“If you’re in control, you’re not going fast enough.”
Parnelli Jones, professional automobile racer
The summer of 1977 was a proof-of-concept season, with my father wanting to make sure the Alpine was no passing fad. He offered just one new attraction: grass skiing, a warm-weather activity where people wore boots fitted with what looked like tank treads and rolled down the slope on dirt, sometimes tumbling from an errant rock or pebble. Grass skiing did not prove popular, but the Alpine continued to draw crowds, and so he decided it was time to move forward. One ride was not enough. Expansion and growth were necessary.
He believed the best way of going about this was to legalize drunk driving.
He called it Motor World. It was in the same lower plot of land across the main roadway where Pete had busied himself getting the dune buggies ready. Because the Alpine’s opening had been delayed, those vehicles had largely sat dormant. At first, Pete explained, our father had merely wanted to allow guests to traverse a wooded area on the buggies, dodging trees as they hit the gas. Over the cold months, when he incubated ideas, he plotted something far more ambitious.
Now, in the late spring of 1978, there stood a prefabricated aluminum garage that housed a small fleet of three-quarter-scale Formula One racers, the first of their kind on the East Coast. Also called Lola cars after the British car company that made them, these were slightly shrunken versions of the arrow-shaped vehicles that tore through Monaco every year. They were not toys. The engine of the Lola T506 vibrated through your stomach and made your testicles rattle.
“Eight grand each,” Pete said. “They top out at fifty miles per hour, but that’s only because we put governors under the gas pedal. These things can go ninety.” Considering some of the questionable judgment already exhibited on the Alpine, I had a suspicion guests would approach these vehicles with a mixture of excitement and gross negligence. It didn’t matter. While my friends played with Hot Wheels, plastic lanes snaking around their bedrooms, I watched as an entire automotive world was laid out before me. Big Al and Charlie supervised the paving of a huge track that wound through the field like a miniature Le Mans. In the middle were the ride attendants and a digital clock that displayed lap times. It was accurate to one hundredth of a second.
“Now we can time how long you’d last with a girl,” Jimmy said, snorting. At fourteen, Jimmy was beginning to approach the opposite sex with a little bit of a swagger. That didn’t quite match his experience, which, like mine, was precisely zero. I had already caught him bragging of his Alpine prowess to the occasional female visitor. Now, I suspected, he would likely drop whatever records he secured in Motor World into conversation with other objects of his affection.
Jimmy and I both snuck in laps, but we were too young to work at Motor World and technically shouldn’t have been allowed on the track at all. You had to be seventeen years old and present a valid driver’s license to operate a Lola car. (Kids with a learner’s permit could get on with a parent’s consent.) At the time, New Jersey printed licenses on paper with no picture. Kids successfully forged them all the time by punching out the birthday numbers with a hole puncher and switching them to buy alcohol. Attendants would eye one of these dubious licenses, then look at the prospective driver, who would often tug their hat brim down to cover acne or braces.
They encountered little resistance. Taking a cue from the obedient employees at the Disney parks, my father told us that we should never utter the word no to guests. Snow White, he said, would never reject anyone. He seemed oblivious to the fact that Snow White wasn’t charged with making sure people didn’t run each other over with gas-powered racing vehicles.
That mandate made attendants in Motor World largely powerless to stop both juvenile drivers and people who had been drinking. There was also the fact that the attendants were teenagers themselves and often cowed to the adults waiting in line, forgetting that the balance of power had shifted in their favor inside the park.
“Sir,” one would say. “I think you’ve been drinking. Have you been drinking?”
“Move, kid,” the guest would say, ignoring the question. Then they’d climb into the Lola and go swerving along the half-mile track, narrowly avoiding mowing down the crowd standing near the edge of the asphalt. We quickly developed a rule. If two wheels ran over on the grass, the driver would get a warning. Four wheels and they’d be kicked off the Lolas for the day. It was our improvised version of a sobriety test.
