 % of them.
Eventually word got around
that he wouldn't settle,
and most lawyers thought it
too much trouble to even try.
Even if you went to trial
and won,
Gene would simply refuse
to pay
unless you sent
the U.S. Marshals
to his door to collect,
something that happened
on more than one occasion.
- The U.S. Marshals,
the first time they showed up,
they surrounded
the ticket booth.
I found my way
to them pretty quickly
and asked them
to please not shoot me.
After the first time,
they would just come
and knock on my office and say,
"Yeah, we're here."
Then we'd go
to the general manager's office
and take care of it.
Action Park
was a product of its time.
It was like an '80s movie,
an era of latchkey kids
going on adventures,
far from the worried eyes
of attentive parents.
♪ ♪
- That was probably
the last decade
of unsupervised fun for kids.
- There was no cell phones.
You know, it's like,
you wanted
to hang out with your buddy,
you called him up,
and you went over
to his house and met him.
You know, whosever house
you were at at lunchtime,
that's who fed you.
- We were all kids
that climbed trees.
We didn't come home
until after 8:00.
Our parents weren't even
looking for us.
- The '80s were
about outdoing each other,
about keeping up.
The '80s were not about,
"How are you feeling?
Are you afraid to do this?"
- Like, we would try
to die for fun.
We would try to die for fun.
When I was in high sch--
I've been in at least
six different abandoned
mental hospitals for fun.
Like, that--
no joke, in high school,
you can show up to school
on Monday and turn around
and be like, "Hey,
what'd you do this weekend?"
And your buddy could look
at you and be like,
"Oh, yeah, we went
and broke into
"the abandoned
mental hospital,
"and we went
in the tunnels underneath.
"Turned out, there were some
fucking skinheads down there.
"So they came at us,
so we beat up a Nazi,
and we went to a diner."
And they'd be like,
"What'd you do?"
And you'd be like, "Oh, yeah,
I went and visited my cousin
in Freehold."
And those were, like, both
totally standard things to say.
- You know, I can remember
being 14, 15 years old,
and we lived about 15 miles
from Action Park.
And I can remember
a bunch of us,
unbeknownst to our parents,
jumping on our bicycles
and riding to Action Park,
spending the day there, and
then riding our bicycles back.
Parents never know.
I would beat my kid's ass
if I ever found out.
♪ ♪
- Looking back on Action Park
with grown-up eyes,
Gene wanted to make sure
everybody was having
a good time.
And it probably wasn't
the best idea
to have, you know, a place
where you controlled the action
and a place
where kids were in charge.
It was scary.
It was dangerous.
- An amusement park
is designed
to look like a kind of place
that it isn't.
It's meant to look dangerous,
but it isn't.
Its artifice is baked
into the story,
and you're told that
from when you're very young.
"Go on the thrill ride.
It's a thrill."
But it's not really going
to fall apart.
It's not really going
to kill you.
But Action Park
was truly dangerous.
♪ ♪
- A lot of places you go to,
unless the ride
catastrophically fails,
no matter how scared you feel,
you're not gonna get hurt.
Action Park was not like that.
If you wanted
to push the boundaries,
you could get hurt, and,
you know, it certainly became
a competition between friends
to see who could push it
a little bit more,
a little bit more.
And then if you got hurt,
you know, if it wasn't serious,
it was almost like
a battle scar.
- The magic and the horror
of Action Park
is that you can go there
expecting a great time,
expecting fantastic memories,
and you can leave
with those exact things,
or you can leave
in a body bag.
And you didn't know
which it was going to be.
- I would say probably
the most pleasant named ride
at Action Park,
the Kayak Experience.
But I later came to learn that
that is the one where someone
was electrocuted to death.
- There were underwater fans
that would help push the water
and created rapids,
like you were kayaking.
And somebody flipped
out of one of their kayaks,
and one of these fans
short-circuited,
and they either touched it
or were close enough to it,
and they got electrocuted.
- Negligence doesn't begin
to even capture
that particular death.
Ungrounded electricity
in a water park,
that's the Kayak Experience.
The Kayak Experience.
♪ ♪
- I knew better than to go
on any rides at Action Park.
I saw people get hurt
on every ride in the park,
and I was like, "I don't
want any part of this."
I had a stack of comp passes
to give out to people
that was probably
six inches thick.
There were hundreds of them.
So if something went wrong,
somebody got something stolen,
I would give them
complimentary passes.
I never gave one to a friend.
People got hurt there.
- When shit got real
at Action Park,
the, like, golf cart,
Cushman first aid thing
would roll by,
and there'd be somebody,
like, completely immobilized
on that thing,
you know, with the backboard
and the neck brace
and the pads on the sides
of their head.
And you'd talk
to the first aid guys,
they'd be like, "Oh, yeah,
he got medevaced to Morristown.
"He had a fractured vertebrae
in his neck
from hitting his head."
I'm like, "Holy shit.
Are you kidding?"
And that's when I started
to realize, it's like,
this place is dangerous.
- When I think back
to the Wave Pool,
I remember being excited
to go in it
and, even as a young kid,
walking up and going, like,
"Oh, no fucking way.
This is nuts. This is"--
I mean, shoulder-to-shoulder
human beings
in a wave pool that was
far too violent and powerful.
- If you go to the beach,
that water is buoyant.
So when the waves come in,
you go up,
and when the waves go down,
you go down.
But a freshwater pool
doesn't do that.
- We'd often have people
that would jump into the water
that didn't know how to swim.
I can't tell you
how many times someone
would come up to me and say,
"Sir, how deep is that water?"
And I wouldn't even tell them
how many feet.
I'd say, "It's over your head."
I'd turn around,
and they would jump in.
- When people got
to shoulder-height depth,
we called that area
"the death zone."
Panic would set in,
and they'd grab everybody
and anybody around them.
And I've seen
literally families
of 8, 10, or 12 people
taking each other down.
- The guards at--we used
to call it "the grave pool."
The guards at the grave pool,
they couldn't relax
for a second.
- To break a new lifeguard in,
they'd be assigned to
the death chair, and that was
the lifeguard stand
that overlooked the death zone
on the Wave Pool.
And literally their first
30 minutes to 45 minutes
sitting in the death chair,
that new lifeguard would save
three to four to five people.
People thought that drowning
at the Action Park Wave Pool
was part of the ride.
They thought it was part
of the experience.
They expected to drown
at the Action Park Wave Pool.
Lifeguards at the Wave Pool
had their hands full.
The water was murky enough
that bodies often
couldn't be spotted
below the surface.
The culprit?
A mixture of muddy runoff
from a nearby hill,
human waste, suntan lotion,
and gore from open wounds.
- That was one of the reasons
they used to stop the thing
every so many minutes,
so they could scan the bottom
and make sure there wasn't
any bodies there
that they had missed.
Those guys did a great job,
but it's hard to see.
And this guy went down,
and by the time they found him,
it was too late.
- When you're a kid,
I think you can separate
yourself from it,
because I didn't work
in that department.
I thought,
"That's somebody else's
responsibility."
But it was a common occurrence.
I don't know how many people
died at Action Park,
but it wasn't just one person.
- The fact
that more than one person
died in your Wave Pool--
who's that second
son of a bitch?
That's who your heart
really bleeds for.
Nobody should ever be
the second person to die
in a wave pool.
You know why?
'Cause after the first person
dies in a wave pool,
close the fucking wave pool.
Put up a fucking sign
or something, man.
- It was a place
where death was tolerated,
where death was put right into
the number situation.
"Oh, we've only had
this many die."
One is too many.
♪ ♪
My firstborn was Georgie.
He was actually born
on Christmas night
in 1960,
but he was delivered
right after midnight,
so he wasn't
the Christmas baby.
We were just so thrilled
to have him.
Just to look at his little
face, it was wonderful.
And then 11 months later,
we had our second child,
Brian.
- My brother and I were
basically raised as twins.
My dad would actually say
that we were twins
so we could play
on the same football team.
We did everything together.
It didn't matter what we did.
We were like the kids
on "The Sandlot."
- Georgie was
very, very popular.
He had many, many friends.
- My brother George
was a handsome guy.
My brother George felt
like he was invincible.
And our whole family thought
my brother was invincible
because of how strong we were.
On July 8, 1980,
my brother George
was supposed to be working
with my dad and I.
- He wanted to go
to Action Park,
so I loaned him the money
in the afternoon,
and a friend of his
went over there to meet him.
And they were just going
to have fun that day.
- He goes
onto the Alpine Slide,
and he's going
down the hillside,
and the cart brake,
I don't believe, was working.
And he went off the track
and flipping down the hillside
and into some rocks
and hit his head on rocks.
- And I had a phone call.
I'll never forget it.
I was sitting at home.
I was looking forward
to watching a movie.
They said,
"Your son has been injured.
He's in the trauma center."
And they told me
that what I had to do
was get a neighbor
or somebody to bring me,
because my husband was
on a sales call that night.
- My dad got the phone call
while we're working
about my brother being hurt.
Stopped working immediately
and went to go see my brother.
- I just didn't think
it was any big deal
because he was so athletic.
And I thought scrapes
or bumps or something,
maybe a cut,
but I had no idea
how awful it was.
When we got to that hospital,
he had been moved
to another hospital,
and I saw the bed
that he had been in.
There was blood
all over the pillowcase,
all over everything.
- When I first saw my brother,
I knew he was hurt bad.
I just knew real bad.
They were checking
for brain waves
to make--to see
if he still had brain waves.
And not only once, obviously
two times or three times--
multiple times to make sure,
to see if he's with it
or not with it.
- There was no sign
that he was going to wake up,
and we just kept
talking to him.
Dr. Houser, who was
my brother-in-law's brother,
came in from Connecticut
just to be with us.
And he checked him out
thoroughly too,
and he said, "No."
- On July 16, 1980,
he passed away.
- I remember that moment
very, very well.
I went out
to the waiting room,
and my husband was with me,
and we told our other children
that he had died.
My daughter ran down
the hallway screaming,
and everybody was crying,
and it was, like,
not believable.
So we went to the rectory
that night,
and then on the way--
I hate to say this--
but on the way back
to the hospital...
we were--walked
across the street,
and I deliberately walked out
in front of a truck.
And at that point,
my husband pulled me back,
and he just screamed at me,
"What are you thinking?"
I was thinking I couldn't live
with that kind of pain.
It just hurt so much.
And here, 39 years later,
I can still feel that pain.
- My brother George
was supposed to be
best man at my wedding.
My wedding was gonna be
July 20, 1980.
He died on the 16th.
And I had to have
my other brother as best man,
and everything was in a cloud.
- Gene Mulvihill
never called us
and never called the hospital.
He had no heart.
He cared about himself
and the almighty dollar.
- In the investigation
of George Larsson's death,
the spokesperson for the park
claims that
the alpine ride
didn't kill him,
that the rock his head hit
killed him,
and therefore,
the Alpine ride was safe.
The newspapers were told that
George Larsson was an employee,
that this happened at night,
and that it was raining.
He wasn't an employee,
it wasn't at night,
and it wasn't raining.
The truth was,
while Larsson worked
as a lift operator
at the park's
sister ski resort
during a prior season,
he never worked at Action Park
and indeed entered the park
during normal business hours.
One likely reason
for the lie:
the park never reported
his death to the state,
dubiously claiming
they didn't need to
because he wasn't part
of the general public.
- The state of New Jersey
had told them
that they could not open
for the Fourth of July.
And they wanted to open
for the Fourth of July,
but they never
removed the rocks
that they were told to remove.
And when my son
went on that ride,
the car flipped him off,
and his head hit the rocks.
The newspapers were taking
Gene Mulvihill's side.
They believed his story,
and they printed it.
Gene lied about my son's death
because he had
fake liability insurance
in the Cayman Islands.
Fake.
It was fake.
- Anyone that sues the park,
if there's not
proper insurance,
is gonna walk away
with not a whole lot of money.
That's the bottom line.
- We never even got
to go to court
because we were told
by our attorney
that a teenager
isn't worth much money.
He's a liability
to the family,
and you can't expect to settle
for very much money.
We eventually settled
for $100,000.
♪ ♪
George Larsson's
death happened in 1980.
He was the first person
to lose his life at the park,
but he would not be the last.
In July 1982,
a 15-year-old from Brooklyn
drowned in the Wave Pool.
A week later, a 27-year-old
man from Long Island
was electrocuted
on the kayak simulator.
In 1984, a guest drowned
in the Roaring Springs area.
And in 1987, the Wave Pool
claimed yet another life.
♪ ♪
- The thing about Action Park
is, Action Park becomes
a huge part
of the local economy.
And if Action Park
creates revenue taxwise,
creates revenue for other
stores when people come in,
the city and the folks there
are gonna take
a much more friendly look
at that operation
if it's making money.
- How many hundreds of people
had jobs, you know,
between, like, those lifeguards
and the concession stands
and the ticket takers
and the janitors
and the support staff?
Like, that's a few hundred
jobs for your town.
I would think there might have
been a town councilman or two
who was willing
to look the other way
to keep the money faucet
turned on.
- Some of the town officials
were clearly on Gene's payroll,
absolutely.
They worked in his restaurants,
in his bars.
They worked in Action Park.
Their children worked
for the resort.
There were elected officials
that he bought homes for.
That there are
local town officials,
chairpersons
of our planning boards,
our zoning boards who had
free memberships to the spa,
free season passes
and that type of thing.
It's not always about being
on the payroll.
I think it was always about,
"What could I get from Gene?"
And Gene knew that,
and he played that.
And that's
why Gene Mulvihill got away
with as much
as he got away with.
- Gene was so much larger
than life than you can imagine,
and there's things about Gene
that I will not tell anybody,
and we'll just leave it
at that.
- When I went back
to work for Gene again,
after years away,
the first thing he said to me
when I saw him was...
"It's great to have you back.
I mean, you know where
all the bodies are buried."
- I believe
that the people in Vernon
turned a blind eye to it.
They didn't want to know
anything negative about it.
I think they thought
that there would be
repercussions
from Gene Mulvihill
or that Gene Mulvihill
was telling the truth.
He's a very good liar.
- I think he made that
very clear,
especially when he started
into a business relationship,
that crossing him
was not a good idea.
When I got fired
from the local newspaper
as its editor
because of Gene contacting
my boss, my publisher,
he told me point-blank
in a phone conversation
that he was threatened
by the local officials
that if he didn't go to my boss
and get me fired,
they were not going to approve
his projects anymore.
- I have heard a lot of stories
that Gene was involved
with mob associates.
Around 1993, I filed a lawsuit
for defamation
and wrongful discharge.
And I deposed him.
And he came to the deposition,
and every answer
to every question was,
"I don't recall.
I don't remember."
He didn't answer
one single question.
And I was so upset with him
that as we were leaving
that deposition,
I'll never forget
what I said to him.
I said,
"You, Gene, are a lowlife."
I said, "I don't care
how much money you have
"in this lifetime.
You are a lowlife for what
you did to me here today."
♪ ♪
By the mid-1990s,
things began to change.
As the bad press
and lawsuits mounted,
attendance dropped,
and Gene found it harder
to move money around
and cover the bills.
The park hit
another turning point
when Gene's friend Bob Brennan
finally faced a reckoning
with the SEC
after years
of committing fraud.
Soon after that,
Brennan was found guilty
of money laundering
and bankruptcy fraud,
landing him in prison
for almost ten years,
meaning Gene's
never-ending spigot of cash
dried up as well.
Before long, Action Park's
parent company
had to declare bankruptcy.
And when the park
shut its gates
at the end of the 1996
summer season,
it soon became clear
that it would be its last.
- I think it ran its course.
I think, like anything else,
people grew wise to it
and people grew weary of it
and people moved on from it.
Plus, the whole
legal environment did a 180.
And New Jersey
was the Wild West
when Action Park opened,
and by the time it closed,
it was not
the Wild West anymore.
- The people's mindset
changed.
They weren't willing
to take the unbridled risks
associated with the way it was
in the '80s.
That just wasn't
acceptable anymore.
Its time came and went.
♪ ♪
In 1998,
Action Park was purchased
by resort giant Intrawest,
the multinational corporation
behind Whistler Mountain.
The new owners stripped out
most of the park's attractions
and renamed it Mountain Creek.
Gone were the looping tubes
and fireball-shooting tanks.
Without Gene's vision
leading the way,
it became a generic
regional water park.
Action Park as we knew it
was gone.
♪ ♪
- One day
after I came home from work,
I walked into the house,
and my husband, George,
said to me,
"Esther, get out the best
bottle of red wine you have.
We're gonna celebrate."
And I said, "What are we going
to celebrate?"
And he said,
"Gene Mulvihill died."
And we did.
He's the only person
that we celebrated his death.
He deserved to be gone.
He didn't care
about any of the riders,
any of the people.
- I would say in the last four
or five years of his life,
we became very close,
and I talked to him
all the time.
And I learned
about a different Gene,
a very generous,
a very benevolent Gene.
I am not glorifying
Gene Mulvihill.
I am not telling you
that he was a good,
decent, honorable man.
But I did see a side
to Gene Mulvihill
that was different from what I
had always thought about him.
Was he a villain or a victor?
I think he was both,
depending on the circumstances,
depending on what he could do
and what
he could get away with.
- It was so easy
to romanticize him
because he does what a lot
of people wish they could do.
A lot of people wish
they could ignore the law.
A lot of people wish
they could ignore rules.
Gene actually did that.
- The spirit of Action Park
lives on today
in the Fyre Festival,
in Theranos,
and all these other schemes.
- The Fyre Festival's
bullshit, man.
He gave them a cheese sandwich.
Gene gave you everything
he fucking promised you.
He said,
"Come to my amusement park.
"Do whatever the fuck
you feel like.
"You might get hurt,
but you're probably
gonna have
a shit ton of fun."
It was what it said it was.
But it was fucked up.
- Even though I was scared
to do those rides,
I fucking did them.
There's also a part of me
that's like,
"If you can't do them,
then fucking get out
of Jersey."
♪ ♪
In 2010, just
two years before his death,
Gene Mulvihill led
a group of investors
to take back control
of the park
he had founded
decades earlier.
In 2014, Gene's son Andy
revived the Action Park name
to cash in on a growing sense
of nostalgia
for the original park.
The following year, the park
announced its intention
to build an updated version
of the Cannonball Loop
called the Sky Caliber.
That ride was never built.
In 2018, the resort,
once again called
Mountain Creek,
was acquired by Vernon native
and onetime teenage
Action Park employee
Joe Hession.
♪ ♪
- When you look back
at Action Park these days,
I think everybody romanticizes
a little bit.
I remember enough
about working at Action Park
to remember that everybody
that worked there hated it
when they were there,
but they always came back,
and we always kept the friends
that we made
while we were there.
It's an '80s movie
that was real life,
and it's something
that'll never happen again.
- I hold it so near and dear
to my heart.
I'm so glad
that I got to go there.
I wear it as a point of pride.
That being said,
I think back to the fact
that I was a child, and I think
about the things that I saw
and that I participated in.
And even at the age of 39,
to no small degree,
it does scare me
that that was happening,
that that was allowed
to happen,
that--that life
could be that way.
- I look back as it was
a positive thing.
You know, be able to,
I don't know,
make your own decisions
on how ambitious
or how adventurous
you want to be
and living
with the consequences.
I think it teaches something.
- Everything's
in your face today,
and I think we're
more fearful, rightfully so.
I think our parents should've
been more afraid, right?
I think everybody in this room
would say...
"My parents should've
known what I was doing
on this day or that day."
- We live in an era
when kids
don't really go outside
as much.
When they do go outside,
people are scared
they're gonna get hurt.
In the '80s,
kids were running free.
They were running outdoors.
They were scraping their knees.
They were going to Action Park.
We look back
at our childhoods.
It's carefree.
We didn't have jobs.
We didn't have to answer
to anybody.
We could do what
we wanted, right?
We look at Action Park,
and we remember
this heightened version
of this.
We could do whatever we wanted.
So when you're nostalgic
for Action Park,
you're nostalgic
for childhood.
You're nostalgic for freedom.
You're not nostalgic
for being hurt.
You're nostalgic
for everything else.
- When you talk to other people
who went there,
there's a certain
shared level of...
sort of survivor's respect.
Many of the people you talk to
who grew up in New Jersey
laughing about Action Park,
if you ask them
on a basic level,
"Do you think the way
you grew up
was healthy for a kid?"
They'll say, "No."
We laugh about it, 'cause
what else are we gonna do?
But we don't think
it was healthy.
And those people understand,
like, no, it was really--
You were swimming in pools
where the lifeguards
weren't paying attention.
You were going on rides
that were poorly designed
that people got hurt on
all the time.
And we felt like
we were on our own.
We felt like the world
was an unsafe place.
But it's what we got,
so fuck you.
- ♪ Day after day ♪
♪ They send my friends away ♪
- We are extraordinarily happy
that we were able to grow up
the way we did
and, simultaneously,
so furious that we had
to grow up that way.
♪ ♪
- ♪ Day after day ♪
♪ They tell me I can go ♪
- A lot of kids
who grew up in the '80s,
they like to talk shit
and tell stories,
and when they got
a couple drinks in them,
it's about how fucked up
and funny it was.
But when they're
with their shrink,
it's just about
how fucked up it was.
But a lot of things were.
A lot of things were
back then.
- ♪ I can fly, I will scream ♪
♪ I will break my arm ♪
♪ I will do me harm ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Don't set me free ♪
♪ I'm as heavy as can be ♪
♪ Just my Librium and me ♪
♪ And my EST makes three ♪
♪ 'Cause I'd rather
stay here ♪
♪ With all the madmen ♪
♪ Than perish
with the sad men ♪
♪ Roaming free ♪
♪ And I'd rather play here ♪
♪ With all the madmen ♪
♪ For I'm quite content ♪
♪ They're all as sane as me ♪
♪ ♪
- It's not really fair
to ask the question,
"What was Action Park?"
Basically, so it was
a waterslide park.
But in truth, it was so much
more than a waterslide park.
- Action Park was
the chaos summer park
with very little oversight,
too much alcohol,
whistles blowing,
people screaming,
motors running.
It was an energy, you know?
You knew you were
jumping into the firepit.
- The most dangerous
theme park of all time.
- There was a waterslide
that held one person
that went in a--
like, in a flip.
- It looked like
a bunch of kids built it,
because that's what it was.
- We'll be back with more
"Headbangers Ball,"
coming from Action Park
in Vernon, New Jersey,
the biggest water park
in the world.
- I think the very reason
people were attracted
to Action Park was because
they could get hurt.
That was the allure of it.
I mean, who wants to sit
on a Ferris wheel?
- It was a place
where death was tolerated,
where death was put right
into the number situation.
- Every member of my family
was injured in that park
at some time or another.
They called it
Traction Park.
- Class Action Park.
- Class Action Park,
the lawyers called it.
- It starts out with people
having fun,
and by the end,
crimes have been committed.
Cover-ups have happened.
The story hasn't been told
truthfully.
To me, that's probably
the worst thing of all.
♪ ♪
In order to truly understand
a place like Action Park,
we need to go back to New York
in the 1970s.