We were not as vigilant with the dune buggies. These were off-road vehicles made by Honda that guests could take on the rougher, wooded area adjacent to the track. Riders would follow a guide deep into the woods, where they could careen around freely. To offset the inevitable wipeouts, the buggies had a roll bar built behind the open driver’s seat, like you see in auto racing. Another set of bars was in front. While these were intended for safety, riders took them as license to drive like lunatics without fear of being trapped under the crumpled body of the vehicle. They whipped around the lot, taking off on small hills that briefly allowed all four wheels to leave the ground.
Balancing a dune buggy while taking sharp turns was difficult, and overzealous drivers sometimes found themselves losing control of the vehicles. The first weekend they were available, all ten dune buggies met cruel ends, their riders pulling themselves from the wreckage, a handful sobbing as they crawled away. Fortunately, my father had mandated helmets. It was one of the few times he decided safety equipment would be necessary. This measure likely saved many attendees from becoming vegetables.
The dune buggy apocalypse drove the mechanic insane. My father had recruited a guy named Mike Kramer because of Kramer’s reputation as a first-class engine jockey for a track in North Carolina. Kramer was short, bearded, and raced Volvo station wagons as a hobby. He was meticulous in maintaining the vehicles, treating them like collectors’ classics. It did not occur to him that they would be abused by people who considered auto accidents a recreational activity.
“The fuck. . . . the fuck is this?” he said, surveying the mangled dune buggies in his shop the following Monday. The garage had turned into a junkyard. “I just got all of these ready.”
Pete shrugged.
“SON OF A BITCH!” Kramer screamed, banging a mechanic’s wrench into a tray, glasses askew. Kramer developed a hostile working relationship with the ride attendants, insisting they didn’t do enough to protect the fleet. It was residual vitriol from my father, who hated seeing his investments mangled and yelled at Kramer to pull it together.
Kramer would often stay late, tinkering with a peculiar machine that looked like one of the evil Dalek robots from Doctor Who. Every time someone asked about it, he’d throw a tarp over it and shake his head, waving off further inquiry. Jimmy and I considered the possibility that he was building a bulletproof vehicle he would eventually take on a rampage.
Kramer was also responsible for maintaining the Super Go-Karts, twenty vehicles that each had an open-chassis seat, positioned low to the ground, and hummed with a high-decibel engine that made the area sound like an actual speedway. Because of their size, people underestimated their ability to take off in a matter of seconds, like a spooked horse. The drivers’ necks snapped backward upon acceleration and then forward upon braking. On some of the karts, a design flaw caused the gas cap to come off as people drove along the track. The fuel would splash out behind them, hitting drivers a few lengths behind.
“My eyes!” one guest cried, veering off course and smashing into the giant truck tires lining the track. Later, we replaced the tires with metal rails, because the go-karts could sail directly over the rubber barrier if the angle was right, crinkling the nose of the vehicle as it speared itself into the dirt.
With each collision or spinout, Kramer would become a forensic auto detective, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It was almost always the fault of the driver, and Kramer would mutter his diagnostic finding: “These people are fucking nuts.”
In fairness to patrons, it was unusual for them to get this level of control over such powerful machines in an amusement park. If a similar attraction existed somewhere else, as was the case with the Lolas and go-karts, my father would make sure his went a step further—faster, more daring, bigger, better. If the Lolas went forty miles per hour in California, his would go fifty. If someone had go-karts that ambled along a serene path, he would allow our guests to race them wheel-to-wheel.
It was a much-needed break from reality. The year prior, in New York City, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, had been on a murder spree, later claiming he was under the control of a talking dog. That same summer, a blackout had sent the entire city into chaos. Stressed-out residents came to Vernon in groups, flooring the gas and forgetting their troubles. The Lolas became addictive, with people constantly repeating the track to try to beat their own best times, which were handed to them on a small ticket at the end. One man spent one hundred dollars in a single afternoon trying to outdo himself. My father even organized a Lola Grand Prix later in the year, inviting fifty people with the best times to race. The winner got a portable color television. To avoid disaster, Kramer only allowed them on the track one at a time.