Wall Street.
Everything was changing.
Bankers and brokers
were transforming
into masters of the universe.
- A ton of money starts
to enter the industry.
It is the place to be.
And that is part of
what creates the environment
that makes it perfect for
someone like Gene Mulvihill.
♪ ♪
- Gene Mulvihill
was Wall Street in the 1970s.
He was Gordon Gekko before
there was a Gordon Gekko.
- He's this mix of
P.T. Barnum, Donald Trump.
It's not just
that he's a businessman.
It's the personality
that he's bringing to it too.
Gene ran a brokerage firm
called Mayflower Securities,
and every time
he'd make a sale,
he'd blast a bugle
through the office
while the champagne bottles
crack open.
- This was the era
of the penny stock,
of the pump-and-dump scheme.
- Penny stocks?
- Yeah.
Penny stock scams
are when salesmen
take worthless stocks
and trick unsuspecting
investors into buying them.
- Come on.
Who buys this crap?
- Enters Robert Brennan,
fraudster, penny-stock king,
and best friend of Gene.
Brennan gets his start
as a salesman
at Mayflower Securities,
working for Gene,
and within a few years,
he's the president
of the company.
Under Gene
and Brennan's leadership,
it wasn't long
before Mayflower
got suspended by the SEC
for doing
what "The New York Times"
referred to
as "selling
worthless securities
in a bankrupt
electronics company."
Gene was effectively
kicked off of Wall Street.
So he did what anybody
in this situation would do:
buy up two ski resorts
in Vernon, New Jersey,
Great Gorge and Vernon Valley.
- Located within
the magic 45-mile radius
of metropolitan New York City,
Vernon Township occupies
67.9 square miles
of prime land,
with a population of better
than 20,000 people.
Also located in Vernon
is Wawayanda State Park,
and that's just the beginning.
- So many big,
larger-than-life people
looked to Vernon in the '70s,
and they saw possibility.
It's got all of this
amazing outdoor terrain.
You can ski in the winter.
You can hike or bike
in the summer.
- You would never think
it was in New Jersey.
For a country boy like me,
it was an amazing place
to grow up.
Everybody seemed
to know each other.
It was like this little
idyllic small town.
♪ ♪
In the early '70s,
none other than Hugh Hefner
opened a Playboy Club
in the hills of Vernon.
Gambling had just taken over
Atlantic City,
and Hef believed
it was on its way
up to North Jersey soon.
- And he wanted to build
the hopping spot,
the casino
that would draw people
from all over to New Jersey.
Vernon had already
been catching the eye
of outside investors,
but the opening
of the Playboy Club
took things
to a whole new level.
- Every weekend, there was
some celebrity coming.
People like Tony Bennett
would come to sing,
or Wayne Newton used to come.
- ♪ The love between
the two of us was dying ♪
- And Vernon was absolutely
poised to be the next Orlando,
even Vegas.
♪ ♪
Since he couldn't negotiate
with New Jersey weather
and its short ski season,
Gene became a pioneer
in artificial snow.
He went so far as to construct
the world's largest
snowmaking machine
out of a jet engine.
- So the thing
with Gene's ski resort is,
there were summer months.
He had downtime.
So what do you do?
Well, Gene started
building rides.
- So he was looking
for something to do with it
in the summer,
and he got the idea
of starting an amusement park,
but he wanted to kind of take
the idea of where
you get on your skis
and you go down
and you control how fast
and where you go
to the amusement park.
And we reflect
on the sounds and sights
of children's joy
at Action Park.
Everything here
is strictly do-it-yourself.
♪ ♪
To get his park built,
Gene turned to his old buddy
Bob Brennan,
always there
to find cash or investors
anytime Gene
had a wild new idea.
- They were saying
that New Jersey could compete
with Orlando
as a theme park destination,
and that's not that crazy.
Enough people
were sold on the vision,
and things started
to take off.
♪ ♪
- Action Park was one
of the very first
modern water parks
in the country--in the world.
Nobody knew what a water park
really was.
They had to invent it.
- Build it higher.
Make it faster.
Do something that nobody's
ever seen before.
That was what my father
was all about.
They were
designing it on the fly,
essentially throwing ideas
at the wall
and seeing what stuck.
Some worked okay.
Others not so much.
♪ ♪
And in 1978,
Action Park was born.
- ♪ Baby, let me take you
where the action's hot ♪
- ♪ Action, Action Park ♪
- ♪ We can ride
the excitement ♪
♪ And feel the park rock ♪
- ♪ Action, Action Park ♪
♪ The action never stops
at Action Park ♪
♪ ♪
- When we would all pile
into the car
to go to Action Park,
it was always a little manic,
everyone just kind of
on the edge of their seat,
just all jacked up
about the excitement
that was about to ensue.
- Like, older teenagers
would take you.
So that right there
is already dangerous,
because they're just gonna
make you do things that they,
as 17- and 18-year-olds,
feel comfortable doing.
- I remember my parents
did not want me
to go to Action Park,
but we got lucky
because there was this family,
they grew up
up the street from us,
and their dad brought them
to Action Park.
I think my parents were like,
"Fuck, someone else
is offering it for free."
And these kids, classic '80s,
children of divorce,
they don't live with their dad,
and my parents knew,
"We can't say no.
We can't say no."
I remember my parents both,
on my way out the door,
being like, "Please be smart.
Like, please be really careful
and use your best judgment."
♪ ♪
Action Park was divided
into three main sections.
You had Alpine Center,
home of the Alpine slide;
Water World, filled with
fantastical waterslides;
and Motor World,
an area dedicated
to exhaust-spewing engines
and go-karts.
And, of course, splitting
the park down the middle
was a major highway, Route 94.
- One of the first things
you saw
when you walked
into Action Park
was the infamous
Cannonball Loop,
which for years,
it was like a myth
that the thing
had ever been open.
- Cannonball Loop was
an enclosed tube waterslide,
and you would climb to the top
of a series of stairs,
and you would ride down
the enclosed tube,
and at the very end, the tube
would go into a huge loop.
- I mean, you looked
at the thing,
and it looked like it was
something out of, like,
a Bugs Bunny
or a Road Runner cartoon,
where they just made a loop
and said,
"Yeah, there's our ride."
- Some lunatic clearly
just was like,
"Build me a slide
that's like that."
And then
they didn't consult anybody
who had a background
in engineering.
- So the story is,
they build the loop,
and they throw
some test dummies down.
Come out dismembered,
missing a head, missing arms.
"Okay, let's tinker
with things.
"Change the height.
Change the angle.
"Change the water pressure.
"Next step, let's put
some humans in this thing.
"Who we got?
How about these
teenage employees?"
So Gene's just waving
$100 bills in the air.
Any teenager gutsy enough
to go down this thing
will get one.
100 bucks, that's real money.
- I'm $100 richer
because Uncle Gene--
we always called him
Uncle Gene--
gave $100 for an employee
to test the Cannonball Loop.
- And I can remember looking,
staring down
into this black tube
and looking at the loop
and being like, "There's no way
that I would go on this thing."
- So you look down
the Cannonball Loop,
and all you see
is pitch black.
It's darkness.
- There's the water flow
at the top of it
that gets you mo--you know,
'cause you got to have water
to get, you know--
it's a waterslide.
You know,
somehow it's a waterslide.
And it's just way too steep.
- So they spray you down
with a garden hose,
and you go down,
and you're supposed to go down
feetfirst with your
arms and legs crossed.
- And then as soon as you,
like, kind of scoot forward,
it just takes you.
All of a sudden, you're going
really, really fast.
I'm like,
"I'm gonna shit my pants."
It was absolutely terrifying.
And then you feel--
all of a sudden,
you feel your feet go up.
And then as I go up,
you kind of lose contact
with the loop for a second.
It just kind of--
gravity just takes you.
You just...
Kind of flop.
The catch pond,
wherever you landed,
was way too short.
You got to the bottom,
and I'm like,
"Shit, I did it.
I made it."
The loop was fun,
and yes, it hurt.
You know,
going through the loop
and having your nuts
get smashed on a--
you know, a fiberglass tube
was not fun.
But then, you know,
Uncle Gene's standing there,
and he hands you 100 bucks.
- The first couple people
that came in came out,
and their mouths
were all bloody,
and that was before they had
put sufficient padding
in the top;
there was a little bit.
So they sent a couple
other people down,
and when those people
came down,
they came down
with lacerations.
They couldn't figure out
why these people
had lacerations
from a giant loop.
Then they took the loop apart
and they found teeth
stuck in the padding
from the first couple people
that went down the slide.
They had gotten their teeth
knocked out.
And these other people
were just going up
and ripping into it.
After Action Park
test pilots
came out woozy
and unable to stand,
Gene brought in
a navy physician
to measure
the slide's effects.
- Let me put it this way.
There's two places
that you can experience
nine Gs as a civilian.
One is the back seat
of an F-14,
and the other one
is at Action Park.
- You couldn't go down
the Cannonball Loop
if you were too small.
You couldn't go down
the Cannonball Loop
if you were too big.
Too big, you'd get stuck.
Too small,
you wouldn't get up
enough momentum
to make the loop.
There was a trapdoor
at the top that they--
that's how they would extricate
people from the loop
if they got stuck.
- So as you entered the park,
you saw this thing.
It was one of the things that,
you know,
you had kind of heard
whispers about.
So right away, you walk in,
you're like,
"Well, that's real.
This shit's real."
I did get hurt on a ride
that was called
Cannonball Falls.
And it looked like
a pretty normal waterslide.
You'd sit down.
You'd go down the waterslide.
What is not discernible
from the top
is that at some point,
you come around a corner,
and there's
this big black tunnel.
You feel like,
all of a sudden,
you're just going faster
as well.
And I'll never forget.
I'm going down this waterslide.
I enter the tunnel, and you
just hear people, "Oh, no!"
Ahead of you--
"Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no!"
So you're like, "What--
what's going on here?"
And then you'd see
this little piece of light
at the bottom of the tunnel,
and then you'd just get
shot out.
And you'd just be there in
the middle of, like, the air.
And I'm not kidding when I say
you're, at minimum,
ten feet in the air.
It shoots you out
the side of a mountain,
and you're just, like,
in the sky.
You think you're getting
on a waterslide,
and the next thing you know,
you're in the fucking sky, man!
- And yes,
you were over water,
but there was a few seconds
where you'd be like,
"I'm gonna fucking die.
What am I doing?"
And you just look around,
and then gravity would take you
down into the water.
- And you're in
ice-cold water, 17 feet deep,
so people were constantly
getting pulled out of there
for, you know,
being unable to swim
or just landing wrong
and being disoriented.
- There's nothing in the world
like Action Park.
- The rides that got built
at Action Park
would often come to Gene
through people
who just had a wild hair
and wanted to build
this crazy idea that they had.
- A certain number
of the Action Park rides
were more or less
designed in-house
by people
without engineering degrees,
and I was certainly
one of them.
- The people who were kind of
on the fringes
of the ride-design world,
people who Six Flags or Disney
wanted nothing to do with,
these guys would literally
track Gene down
at amusement industry
conventions.
- You could tell these guys
went and did bumps of coke,
and were like, "Let's
fucking-- let's drill a slide
"right through the fucking
middle of a mountain,
and it'll shoot them
20 feet in the fucking air!"
You just couldn't
trust anything there.
- Guys would come to us,
and no matter
what the idea was,
my father would try it.
- And then when each of these
rides went into construction,
Gene would change them
drastically.
Action Park's
most prolific ride designer
was none other
than Gene himself.
After designs came in,
he would almost always
tinker with them
during construction,
making them bigger, badder,
more extreme.
And the Cannonball Loop?
Its design actually came about
when Gene drew a circle
on a cocktail napkin
and hired some local welders
to put it all together.
- Many of the rides
were experimental,
and on paper,
the design looked good.
But in reality,
once the ride was turned on,
it was not fit for a safe ride
by the average person
in public.
- One of those rides was
the Man in the Ball
in the Ball.
The Man in the Ball
in the Ball
was this giant ball
that we had
with ball bearings inside it
with another ball,
and you would open up two doors
and get in the ball
to go down the mountain.
And what he did is,
the guy built it
with PVC pipe
all the way down the mountain.
- Like, it's a great idea;
you can see how someone
would think that'd be
a lot of fun,
and I think it might work
and be relatively safe.
It turned out, you know,
there were limitations to it.
- It's a crazy concept.
I mean, it's so big
and so heavy and so unwieldy
that there's no way it's gonna
stay in any kind of track.
- The day that we were gonna
put a live man in it,
it got really hot,
and he didn't realize
that PVC expanded.
So when we put the live man
in the ball
and tested it
to go down the mountain,
the ride just fell apart.
And the guy ended up
going down the ski slope,
right over 94,
into the swamp down below.
It was unbelievable.
Another
prototype waterslide
was inspired
by zero-gravity airplanes.
Riders
would actually take flight
as they plummeted downhill.
- We built this, and we tested
several versions of it,
and we started sending
employees off of it.
And it was working perfect.
But unfortunately,
after dozens
of successful test flights,
one went horribly wrong.
- This one kid went down,
and I don't know how he did it,
but he got himself going
way faster
than anybody else had.
He went way high in the air
and completely missed
the landing.
He had to be backboarded
off of the ride.
He's gone on
to lead a normal life,
but he was hurt that day,
and that was
the end of that ride.
While some rides
never made it
past the testing phase,
dozens of other
questionable ideas did.
- Right here,
that's called the Speed Slide.
It's over seven stories.
They tell me that you go
over 60 miles an hour.
So tell me,
any preparations
as we're about to embark
on the Speed Slide?
- Yeah,
Preparation H.
- There was a canopy around
the first 20 feet or so
in case you flew off.
The idea was that it would
bounce you back in.
You had a bar
you had to hold on to
and lower yourself
to vertical...
- And you just drop.
And you've got to be
free-falling
for a few seconds,
and then you actually
make contact
with the waterslide,
and you go down.
- Tops would come off.
Bottoms would be up
around their shoulders.
People would be
all disoriented.
Not the most pleasant
experience.
- What did you think
about the Speed Slide?
- I'm feeling
kind of juicy right now.
- It puts more fluids
through your system, that's--
I'm trying to think
of a nice way to say it.
What would you say?
- I'd say my fig
is puckered.
- I think the
Super Speed Slide was the one
that a lot of people would say
that it would just sort of,
like, shoot water
straight up their assholes,
that it was designed in a way
where you just--
you got your first colonic
for free
courtesy of Action Park.
- Everybody that got off
that ride walked funny.
Yeah, whether you're a guy
or a girl, you know,
you were not just getting off
and walking away.
You were, you know,
picking and prodding
and hopping and poking
for quite a while
after you got off that ride.
♪ ♪
Questionable
design decisions
weren't limited to the rides.
The construction and layout
of Action Park itself
had its own way
of leaving a mark.
- All the park was, like,
paved in asphalt.
So everywhere you went,
you had to walk around
on, like, dark, you know,
highway-grade type asphalt
that was absorbing heat
and reflecting it
back on you all day.
- So if you don't bring
your own flip-flops
or those water shoes,
you are going to suffer
from the notorious ailment
known as chopped-meat feet.
Everybody's, like, limping
around from running around
on fucking jagged
and poorly paved asphalt.
♪ ♪
- There was a great ride
called the Aqua Skoot,
which was essentially
warehouse rollers
built on an angle
like a ski jump.
You rode a plastic sled,
and then you would see
how far you could skim
across the water,
like a stone skipping
across the water.
- People didn't sit back
on the ride
and they'd lean
too far forward,
they would face-plant
into the water.
Unbeknownst to most patrons,
the Aqua Skoot was also home
to a thriving bee nest.
Guests who lingered too long
were likely to be stung.
- I'll tell you something
about the Aqua Skoot.
Took one look at that thing,
I said,
"No fucking way.
No way, man."
That just looked like a thing
where you'd get
your fucking toes
or your balls
get caught in those--
Aqua Skoot.
I'm gonna Aqua Skoot
the fuck away from this thing,
that was my instinct.
The culture, the atmosphere
at Action Park,
it's most summed up
by the Tarzan Swing.
Everybody wanted to go
on the Tarzan Swing.
That was, like,
number one childhood
test your mettle,
prove you got some guts,
go on the Tarzan Swing.
- The idea was that you would,
you know, swing and release.
The problem was,
people couldn't hold
their body weight.
They would lean out
like they were gonna swing
and then just do
a total face-plant
from 10, 12 feet up
into the water.
- People would think
on a 90-degree day
that they were gonna be
jumping into pool water.
No, no, no.
That's a spring-fed stream
that held native trout in it.
It's cold, and, I mean,
people would go into shock.
People would hit and start
to scream because of the cold,
and they would actually
forget how to swim.
Man, what a shock
to the system.
- The Tarzan Swing was cool
because there was kind of,
like, an observation deck,
and that's where everybody
was waiting on line.
- So you might have,
I don't know,
probably over 75, 100 people
at given times that could all
see you as you went.
- Go to do it.
Your weight would hit.
You'd flip off.
You'd, like,
hit the back of your head
on the water.
No lifeguard would jump in
to help you.
The water's ice cold.
You come up for air.
You're all shell-shocked.
You're probably concussed.
And you have, like,
150 people from New Jersey
just being like, "Pussy!
"You fucking bitch!
You fucking wiped out!
Pussy!"
And that's, like,
when it's at its classiest.
- It was like,
"You fucking pussy, just do it!
This is Jersey!"
- "Oh, you fucking suck!
Start swimming, pussy!"
You know, I mean, it was just--
it was actually--
it was a very demeaning place.
- No one yelled at you.
No lifeguard
ever blew a whistle
and was like, "Hey,
stop chanting the word 'pussy'
at this injured,
bleeding person."
Nobody did that.
- They always tell people,
"No inverted jumps,
no obscenities,"
and people would go up,
do backflips.
People were dropping
their pants.
- So you got
the people who, like,
swing on the Tarzan Swing
and just, like,
throw up the middle finger,
and everybody's
fucking flipping--
or people are, like, taking
their dick and balls out,
mooning each other.
- Of course,
girls in bikinis would go,
they'd hit the water,
and, of course,
the bikini top surfaces
before the girl does,
and, you know, you get
the big round of applause,
and you see the girl
get to the top, and...
That happened all the time.
♪ ♪
- Action Park felt,
in some ways,
like a strange
social experiment.
What happens when you take
a bunch of riled-up teenagers,
a bunch of alcohol,
bunch of dangerous rides,
and you put them into a place
where there are no rules?
- Yo, come on. Follow me.
- Action Park was run by kids.
- Hell yeah!
- Oh, my God.
- You know,
the second you turn 14,
you got your working papers,
and then you went to work
at Action Park.
You know, even the people in
the lead supervisor positions,
it's like, "Oh, you've
been here for two years.
Here's a radio.
You're in charge."
- You had 16-year-old,
17-year-old kids
with no prior management
experience whatsoever
literally managing
a third of the park.
Hazing became
a rite of passage
at Action Park.
It wouldn't be uncommon
to use a new recruit
as a victim in a drowning.
In the water, we would spin
the new employee over
and put him on a backboard,
strap him down real tight
while in the water,
and just leave him be.
There are certainly things
that happened at Action Park
that are never spoken about.
We lived through it,
we regretted some
of the things we did,
but we don't talk about it.
- I was probably
a security guard
for maybe three months,
and then they worked me up
to a supervisor
and then assistant
and then, eventually,
if you stayed there
long enough
and you had
anything going for you,
they would make you
director of security.
So it's not as impressive
as it sounded.
- Somehow I ended up
in the kitchen.
Like, all the bread products
in there--
everything was stale.
Everything was out of date.
So what they would do is,
they would put
the big pot of water on
and put, like,
a colander over the water
and then put the hot dog buns
in the colander
and cover it with a towel,
and in five minutes,
you'd have
moist hot dog buns again.
Damn, how did
we not kill people?
- I know there were people
older than them
who owned it,
but you never saw them.
Just literally imagine
teenagers you know right now
opening an amusement park.
That's what it was.
- Everybody worked
at Action Park
because you knew
you'd get hired.
They'd give you as many hours
as you wanted.
But, you know,
Action Park didn't care
about, like, labor laws.
It was like,
"Yeah, I just worked 46 hours.
Yeah, I'm 16."
According to New Jersey law,
employees had to be
16 years old
in order to operate rides.
According to local newspapers,
kids as young as 14
were, in fact,
working in these roles.
- They were kids.
They were teenagers.
So I'm sure their priorities
were on, like, hooking up
and getting fucked up.
- There was romance
between everybody.
They were teenagers,
horny teenagers.
- At the top
of the Alpine Slide,
we had a shack,
like, where we kept
our employee carts,
where you would put
your backpacks,
where you kept your water.
People would go in the shed
to smoke weed and have sex.
That's what they would do
in that shed.
Why anybody would want to have
sex in there, I can't fathom,
because it was always, like,
95,000 degrees in that thing.
And it always stunk
like dirty backpacks,
feet, weed,
and just ball sweat.
- There are definitely people
who worked at Action Park
who have stories about that's
the first time they fingered
and/or got fingered.
Like, clearly,
a lot of fingering
going on after hours,
I would imagine.
There's a child
who was conceived
at Action Park, right?
There's some kid who's, like--
you know,
his name's Adam Peter
'cause his initials are AP
'cause he got conceived
down behind the bumper boats
on one hot summer eve.
- Now, I was a good girl,
so I wasn't really involved
in much of the shenanigans
that took place.
But there were parties
that I heard about.
I may have attended one.
The Action Park
employee parties
became the stuff
of New Jersey legend.
- We would save
all the money we found
in the pools over the course
of the summer,
and at the end of the summer,
one huge all-night bash
right up in Water World
called
the kamanawanalea party.
- Everyone stayed over,
so no one was driving,
but that was back in the days
when you could get away
with stuff like that.
- You'd find anyplace
you could find to sleep--
on the mats,
under the umbrellas,
on the picnic tables.
Some days, we'd wake up
after the kamanawanalea party,
we'd put our shorts on,
put the whistle
round our neck,
and find our way
to the lifeguard chair
as soon as we could.
Of course,
leadership comes from the top.
And Action Park's
free-for-all atmosphere
was inspired by
Gene Mulvihill's disdain
for rules of any kind.
- We called him Uncle Gene
because he actually did have
a lot of endearing qualities.
I mean, he was always out
and around in the park.
You know, he was a very
personable guy to talk to.
- So I go in his office
one day for a meeting,
and he has a cattle prod.
And he goes,
"Joe, I can't do this anymore."
And he takes the cattle prod.
He puts it to his chest,
and he hits the button,
and the thing goes boom!
And I get so freaked out
that I'm like, "Oh, my God."
He starts laughing
hysterically,
and at that point,
he basically goes, like,
"Don't get nervous.
It's fake."
And then he pitches me an idea.
"Joe, the people sneak
on the lift.
"And they go on the lift
without tickets,
"and we want to make sure
they all have tickets.
"So what I'm gonna do is,
I'm gonna get the cattle prod,
"and I'm gonna
stand by the lift.