Amid the revving engines and drunken swerves of patrons, a romance flourished between Pete and one of the ride attendants, a tough, no-nonsense girl named Ellen. A black belt in karate, Ellen had the interpersonal skills to deal with braying guests. Her comparatively soft-spoken sister, Erin, also worked at Motor World. Part of Erin’s job was to let people know when they had reached the final lap of the four allowed on the Lola track. To signal the drivers, she waved a checkered flag. Often, people completely ignored it.
“Sir,” Erin would say. “Please return the car to the starting line.”
“Fuuuuuuuuuuck . . .” the drivers would say before disappearing around a curve and out of sight, then zooming back into view to add, “yoooooooooooou!”
The honor system was clearly not working.
Erin was patient and a valued employee, but Ellen’s other referral was not. A neighborhood kid she enlisted broke into the park in the middle of the night, made off with a Lola, and took it for a joyride down Route 94. He figured out how to deactivate the governor that limited the car’s speed and tore off like a Daytona 500 finalist. Police followed in pursuit for miles before they apprehended him.
Maybe it was then that I began to wonder whether the park was broadcasting on a frequency only a special kind of lunatic could hear.
As the park grew in the coming years, it always reflected my father’s interests. The Alpine was his homage to skiing, a rapid descent down a mountain path that rewarded skill. With its high-throttle races, Motor World told a story about his passion for speed and competition. The faster he could get from one point to another, the better. Being forced to stand idle was probably the only thing he truly feared.
His friends later told me that, in his early Wall Street days, Gene would take the ferry into New York amid a morass of commuters. When the ferry docked, he would suddenly burst forth, cutting through the congestion of bodies, jabbing them with his elbows and shoulders like a running back so he could be the first off the boat. Waiting for other people to make room for him was unthinkable.
Later on, he began driving to the train station to get into the city. One morning, worried he might miss the train, he sped through a school zone. A police cruiser saw him barrel through and gave chase, but had to stop for the crossing children. When the cops finally caught up, my father had left his car and was already on the train. Unable to prove he was the one driving, the police could do nothing more than issue a parking ticket.
This story made the newspaper. It would be the first of many unflattering press clippings.
He was caught parking illegally so often that a vengeful meter maid once plastered his car with tickets, obscuring the windows. He scraped off just enough of them to see through the windshield to drive home. Another time, with my mother in the car, he was going one hundred miles per hour.
“Slow down,” she said, her fingernails sinking into the seat. “Slow down.”
Seeing the lights of a police cruiser behind them, she was delighted that he would finally have his comeuppance. When the officer walked up to the car, he noticed that Gene’s insurance card was issued by USAA, which serviced veterans. Gene and the cop got into an exchange about the Marine Corps, at which point the officer learned my father was a captain.
“Semper fi, Mr. Mulvihill,” the cop said, saluting him. “On your way, sir.”
My mother stewed the entire way home. If my father believed he could get anyway with anything, it was because he got away with everything.
Speed was only part of it. From the days he sold vacuums and the salesmen’s results were tracked in chalk on a leaderboard at the Kirby offices, my father considered everything a contest. That all of us grew up to be competitive came as little surprise. Over dinner, he would charge us with taking up positions in political or business discussions and then encourage us to defend our assigned beliefs. (Splinter often boasted he was on the “wrong” side of a debate but had the skills to win the argument anyway.) We were rarely given quarter for being young. He relished our exasperation, if only to teach us that life could prove frustrating, and we had better become used to it.