"We got to get one of those
real dirty-looking kids
"that work down
in the train park.
"I'll be working the lift,
"and when they come up,
I'll go,
"'Hey, where's your ticket?'
"And they'll say,
'I don't have a ticket.'
"I'll take out the cattle
prod, I'll hit him,
"he'll pass out
like he's dead,
"and then we'll have patrol
come drag him away,
"and then everyone will know
not to come here
without a ticket."
I laughed like,
"Gene, that's some idea."
While I was out of town,
I get a phone call
from the person
who runs guest services to say,
"We have an issue.
"We have hundreds of parents
who are calling
"who are very upset
"because they saw someone who
works lift today kill someone
because they didn't have
a lift pass."
- I had a friend of mine
that had worked there
for couple seasons,
and he had told me
that Gene Mulvihill
had a MAC-10 machine gun
that he kept
in his office drawer.
♪ ♪
- He was far and away
the most unique character
I've met in my lifetime.
He was big and loud
and full of ideas.
Probably 90 % of those ideas
were just so crazy
and off the wall
that nobody would get near him,
and the other 10 %
were pretty close to that.
And we actually made
a lot of those ideas happen.
Gene's rule-bending antics
may have been common
on Wall Street,
but in this small town,
the locals had no idea
how to handle him.
- Well, they obviously
didn't know
Gene Mulvihill's personality
until they got to know him.
But Vernon is a little bit
of a mixed bag.
There were those who embraced
someone like Gene Mulvihill
with open arms,
and there were those
who hated him
because they see him
as having destroyed
our beautiful, bucolic, sleepy
little town with his resorts.
- The man could wear a suit
in 90-degree heat.
I had no idea how he did that.
He just was a--
he was a cool dude.
- I think he was
a piece of shit.
Action Park's
growing reputation
posed an important question:
what insurance company
would dare cover
this creatively designed park?
- Gene didn't believe
in the concept of insurance.
He thought if you got hurt,
you should be responsible.
He shouldn't have to pay
an insurance company.
However, he needed insurance
to stay in business.
It was part of the terms
of his lease.
So he had a work-around.
He created
his own fake insurance company
based in the Cayman Islands.
Its name?
The very real
and very legitimate-sounding
London and World Assurance.
- This company's documents
were very, very homemade.
They looked like they were
ginned up in a basement.
The letterhead
was not official.
Might as well have been
on napkins.
Gene was,
if nothing else,
efficient with his schemes.
And so his fake
insurance company
wasn't just used to avoid
paying for insurance.
It also became a vessel
for him to launder money.
- I said,
"We can't do that."
And he said,
"Why can't we do that?"
And I said, "Because the state
says we can't do that."
And he goes,
"Well, who the hell are they?
They can't shut us down."
And I said, "Well, actually,
yes, yes, they can."
These crimes would attract
the attention of the state
and eventually lead
to a large-scale
investigation,
three-day hearing,
and a 110-count indictment.
- Top officials
from the Vernon Valley
Recreation Association
today refused to testify
before the State Commission
of Investigation.
Gene Mulvihill did not appear,
citing client privilege.
The outcome?
Gene pled guilty
to counts of fraud,
theft, and conspiracy
and was ordered to give up
control of Action Park,
which was partially
on state land.
But to Gene,
that would not do.
So he came up
with yet another scheme.
He decided to become
the worst tenant he could.
He stopped paying bills
and filing paperwork.
He basically did
everything he could
to antagonize
his landlord state.
- The SCI
accusing Vernon Valley
of "arrogantly violating
its agreement with the state
to lease land
for the ski resort."
Vernon Valley
allegedly diverted funds
to avoid paying the state
several hundred thousand
dollars in rent.
The SCI probe also disclosed
Vernon Valley
created a phony
insurance company
to avoid premium payments
and changed the terrain
of the ski resort
without obtaining permission.
And it worked.
New Jersey got
so fed up with Gene
that they decided
to sell him the land
for just over $800,000
just to get him
off their backs.
Gene was free from the pesky
state of New Jersey.
And so Action Park continued
to expand and grow.
And anytime Gene needed cash
for a new ride,
his buddy Bob Brennan
was waiting in the wings
to support Gene's wild ideas.
- Excellence always succeeds.
When you have
an excellent facility
run by extraordinary people,
you're able to bring out
the fans,
and the facility does well.
But things
really started to take off
when Gene started running
TV ads
created by his daughter
and starring the park's
teenage employees.
- Just go to Action Park.
There's no other park like it.
- When it's hot out,
this is a great place
to spend the day
with your family.
- Race like a pro.
It's great.
- These are the most
amazing rides in the world.
I love it here.
- ♪ There's nothing
in the world ♪
♪ Like Action Park ♪
It's absolutely insane!
♪ ♪
A lot of Gene's ride ideas
took inspiration
from natural settings
and environments
that he grew up playing in.
His thinking was,
if kids couldn't make it
to real nature, he'd create
the next best thing.
How else to explain
an amusement park
that lets six-year-olds jump
off a 20-foot cliff?
♪ ♪
- They also had a slide
you could slide off
of the same cliff
into that water.
- So the slide version
of the Cliff Dive,
I think, was also
really good for people
who wanted to treat it
like a ride mentally
and didn't want to know
the feeling
of committing suicide.
- I remember being on
the diving cliff looking down,
being scared out of my life,
and to add to that,
there were people
right down below,
and they had no idea
you were about to jump.
- Conceivably, if you
just wanted to chill out
for a minute from all
the action of Action Park,
you could just hang out there.
You could be minding
your own business,
and somebody could land
right on top of you
without any warning.
So it was not actually
a chill-out area at all.
- You could do it safely,
but people didn't.
You know,
people just didn't listen.
They would jump stupidly.
They would slip and fall.
- And people would jump, and
the lifeguards always told you
to cross your arms
over your chest,
but people didn't listen,
and they would land
on the water like this,
and their arms
would get thrown up,
and they'd dislocate
their shoulder.
So you'd see somebody
coming out of the water,
and one shoulder's, like,
six inches lower
than the other one.
And their arm would just be,
like, hanging.
The floor
of the pool below the cliff
was eventually painted white
to make it easier
for lifeguards
to spot any bodies below.
And this wasn't
the only attraction
that was to feature cliffs.
The original concept
for Surf Hill,
which was basically a giant
Slip 'N Slide on a mountain,
was to have guests
jump off a cliff
before the mat
would catch them.
This idea was abandoned
due to space limitations.
- Staff members started
building up the jump
by sliding the mats
underneath,
making it bigger
and bigger and bigger,
until eventually one of the
guests got seriously injured.
We had been told
the person broke his neck.
Roaring Springs
was an expansive collection
of tube rides designed
to mimic the experience
of a mountain swimming hole.
- I remember this guy
coming up behind me.
He hit my tube
right before the tunnel,
and I went off to the side,
and I slammed my head
into the center of this tube
that you were meant
to go through.
- Some of the padding had got
torn away and exposed a bolt,
and one of the guests
came down,
and they basically
got impaled on the bolt,
and it tore a nice gash
through their midsection,
and they had to be evacuated
off the ride.
- Those ride attendants,
they spent their time
twisting their whistles
and then just going,
"Go, go, go."
And a lot of the time,
those tubes would bunch up.
And then what happens
when you get to the bottom
when you have to squeeze
into a particular area?
People were crashing
into each other,
slamming on top of each other.
One person would be
in the water.
The next person coming down
would then dunk
the next person and go under.
And if you couldn't swim well,
yikes.
CFS stood for
"can't fucking swim."
- Security guys, lifeguards,
they carried Sharpies.
Action Park gave out
daily wristbands,
and they would write "CFS"
on the wristband.
If someone had CFS
on their wristband,
that means they probably
had gotten saved already
at some point in the day,
and it was a warning
to other people.
Like, if CFS
was on your wristband
and you knew
you couldn't swim,
what the hell are you doing
jumping off a 20-foot cliff
into a deep pool of water?
But people just--you know,
they thought, like,
this was some magical place
where all of a sudden,
they would have
the ability to swim.
- We should talk
about that other ride
that's right near there,
the Colorado River Ride.
Holy shit, dude.
I will say everybody talks
about Tarzan Swing.
Cliff Dive, Cannonball Falls,
you hear about those.
Colorado River Ride
may have been
the most underrated
dangerous ride.
- You would load in,
and they would just let
the laws of physics
take over from there,
which sometimes meant
that you would fly really fast
and also sometimes meant
that you would get stuck
at certain points of the ride
that they hadn't designed
all that well,
and then you would get punted
by another tube.
- That thing was just
a fucking whiplash machine.
You're going up on the side.
Your raft is getting stuck
on the wall.
You have to all team up
and push off the wall,
and now you're going backwards.
Like, this is clearly not--
there's no rhyme or reason
in this.
The Colorado River Ride
actually began life
as a lazy-river ride.
But during construction,
Gene decided
he wanted a realistic
simulation of Class IV rapids.
Early test pilots reportedly
came out unconscious,
forcing him to turn down
the ride's intensity.
- There was one section
where tubes tended to go
right up an embankment,
and everyone was
looking at it expectantly,
waiting for them
to fly over the side.
You would hear people
audibly go, "Oh... aw,"
when they didn't actually fall
to their doom.
- I mean, we're holding on,
getting slammed into stuff,
the thing's getting stuck,
we have to kind of
stick our own legs out
and push our way off,
and then we go past
a lifeguard chair that,
you guessed it, is empty.
Nobody there
keeping an eye on anything.
- Gene got involved during
the construction process,
and he said...
"Look, when you go down
"the Colorado River in a raft,
"there's not some guy
in a lifeguard shirt
pushing your raft
down the river."
And I said,
"Look, Gene,
"this is not
the Colorado River.
It's a water park."
- A lot of fights
on the Colorado River Ride
for the dumbest thing ever--
you know,
rafts bumping into each other.
And then people would get out
and just start having at it.
Some of the worst fights we had
were people standing
in the Colorado River Ride
punching each other.
It was just dumb.
You would be like,
"Really? Why here?"
- There's morons
in the pool with us,
morons in the pool with us.
Action Park was like
the movie "The Purge."
Thousands of kids
with pent-up aggression
and a healthy dose of alcohol
were given a space
where they could do
whatever they wanted.
- You know when you were
at pool parties or things
when you were a kid and there
was always those idiots
who were like, "Let's jump
in the pool off the roof!
"No, let's get higher!
Let's do
the second-story roof!"
And you're always--you know,
you're kind of on board for it,
but then at one point,
you're like,
"Ah, I got to pull out
at this point.
This is where it's getting
too dangerous."
It was all those kids
in one park with no rules.
There were no rules.
And for a lot of kids,
that was heaven.
- Action Park was basically
the only water park
within the New York City area.
And it was a place
that filled a void for people
who weren't spending
their summer vacation
at a beach house.
They weren't going
to Cape Cod.
They weren't going to Florida.
They were going
to Action Park.
And I think because of that,
it might've attracted
a more, say,
working-class clientele.
The more
news reports warned people
about Action Park's
potential danger,
the more adrenaline-fueled
teenagers flocked to it.
It became
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In a world filled with people
telling you no,
Action Park became known
as the land of yes.
- I'd work the front
of the lot
to let people know
the lot was full.
And what would happen is,
people would come
to try to get in the lot
after it was full.
And one of the ways they would
try to get in is, they'd say,
"Hey, I'm from New York City."
And I don't know
what they meant by that,
but I think they didn't realize
that everyone here
was from New York City.
So as a 14-year-old, I'd say,
"Oh, my God.
"Are there big buildings?
"What is it like there?
You think one day,
I can go there?"
- There were a lot of people
that came up there,
usually younger guys,
that were just coming up there
for the idea
of starting trouble.
- It didn't always bring
the best.
It did bring sometimes
a criminal element.
I once heard
a police officer tell me
the majority of their calls
during the day
were for Action Park.
- There were a lot of fights
at Action Park.
You know, hot, in the sun,
lots of places to buy alcohol,
people that don't know
any restraint.
- Trying to start fights
with each other,
trying to start fights
with the ride attendants,
pulling the ride attendants
into the rides themselves.
- We used to call it
a Code Brown.
That was the code for
"somebody shit in the pool."
How angry do you have to be
on vacation
to just shit in a pool?
- The average customer
at Action Park was just insane.
And they just didn't care
half the time,
and, you know, combine that
with liquor, and anything goes.
- I lived through it, man,
I lived through it.
- There was a big fest tent.
That's where the beer
used to be.
And they would have, like,
Summerfest, Oktoberfest.
- My father was crazy
for that kind of stuff.
I mean, we had
a German brewer.
We had a German baker.
We had German bands.
- And I remember them doing
a big Polish festival,
Irish festival,
German festival.
- Anything you could put the
word "fest" on the end of it,
Action Park did it.
And they were
kind of free-for-alls.
- Jump, jump, jump, jump!
Come on, jump, jump!
Gene took
this stuff seriously.
He went so far as to literally
dismantle an entire brewery
from Germany
and have it sent
to New Jersey.
And during festivals,
such as Action Park's famed
Oktoberfest celebration,
Gene would be
front and center,
wearing lederhosen
and dancing to polka music.
♪ ♪
- Now, anyone who worked
at Action Park knew
Water World
was for the daytime,
and then at some point
around 4:00 or 5:00,
the adults would have
a little fun in the bar area,
and then they'd make their way
over to Motor World.
One side of the highway--
you have 94 that runs
through the middle,
and you have Water World
on one side
and Motor World
on the other side,
with all the racing cars,
the racing boats.
And that was usually
after they had a few drinks.
♪ ♪
- The design was flawed
because the Grand Prix cars
were right next
to the beer tent.
- So at 5:00,
guys would come up.
They'd get a bunch
of beers in them.
They'd go down to Motor World
to drive the cars.
- Out of all the rides,
my opinion,
that's the craziest one
because it's not the ride
attendant's fault, you know?
You can't always tell
if someone's been drinking,
and if you didn't stink
like booze,
they would never know.
- Gene said to me one day...
"You know what we need here?
"When somebody comes in
under 55 seconds,
"we got to have these girls
in bikinis come running out
"and a huge champagne bottle
that pops the top off
and shoots champagne
up in the air."
And I was laughing
when he said it.
And I looked at him,
and he had a straight face.
He was dead serious
about doing that.
- Occasionally
with the LOLA cars,
we would get a guest that,
instead
of following the course,
would decide he wanted
to make his own course,
that he would just start
driving around on the course,
drive off the course.
- I watched a guy
go off the track
and start chasing one of my
employees around in the field
with a LOLA car.
And so this kid
was running around
kind of like a bullfighter,
like, trying
to make tighter turns
than the car could make so
the car couldn't run him over.
- I'd heard the employees
figured out
how to override
the speed governor
so that the go-karts could go
as fast as 50
or 60 miles an hour.
And I'd heard that they would
then take those go-karts
on the highway that ran
through the middle of the park.
- Yeah, I took a LOLA car
on 94.
It has a top speed
of over 60 miles an hour.
It was worth it.
Many amusement parks
feature bumper boats.
Action Park had full-on
"Miami Vice"-grade speedboats,
where riders
regularly tempted fate
by treating them
like bumper boats,
a common action
that would send many a guest
tumbling into a pond
murky from leaked gas and oil
and known by employees
to be infested with snakes.
- Like, you'd be driving
a power boat,
and you'd see something
slither out
from, like, in the high grass.
- Oh, yeah, there were
big black snakes.
Motor World had lagoons
and swamp,
and there must've been
four-foot snakes.
Used to scare the hell
out of the New Yorkers.
- The things would flip,
I mean, on a regular basis.
If I stood there for an hour,
I could almost guarantee
I was gonna see one flip.
- Well, if you were a lifeguard
in Motor World,
you were being punished for
something, for the most part,
or you were somebody
who didn't know anybody.
You know, it was not the place
you wanted to be.
- I worked at Speedboats,
and everyone would get
three times around this pond,
this gas, oily pond...
That was just loaded
with dead fish.
I remember that.
One day, we had
a group of people.
I think you had about eight
boats going at the same time,
and they did
their three times around,
and they would throw
a red flag.
And this one gentleman
is coming toward the dock,
and he comes up,
flies forward,
up and over the small dock,
and on top of this other boat.
I thought this gentleman
was decapitated.
And I walk over,
and I see that he's--
you know, he's stuck forward
and his neck is bleeding,
but he's breathing.
I'm shocked, and I'm afraid
that this guy
is going to get his hair
pulled into the prop.
I remember taking my rod
and slamming
on top of the boat
to get the guy to let go
of the throttle,
for--you know, for God's sake.
And the gentleman
who was on top of the boat
just jumps off the ride
and just heads to the monorail
like--as if he hadn't done
anything wrong.
- One of the coolest
attractions
I've never seen anywhere else,
the Battle Tanks,
you know, kind of homebuilt
tanks where you drove around
and shot tennis balls
at each other.
And if it hit a target
on the tank,
it would be disabled
and spin in a circle.
- I got a call down there
one time,
and one of the guests
had gotten hold
of one of the gas cans,
and he poured gasoline
on his tennis balls
and was putting them
into the air cannon,
lighting the balls on fire,
and was shooting them
at the tanks.
So he wound up getting ejected
from the park.
♪ ♪
- At Action Park, the most
dangerous ride, probably,
from sheer amount of injuries,
would be the Alpine Slide.
♪ ♪
- People would get
on the chairlift,
and this was crazy,
but they would actually take
the carts that were on
their cart and pull them off
and throw them off the cart
and try to hit people
that were coming down
underneath them.
- With just a little nudge
of your elbow,
it was pretty easy to knock
the cart right off the ski lift
down on to the track where
people are riding the ride.
- There were some times
it happened
a couple times in a day.
It certainly happened
a few times a week.
Once they reached
the top of the Alpine Slide,
parkgoers were greeted
with signs
bearing bloody photos of
the ride's previous victims,
a grim warning that what
they were about to endure
was, in fact, truly dangerous.
♪ ♪
- It had a stick,
and, ostensibly,
you were supposed to be able
to pull up on the stick
as a brake,
push down on it to go faster.
But one thing that I learned
was very true:
the sleds were often broken.
- I didn't know it
at the time,
but the Alpine Slide was made
of fiberglass, concrete,
and mostly asbestos.
- Cement track.
It's summertime.
People are in bathing suits,
and they're flying down
this path at full speed ahead,
and they would just tumble off.
- I wasn't particularly excited
to go on the Alpine Slide.
I knew it was unsafe.
- One of the reasons the
Alpine Slide was so dangerous
is because it wasn't designed
to keep you on.
If you didn't touch your brakes
in a couple of key spots,
you were going to fly off.
♪ ♪
- You'd go up into this lip,
and if you didn't know
how to distribute your weight
when you came out
of that bank turn,
the thing would flip on you.
And when the thing
flipped on you,
that's when it started to hurt.
- You had kids breaking
their collarbones,
their skin ripped off.
And when I was in high school,
you would come back to school
in the fall,
and you'd see
all these kids bandaged up.
And you'd walk in the hallways,
and they were like,
"Yeah, Alpine Slide, huh?"
"Yeah."
- Kid shows up back
in the neighborhood,
and, like, he's got a big burn
on his thigh and his hip.
You assume, "Oh, you fall off
the Alpine Slide?
Oh, when did you go
to Action Park?"
Like, that--
He'd have to correct you.
He'd have to--
"Oh, no, I had surgery."
- The area around the slides
was just rock,
so, I mean,
everything from broken bones
to concussions.
On an average day, you would
have 50 to 100 people injured.
On a weekend,
you could double that.
- When I was a kid,
I was extremely law-abiding,
so every single time
that I saw a sign
that said "slow down,"
I would slow down.
I hit a bump,
and I was sort of airborne,
and I looked to my side,
and I saw that the slide
that I had been riding on
was rolling down the hill
next to me.
And I was taken
to the infirmary,
which was
this unsettling-looking
sort of shed.
They took a look at my wound,
and they told me
that they needed to spray
some sort of stuff on it
so that it would scab over
and heal.
And then, unlike a doctor,
the person who was
administering this stuff
said to me,
"This is gonna hurt."
- First aid had this spray.
It was a little squeeze bottle,
like a Windex bottle,
and it had
this orange solution in,
which I've been told
years later
that it was alcohol and iodine.
I know it was an orange color.
And they would spray the person
with this thing,
and from the looks of things,
this was the most incredible
pain this person had ever felt.
I can specifically remember
one time where we had this guy
come in, and this guy
was a bodybuilder.
I mean, this guy was jacked.
And he had friction burns
on his arm and his leg,
and this guy was in tears.
We told him, "Okay,
now we got to do the leg."
And he was like, "No."
We're like, "Dude,
this is gonna get infected
if we don't spray it."
And he's like, "I don't care.
I'd rather have an infection
than go through that again."
- They had a circle drawn
on the floor
in the first aid room.
And while they were cleaning
your slide burns,
if you managed to stay in
the circle, you won a prize.
They said over, like,
two or three years,
only two people actually stayed
in the circle,
and the best they could produce
was an Action Park pen.
- You could walk
around Action Park
and just see the people
with the orange spray.
It was like
an Action Park battle scar.
- Action Park
was this litmus test that--
it was very clear
from the time
I was eight or nine years old,
like, you got to go there,
and you got to come back
with some scars.
You got to go take your lumps
at Action Park
if you really want to be able
to kind of grow up
and be a young man
in this world.
- After a while,
the town couldn't dedicate
its ambulances to Action Park
because, you know,
Vernon was a small town,
and we had two
volunteer ambulance squads,
and Action Park would
keep them busy all day long.
So there was a meeting,
and, you know, the town said,
"Look, you got to buy
your own ambulance."
And they did.
They had either one or two.
I think at their height,
they might have had two.
- My wife, she worked--
she was one of the admins.
One of her jobs, it took her
an entire week, 40 hours.
She made an Excel spreadsheet
of all of the injuries
for one season at the park.
And it was a lot
of dislocated shoulders,
broken arms, wrists,
slide abrasions
from the Alpine Slide.
It was just a crazy,
crazy amount of injuries
at this place.
It's impossible to say
exactly how many people
were injured at Action Park.
The state only required
that they report
"serious injuries."
Of course, that left it
to Gene to decide
what he viewed as serious,
meaning that unless you
left the park in an ambulance,
it was almost certainly
not going to be reported.
- If the government
doesn't require you
to report something,
there's no way
that someone could determine
how many injuries occurred
on a daily basis.
And if Gene wanted
to cover that up,
it'd be very easy to do so.
Amusement parks
often embody their creators.
They are the personification
of some individual,
some auteur's worldview.
Walt Disney looked
at the world
and wanted it to resemble
turn-of-the-century America
with a hint of fantasy
and the Wild West.
And thus, you have Disneyland.
Gene Mulvihill had a vision
of a place
where there were no rules,
something between Ayn Rand
and "Lord of the Flies."
- My father wanted
to give people the freedom
to control the action,
to control their speed.
He loved to have fun,
and so the park reflected that.
- The way things were done
in the '80s,
it seems to me,
created this situation.