Sometimes this led to a sense of gross injustice. Once, when he was involved in a houseboat business, he reserved one of the vessels for a Caribbean family vacation with four of us: me, Julie, Pete, and Jimmy. For reasons we could never quite grasp, my father brought only a minimal amount of food along for the trip. He rationed out sandwiches like he expected to get lost at sea, leading to frequent complaints of hunger from all of us.
“Okay, okay,” he said, capitulating to our protests. He produced a small stash of individually wrapped chocolate coins, which immediately made all of us begin to salivate. As we reached for them, he brushed us away. “We’re going to play cards for them,” he said.
While Pete and Julie could put up a semblance of a fight in poker, Jimmy and I were easy marks, and none of us were a match for our father. Using the chocolate coins as chips, he proceeded to wipe us all out, offering no allowance for the fact that most of his rivals could barely hold five cards at once in their tiny hands. His lanky arm swept the delicious currency away as we looked on with a sense of hopelessness. At least when you lose in Vegas, the casinos will comp you some food. This trip was due to last for days. Starvation seemed like a real possibility. Satisfied we had learned the perils of gambling, he eventually handed over the chocolates.
When he was not stirring dissent among the children, he was transforming even mundane episodes into matters of winning and losing. One oft-repeated story involved my father boarding an airplane for a long flight. The plane hit turbulence, and soon the passengers and attendants were vomiting. Only my father and a single flight attendant had not. He decided this was some kind of competition. Grabbing the provided air-sickness bag, he poured a can of tomato juice into it. When the stewardess came around, he began gulping from it. She ran to the bathroom, spewing. My father had “won.”
Time and again, rides would go up in the park with lanes, speed, and the ability to set records and conquer. To my father, fun had winners and losers.
As much as he loved competition, he took as much delight, perhaps more, in watching other people release themselves from speed limits both literal and metaphorical.
His face lit up as Pete told us a story over dinner one night. He was getting something to eat when he heard a crackle over his radio. “There is a situation at the Super Go-Karts,” an attendant said.
Because there was always some kind of “situation,” Pete took his time returning to Motor World. When he got there, he saw a woman behind the wheel of a go-kart with what looked like a scarf wrapped around her face. She clearly had no control of the vehicle, smashed through a chain-link fence, and was careening toward pedestrians, who screamed and jumped out of the way. Unable to slow down, she headed directly for Pete.
To avoid being run over, Pete stepped to the side—“like a matador,” he said—and jumped on top of the go-kart. The woman drove through another section of fencing, smashing Pete’s head on the metal bar in the process. She then drove the go-kart into a tree, wheels spinning. Pete, likely woozy from the head trauma, still had the presence of mind to hit the kill switch. When he looked back toward the track, he saw eight other women driving in the same frenzied manner. Pete, who hadn’t been exposed to much religious diversity in New Jersey, speculated that they were part of a spiritual sect that disallowed driving.
“That’s fantastic!” my father said, pouring a tablespoon’s worth of salt on his salad. He doused everything he ate in salt. He put salt on pancakes. “You see the opportunities we’re bringing to people?”
“What if someone gets hurt?” Julie said.
Pete, not without reason, pointed out that he had smashed his head into a steel pipe and had been having memory problems.
“A guest, I mean,” Julie said.
“Ski laws,” Gene said.
Historically, if you skied into a tree, it was your fault. However, when a novice skier named James Sunday lost control and hit a boulder next to a slope in Vermont in 1974 and became a quadriplegic, he sued and won $1.5 million from the resort. Ever since, insurance rates had been rising, and the ski industry was lobbying to go back to the status quo. New Jersey was helpful in this regard, having recently endorsed a law that said that the liability fell on the individual, not the operator. Skiers had to assess their own experience and choose slopes wisely. It fit my father’s philosophy. He believed every person was the architect of their own fate. Specifically, he believed a court would agree every person was responsible for themselves. It was not a recklessness that seized my father so much as a sense of imperviousness. He did not often stop to mull over consequences, believing they would either never materialize or that they would not be of sufficient seriousness to prevent him from doing what he wanted to do. He assumed others felt the same.