You have this sense
of not being bridled
by a federal or state
or local government
that's trying to keep you
from having fun.
So Mulvihill created
a business that allowed people
to thumb their nose
at conventional norms
and thumb their nose at people
who worried about danger,
and they put themselves
in the teeth
of a dangerous situation.
And while regulators
may have been tough
on other amusement parks,
Gene had friends
in high places,
and Action Park suffered
virtually no fines
or citations.
- In the Reagan years,
there was this idea
that people
should govern themselves,
that red tape got in the way
of innovation,
that American capitalism
was at its best
when it was unregulated.
And it's in this environment
that Action Park
is allowed to flourish.
It turns out
that Gene was friends
with future president
Donald Trump.
According to park employees,
Trump was actually very close
to investing in Action Park
at one point
and even dropped by the park
to check things out
and have a look around.
When he saw Gene's vision,
he realized it was too wild,
too nuts, even for him.
- Trump found Gene's vision
too unhinged.
Fuck yeah, dude.
Good for Gene.
So what would happen
if you sued Action Park?
Well, Gene would refuse
to settle.
He'd force you to trial
almost every single time,
and he'd make that trial as
long and painful as possible.
- Gene's philosophy was,
"We fight every case.
"We don't settle it.
We bring it all the way
to trial."
And we won 93 % of them.
Eventually word got around
that he wouldn't settle,
and most lawyers thought it
too much trouble to even try.
Even if you went to trial
and won,
Gene would simply refuse
to pay
unless you sent
the U.S. Marshals
to his door to collect,
something that happened
on more than one occasion.
- The U.S. Marshals,
the first time they showed up,
they surrounded
the ticket booth.
I found my way
to them pretty quickly
and asked them
to please not shoot me.
After the first time,
they would just come
and knock on my office and say,
"Yeah, we're here."
Then we'd go
to the general manager's office
and take care of it.
Action Park
was a product of its time.
It was like an '80s movie,
an era of latchkey kids
going on adventures,
far from the worried eyes
of attentive parents.
♪ ♪
- That was probably
the last decade
of unsupervised fun for kids.
- There was no cell phones.
You know, it's like,
you wanted
to hang out with your buddy,
you called him up,
and you went over
to his house and met him.
You know, whosever house
you were at at lunchtime,
that's who fed you.
- We were all kids
that climbed trees.
We didn't come home
until after 8:00.
Our parents weren't even
looking for us.
- The '80s were
about outdoing each other,
about keeping up.
The '80s were not about,
"How are you feeling?
Are you afraid to do this?"
- Like, we would try
to die for fun.
We would try to die for fun.
When I was in high sch--
I've been in at least
six different abandoned
mental hospitals for fun.
Like, that--
no joke, in high school,
you can show up to school
on Monday and turn around
and be like, "Hey,
what'd you do this weekend?"
And your buddy could look
at you and be like,
"Oh, yeah, we went
and broke into
"the abandoned
mental hospital,
"and we went
in the tunnels underneath.
"Turned out, there were some
fucking skinheads down there.
"So they came at us,
so we beat up a Nazi,
and we went to a diner."
And they'd be like,
"What'd you do?"
And you'd be like, "Oh, yeah,
I went and visited my cousin
in Freehold."
And those were, like, both
totally standard things to say.
- You know, I can remember
being 14, 15 years old,
and we lived about 15 miles
from Action Park.
And I can remember
a bunch of us,
unbeknownst to our parents,
jumping on our bicycles
and riding to Action Park,
spending the day there, and
then riding our bicycles back.
Parents never know.
I would beat my kid's ass
if I ever found out.
♪ ♪
- Looking back on Action Park
with grown-up eyes,
Gene wanted to make sure
everybody was having
a good time.
And it probably wasn't
the best idea
to have, you know, a place
where you controlled the action
and a place
where kids were in charge.
It was scary.
It was dangerous.
- An amusement park
is designed
to look like a kind of place
that it isn't.
It's meant to look dangerous,
but it isn't.
Its artifice is baked
into the story,
and you're told that
from when you're very young.
"Go on the thrill ride.
It's a thrill."
But it's not really going
to fall apart.
It's not really going
to kill you.
But Action Park
was truly dangerous.
♪ ♪
- A lot of places you go to,
unless the ride
catastrophically fails,
no matter how scared you feel,
you're not gonna get hurt.
Action Park was not like that.
If you wanted
to push the boundaries,
you could get hurt, and,
you know, it certainly became
a competition between friends
to see who could push it
a little bit more,
a little bit more.
And then if you got hurt,
you know, if it wasn't serious,
it was almost like
a battle scar.
- The magic and the horror
of Action Park
is that you can go there
expecting a great time,
expecting fantastic memories,
and you can leave
with those exact things,
or you can leave
in a body bag.
And you didn't know
which it was going to be.
- I would say probably
the most pleasant named ride
at Action Park,
the Kayak Experience.
But I later came to learn that
that is the one where someone
was electrocuted to death.
- There were underwater fans
that would help push the water
and created rapids,
like you were kayaking.
And somebody flipped
out of one of their kayaks,
and one of these fans
short-circuited,
and they either touched it
or were close enough to it,
and they got electrocuted.
- Negligence doesn't begin
to even capture
that particular death.
Ungrounded electricity
in a water park,
that's the Kayak Experience.
The Kayak Experience.
♪ ♪
- I knew better than to go
on any rides at Action Park.
I saw people get hurt
on every ride in the park,
and I was like, "I don't
want any part of this."
I had a stack of comp passes
to give out to people
that was probably
six inches thick.
There were hundreds of them.
So if something went wrong,
somebody got something stolen,
I would give them
complimentary passes.
I never gave one to a friend.
People got hurt there.
- When shit got real
at Action Park,
the, like, golf cart,
Cushman first aid thing
would roll by,
and there'd be somebody,
like, completely immobilized
on that thing,
you know, with the backboard
and the neck brace
and the pads on the sides
of their head.
And you'd talk
to the first aid guys,
they'd be like, "Oh, yeah,
he got medevaced to Morristown.
"He had a fractured vertebrae
in his neck
from hitting his head."
I'm like, "Holy shit.
Are you kidding?"
And that's when I started
to realize, it's like,
this place is dangerous.
- When I think back
to the Wave Pool,
I remember being excited
to go in it
and, even as a young kid,
walking up and going, like,
"Oh, no fucking way.
This is nuts. This is"--
I mean, shoulder-to-shoulder
human beings
in a wave pool that was
far too violent and powerful.
- If you go to the beach,
that water is buoyant.
So when the waves come in,
you go up,
and when the waves go down,
you go down.
But a freshwater pool
doesn't do that.
- We'd often have people
that would jump into the water
that didn't know how to swim.
I can't tell you
how many times someone
would come up to me and say,
"Sir, how deep is that water?"
And I wouldn't even tell them
how many feet.
I'd say, "It's over your head."
I'd turn around,
and they would jump in.
- When people got
to shoulder-height depth,
we called that area
"the death zone."
Panic would set in,
and they'd grab everybody
and anybody around them.
And I've seen
literally families
of 8, 10, or 12 people
taking each other down.
- The guards at--we used
to call it "the grave pool."
The guards at the grave pool,
they couldn't relax
for a second.
- To break a new lifeguard in,
they'd be assigned to
the death chair, and that was
the lifeguard stand
that overlooked the death zone
on the Wave Pool.
And literally their first
30 minutes to 45 minutes
sitting in the death chair,
that new lifeguard would save
three to four to five people.
People thought that drowning
at the Action Park Wave Pool
was part of the ride.
They thought it was part
of the experience.
They expected to drown
at the Action Park Wave Pool.
Lifeguards at the Wave Pool
had their hands full.
The water was murky enough
that bodies often
couldn't be spotted
below the surface.
The culprit?
A mixture of muddy runoff
from a nearby hill,
human waste, suntan lotion,
and gore from open wounds.
- That was one of the reasons
they used to stop the thing
every so many minutes,
so they could scan the bottom
and make sure there wasn't
any bodies there
that they had missed.
Those guys did a great job,
but it's hard to see.
And this guy went down,
and by the time they found him,
it was too late.
- When you're a kid,
I think you can separate
yourself from it,
because I didn't work
in that department.
I thought,
"That's somebody else's
responsibility."
But it was a common occurrence.
I don't know how many people
died at Action Park,
but it wasn't just one person.
- The fact
that more than one person
died in your Wave Pool--
who's that second
son of a bitch?
That's who your heart
really bleeds for.
Nobody should ever be
the second person to die
in a wave pool.
You know why?
'Cause after the first person
dies in a wave pool,
close the fucking wave pool.
Put up a fucking sign
or something, man.
- It was a place
where death was tolerated,
where death was put right into
the number situation.
"Oh, we've only had
this many die."
One is too many.
♪ ♪
My firstborn was Georgie.
He was actually born
on Christmas night
in 1960,
but he was delivered
right after midnight,
so he wasn't
the Christmas baby.
We were just so thrilled
to have him.
Just to look at his little
face, it was wonderful.
And then 11 months later,
we had our second child,
Brian.
- My brother and I were
basically raised as twins.
My dad would actually say
that we were twins
so we could play
on the same football team.
We did everything together.
It didn't matter what we did.
We were like the kids
on "The Sandlot."
- Georgie was
very, very popular.
He had many, many friends.
- My brother George
was a handsome guy.
My brother George felt
like he was invincible.
And our whole family thought
my brother was invincible
because of how strong we were.
On July 8, 1980,
my brother George
was supposed to be working
with my dad and I.
- He wanted to go
to Action Park,
so I loaned him the money
in the afternoon,
and a friend of his
went over there to meet him.
And they were just going
to have fun that day.
- He goes
onto the Alpine Slide,
and he's going
down the hillside,
and the cart brake,
I don't believe, was working.
And he went off the track
and flipping down the hillside
and into some rocks
and hit his head on rocks.
- And I had a phone call.
I'll never forget it.
I was sitting at home.
I was looking forward
to watching a movie.
They said,
"Your son has been injured.
He's in the trauma center."
And they told me
that what I had to do
was get a neighbor
or somebody to bring me,
because my husband was
on a sales call that night.
- My dad got the phone call
while we're working
about my brother being hurt.
Stopped working immediately
and went to go see my brother.
- I just didn't think
it was any big deal
because he was so athletic.
And I thought scrapes
or bumps or something,
maybe a cut,
but I had no idea
how awful it was.
When we got to that hospital,
he had been moved
to another hospital,
and I saw the bed
that he had been in.
There was blood
all over the pillowcase,
all over everything.
- When I first saw my brother,
I knew he was hurt bad.
I just knew real bad.
They were checking
for brain waves
to make--to see
if he still had brain waves.
And not only once, obviously
two times or three times--
multiple times to make sure,
to see if he's with it
or not with it.
- There was no sign
that he was going to wake up,
and we just kept
talking to him.
Dr. Houser, who was
my brother-in-law's brother,
came in from Connecticut
just to be with us.
And he checked him out
thoroughly too,
and he said, "No."
- On July 16, 1980,
he passed away.
- I remember that moment
very, very well.
I went out
to the waiting room,
and my husband was with me,
and we told our other children
that he had died.
My daughter ran down
the hallway screaming,
and everybody was crying,
and it was, like,
not believable.
So we went to the rectory
that night,
and then on the way--
I hate to say this--
but on the way back
to the hospital...
we were--walked
across the street,
and I deliberately walked out
in front of a truck.
And at that point,
my husband pulled me back,
and he just screamed at me,
"What are you thinking?"
I was thinking I couldn't live
with that kind of pain.
It just hurt so much.
And here, 39 years later,
I can still feel that pain.
- My brother George
was supposed to be
best man at my wedding.
My wedding was gonna be
July 20, 1980.
He died on the 16th.
And I had to have
my other brother as best man,
and everything was in a cloud.
- Gene Mulvihill
never called us
and never called the hospital.
He had no heart.
He cared about himself
and the almighty dollar.
- In the investigation
of George Larsson's death,
the spokesperson for the park
claims that
the alpine ride
didn't kill him,
that the rock his head hit
killed him,
and therefore,
the Alpine ride was safe.
The newspapers were told that
George Larsson was an employee,
that this happened at night,
and that it was raining.
He wasn't an employee,
it wasn't at night,
and it wasn't raining.
The truth was,
while Larsson worked
as a lift operator
at the park's
sister ski resort
during a prior season,
he never worked at Action Park
and indeed entered the park
during normal business hours.
One likely reason
for the lie:
the park never reported
his death to the state,
dubiously claiming
they didn't need to
because he wasn't part
of the general public.
- The state of New Jersey
had told them
that they could not open
for the Fourth of July.
And they wanted to open
for the Fourth of July,
but they never
removed the rocks
that they were told to remove.
And when my son
went on that ride,
the car flipped him off,
and his head hit the rocks.
The newspapers were taking
Gene Mulvihill's side.
They believed his story,
and they printed it.
Gene lied about my son's death
because he had
fake liability insurance
in the Cayman Islands.
Fake.
It was fake.
- Anyone that sues the park,
if there's not
proper insurance,
is gonna walk away
with not a whole lot of money.
That's the bottom line.
- We never even got
to go to court
because we were told
by our attorney
that a teenager
isn't worth much money.
He's a liability
to the family,
and you can't expect to settle
for very much money.
We eventually settled
for $100,000.
♪ ♪
George Larsson's
death happened in 1980.
He was the first person
to lose his life at the park,
but he would not be the last.
In July 1982,
a 15-year-old from Brooklyn
drowned in the Wave Pool.
A week later, a 27-year-old
man from Long Island
was electrocuted
on the kayak simulator.
In 1984, a guest drowned
in the Roaring Springs area.
And in 1987, the Wave Pool
claimed yet another life.
♪ ♪
- The thing about Action Park
is, Action Park becomes
a huge part
of the local economy.
And if Action Park
creates revenue taxwise,
creates revenue for other
stores when people come in,
the city and the folks there
are gonna take
a much more friendly look
at that operation
if it's making money.
- How many hundreds of people
had jobs, you know,
between, like, those lifeguards
and the concession stands
and the ticket takers
and the janitors
and the support staff?
Like, that's a few hundred
jobs for your town.
I would think there might have
been a town councilman or two
who was willing
to look the other way
to keep the money faucet
turned on.
- Some of the town officials
were clearly on Gene's payroll,
absolutely.
They worked in his restaurants,
in his bars.
They worked in Action Park.
Their children worked
for the resort.
There were elected officials
that he bought homes for.
That there are
local town officials,
chairpersons
of our planning boards,
our zoning boards who had
free memberships to the spa,
free season passes
and that type of thing.
It's not always about being
on the payroll.
I think it was always about,
"What could I get from Gene?"
And Gene knew that,
and he played that.
And that's
why Gene Mulvihill got away
with as much
as he got away with.
- Gene was so much larger
than life than you can imagine,
and there's things about Gene
that I will not tell anybody,
and we'll just leave it
at that.
- When I went back
to work for Gene again,
after years away,
the first thing he said to me
when I saw him was...
"It's great to have you back.
I mean, you know where
all the bodies are buried."
- I believe
that the people in Vernon
turned a blind eye to it.
They didn't want to know
anything negative about it.
I think they thought
that there would be
repercussions
from Gene Mulvihill
or that Gene Mulvihill
was telling the truth.
He's a very good liar.
- I think he made that
very clear,
especially when he started
into a business relationship,
that crossing him
was not a good idea.
When I got fired
from the local newspaper
as its editor
because of Gene contacting
my boss, my publisher,
he told me point-blank
in a phone conversation
that he was threatened
by the local officials
that if he didn't go to my boss
and get me fired,
they were not going to approve
his projects anymore.
- I have heard a lot of stories
that Gene was involved
with mob associates.
Around 1993, I filed a lawsuit
for defamation
and wrongful discharge.
And I deposed him.
And he came to the deposition,
and every answer
to every question was,
"I don't recall.
I don't remember."
He didn't answer
one single question.
And I was so upset with him
that as we were leaving
that deposition,
I'll never forget
what I said to him.
I said,
"You, Gene, are a lowlife."
I said, "I don't care
how much money you have
"in this lifetime.
You are a lowlife for what
you did to me here today."
♪ ♪
By the mid-1990s,
things began to change.
As the bad press
and lawsuits mounted,
attendance dropped,
and Gene found it harder
to move money around
and cover the bills.
The park hit
another turning point
when Gene's friend Bob Brennan
finally faced a reckoning
with the SEC
after years
of committing fraud.
Soon after that,
Brennan was found guilty
of money laundering
and bankruptcy fraud,
landing him in prison
for almost ten years,
meaning Gene's
never-ending spigot of cash
dried up as well.
Before long, Action Park's
parent company
had to declare bankruptcy.
And when the park
shut its gates
at the end of the 1996
summer season,
it soon became clear
that it would be its last.
- I think it ran its course.
I think, like anything else,
people grew wise to it
and people grew weary of it
and people moved on from it.
Plus, the whole
legal environment did a 180.
And New Jersey
was the Wild West
when Action Park opened,
and by the time it closed,
it was not
the Wild West anymore.
- The people's mindset
changed.
They weren't willing
to take the unbridled risks
associated with the way it was
in the '80s.
That just wasn't
acceptable anymore.
Its time came and went.
♪ ♪
In 1998,
Action Park was purchased
by resort giant Intrawest,
the multinational corporation
behind Whistler Mountain.
The new owners stripped out
most of the park's attractions
and renamed it Mountain Creek.
Gone were the looping tubes
and fireball-shooting tanks.
Without Gene's vision
leading the way,
it became a generic
regional water park.
Action Park as we knew it
was gone.
♪ ♪
- One day
after I came home from work,
I walked into the house,
and my husband, George,
said to me,
"Esther, get out the best
bottle of red wine you have.
We're gonna celebrate."
And I said, "What are we going
to celebrate?"
And he said,
"Gene Mulvihill died."
And we did.
He's the only person
that we celebrated his death.
He deserved to be gone.
He didn't care
about any of the riders,
any of the people.
- I would say in the last four
or five years of his life,
we became very close,
and I talked to him
all the time.
And I learned
about a different Gene,
a very generous,
a very benevolent Gene.
I am not glorifying
Gene Mulvihill.
I am not telling you
that he was a good,
decent, honorable man.
But I did see a side
to Gene Mulvihill
that was different from what I
had always thought about him.
Was he a villain or a victor?
I think he was both,
depending on the circumstances,
depending on what he could do
and what
he could get away with.
- It was so easy
to romanticize him
because he does what a lot
of people wish they could do.
A lot of people wish
they could ignore the law.
A lot of people wish
they could ignore rules.
Gene actually did that.
- The spirit of Action Park
lives on today
in the Fyre Festival,
in Theranos,
and all these other schemes.
- The Fyre Festival's
bullshit, man.
He gave them a cheese sandwich.
Gene gave you everything
he fucking promised you.
He said,
"Come to my amusement park.
"Do whatever the fuck
you feel like.
"You might get hurt,
but you're probably
gonna have
a shit ton of fun."
It was what it said it was.
But it was fucked up.
- Even though I was scared
to do those rides,
I fucking did them.
There's also a part of me
that's like,
"If you can't do them,
then fucking get out
of Jersey."
♪ ♪
In 2010, just
two years before his death,
Gene Mulvihill led
a group of investors
to take back control
of the park
he had founded
decades earlier.
In 2014, Gene's son Andy
revived the Action Park name
to cash in on a growing sense
of nostalgia
for the original park.
The following year, the park
announced its intention
to build an updated version
of the Cannonball Loop
called the Sky Caliber.
That ride was never built.
In 2018, the resort,
once again called
Mountain Creek,
was acquired by Vernon native
and onetime teenage
Action Park employee
Joe Hession.
♪ ♪
- When you look back
at Action Park these days,
I think everybody romanticizes
a little bit.
I remember enough
about working at Action Park
to remember that everybody
that worked there hated it
when they were there,
but they always came back,
and we always kept the friends
that we made
while we were there.
It's an '80s movie
that was real life,
and it's something
that'll never happen again.
- I hold it so near and dear
to my heart.
I'm so glad
that I got to go there.
I wear it as a point of pride.
That being said,
I think back to the fact
that I was a child, and I think
about the things that I saw
and that I participated in.
And even at the age of 39,
to no small degree,
it does scare me
that that was happening,
that that was allowed
to happen,
that--that life
could be that way.
- I look back as it was
a positive thing.
You know, be able to,
I don't know,
make your own decisions
on how ambitious
or how adventurous
you want to be
and living
with the consequences.
I think it teaches something.
- Everything's
in your face today,
and I think we're
more fearful, rightfully so.
I think our parents should've
been more afraid, right?
I think everybody in this room
would say...
"My parents should've
known what I was doing
on this day or that day."
- We live in an era
when kids
don't really go outside
as much.
When they do go outside,
people are scared
they're gonna get hurt.
In the '80s,
kids were running free.
They were running outdoors.
They were scraping their knees.
They were going to Action Park.
We look back
at our childhoods.
It's carefree.
We didn't have jobs.
We didn't have to answer
to anybody.
We could do what
we wanted, right?
We look at Action Park,
and we remember
this heightened version
of this.
We could do whatever we wanted.
So when you're nostalgic
for Action Park,
you're nostalgic
for childhood.
You're nostalgic for freedom.
You're not nostalgic
for being hurt.
You're nostalgic
for everything else.
- When you talk to other people
who went there,
there's a certain
shared level of...
sort of survivor's respect.
Many of the people you talk to
who grew up in New Jersey
laughing about Action Park,
if you ask them
on a basic level,
"Do you think the way
you grew up
was healthy for a kid?"
They'll say, "No."
We laugh about it, 'cause
what else are we gonna do?
But we don't think
it was healthy.
And those people understand,
like, no, it was really--
You were swimming in pools
where the lifeguards
weren't paying attention.
You were going on rides
that were poorly designed
that people got hurt on
all the time.
And we felt like
we were on our own.
We felt like the world
was an unsafe place.
But it's what we got,
so fuck you.
- ♪ Day after day ♪
♪ They send my friends away ♪
- We are extraordinarily happy
that we were able to grow up
the way we did
and, simultaneously,
so furious that we had
to grow up that way.
♪ ♪
- ♪ Day after day ♪
♪ They tell me I can go ♪
- A lot of kids
who grew up in the '80s,
they like to talk shit
and tell stories,
and when they got
a couple drinks in them,
it's about how fucked up
and funny it was.
But when they're
with their shrink,
it's just about
how fucked up it was.
But a lot of things were.
A lot of things were
back then.
- ♪ I can fly, I will scream ♪
♪ I will break my arm ♪
♪ I will do me harm ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Don't set me free ♪
♪ I'm as heavy as can be ♪
♪ Just my Librium and me ♪
♪ And my EST makes three ♪
♪ 'Cause I'd rather
stay here ♪
♪ With all the madmen ♪
♪ Than perish
with the sad men ♪
♪ Roaming free ♪
♪ And I'd rather play here ♪
♪ With all the madmen ♪
♪ For I'm quite content ♪
♪ They're all as sane as me ♪
♪ ♪