Attending a football game while enrolled at Lehigh University, he had a bit too much to drink and tumbled out of the stands, landing on the ground ten or so feet below. A man named Billy Porter, who would become a close friend of his, met up with him in the bathroom right after. Porter’s memory of meeting my father is watching him urinate blood, profoundly and utterly unconcerned with any possible damage done to his internal organs. Asking my father about people totaling Lola cars seemed quaint in comparison.
“So, what if someone gets hurt?” Julie pressed.
“The important thing is to drag them off to the side so no one trips on them,” he said, chuckling.
“Dad!” Julie said.
“I’m joking, Rosebud,” he said.
My mother sighed. No matter how busy my father was, Sunday dinners were sacrosanct. They were a time for the entire brood to get together and leave business behind. Now, the family was part of the business. As a result, the dinner conversation was veering away from school and other topics and toward his ambitions for the park. He discussed strategy and our respective roles. As laborers, Jimmy and I were now inexplicably digging swimming-pool-sized holes in the ground. I also took the occasional shift fetching the Alpine carts. Pete covered Motor World. Splinter, the Alpine. Julie, the roller rink. Each of us pulled our own weight, fueled by the work ethic he handed down to us. Once, we spent multiple weekends in a row putting up a ten-foot-tall metal fence around our ten-acre property, a complicated task that involved navigating trees and other obstacles. He could have hired someone to do it, but he had a fleet of perfectly good laborers in the house already. He always expected us to help. Plus, we needed the spending money. There was no allowance, no stipend for the effort of simply existing. Family vacations were on our parents’ dime, but records, and junk food, and everything else that fueled adolescence, were not.
After finishing the excavation of the holes, Jimmy and I were tasked with manning them. They turned out to be skateboard bowls, making the park one of the first in the country to have a dedicated skate area in 1978. My father hired Bobby Piercy, a professional skateboarder from California, to oversee its design. Bobby was more interested in the waitressing bunnies at the neighboring Playboy Club Hotel, however, and rarely strayed from their company. Bobby actually missed several of his scheduled flights to New Jersey, prompting my father to have a friend physically drag him onto the plane. I was pretty sure that was technically kidnapping.
As Bobby radiated California cool, Jimmy, Kelly O’Brien, and I rented out skateboards and helmets to people curious to try the burgeoning sport. Because few had the ability to make any real use of the ten-foot-deep bowls, our job consisted mainly of handing out Band-Aids. My father buried the bowls in dirt the next summer, erasing evidence of their existence. He was unfazed. “Try ten things, eight fail, doesn’t matter,” he said. “The two that score will make up for it.”
While Jimmy and I continued to moan about swinging pickaxes and offering first aid to clumsy skateboarders, we agreed it was better than Topher’s role. He wore the dog suit.
No one was sure where the dog suit had come from, but it was a clear attempt to mimic the costumed Disney characters. The dog costume helped foster a kind of alternative reality for parkgoers, one in which they could fancy themselves Formula One drivers while interacting with a non-copyrighted dog.
Topher hated it. It was stifling hot, and my mother refused to let him launder it in the washing machine, insisting it might harbor actual fleas. It was dark brown and hung listlessly from his eleven-year-old frame, which was tall but thin. He looked like the world’s saddest McGruff.
“I’m just some no-name dog,” Topher sulked. Families arranged for their kids to pose for pictures, not realizing the kid inside the suit was probably younger than they were. Unlike the Disney mascots, our dog was also chatty. Hearing Topher converse with guests, I wondered if David Berkowitz had ever visited the park.
The costume was so saggy, and Topher so unimposing, that he became a target. Once, I came upon him wriggling against a light pole. A group of drunks had taken the arms of the costume and tied them around the fixture, trapping him in the afternoon heat. Guests walked right past him, oblivious to his struggles and muffled pleas for help.
“Assholes,” Topher said, taking in great gulps of air as I freed him. His dog head was heavy with sweat. He vowed never to wear it again.
“You can wear the dog suit,” my father said, “or you can wear the pig suit.”
Topher stuck with the dog suit.
Emboldened by the success of the Lolas, my father became preoccupied with growing out the entire motorized area. If it needed fuel, it belonged here. He collected things that went fast and faster still, scooping up anything that could accelerate and filling up virtually every corner of the dedicated property with vehicles that guests could race or wreck. In this hazy tract, Motor World’s atmosphere was different from the one surrounding the Alpine Slide or even the skate park. From across Route 94, my ears partially obscured by a skate helmet, I could hear the chants: “Wreck the boats! Wreck the boats!”
On a break, I walked across the road and stood out in the rain next to Pete. We watched as people zipped around in speedboats that were roughly two-thirds the size of a full-scale version. Powerful engines that seemed way out of proportion for their flimsy plastic frames weighed them down. They populated a mucky-looking lake in Motor World with a small island in the middle.
“Why are they upset?” I asked.
“When it rains, we close down all the motorized rides except for the boats,” Pete said. “The lines get long. They get pissed and start to revolt.” Once someone got in a boat, he said, it was almost impossible to get them out until they ran out of gas.
The boats made a zipping sound as they looped around the island, noses pointed up in the air as if driven by junior cartel smugglers on the run from the Coast Guard. Two teenagers sped directly at each other, hair blowing back, bearing down on the throttle.
“Don’t do that!” Pete yelled. “Don’t you do that!”
The hulls collided with a thonk noise. Both speedboats began to capsize, spilling the occupants into the water.
“Serves them right,” Pete said.
One of them managed to get back into the boat and began cycling around the island again as Erin, the area’s traffic cop, tried to wave him in. The other climbed back on the dock, dripping with water and reeking of gasoline.
“There’s fuel all over my shorts!” he shouted. “My dick is burning, man!”
“Go to the office,” Pete said. “They have soap.”
Fuel and engine oil leaked from the motors, giving the entire lake a greasy sheen, like the top of a pizza.
Kramer looked at the water, taking a drag of his cigarette. “These people are maniacs,” he said. “Delinquents.” He had adopted the steely gaze of a war veteran, immune to the sights of vehicular gore.
People who had been tossed into the water often started screaming. “Something brushed against my leg!” they would wail as they waded toward land, looking back as though a shark might emerge from the four-foot depths.
“Snakes,” Pete said. “Some of them are copperheads. We have snapping turtles, too. They can take a toe.” Doing laps in the boats first thing in the morning, Pete said, usually scared them off.
The relative sophistication of the motor-powered rides didn’t prevent us from installing low-cost attractions as well. Adjacent to the speedboat lake was a giant pile of hay bales that stretched more than ten feet in the air. They formed a winding labyrinth that resembled an obstacle course constructed for a rat in a laboratory. A sign next to it read: HUMAN MAZE.
A buddy of mine from school, Artie Williams, worked as the maze attendant. He was a good tennis player and read The New York Times every day without fail. These would normally be insufferable qualities for a teenager, but Artie managed to remain likable. He said he often heard muffled pleas for help from inside the maze. “People don’t understand it’s actually complicated and hard to get out of,” he said. “They think it’s like one of those things you draw a line through in a puzzle book. I wouldn’t go in without a rope tied around my waist.”
Snakes occasionally made their way into the bales, he said, popping out and causing people to sprint away in a mad panic, getting themselves even more lost than before. In the middle of summer, the bales trapped heat, effectively turning the maze into a suffocating furnace. People emerged from the exit soaked in sweat and gasping. “Water, water,” they whispered, dry lips cracking. One of these disappearances actually made the local newspaper.
After a week, I saw a sign go up near the entrance:
DANGER
People Have Been Lost in This Maze for Up to Nine Hours
“It’s good to warn them up front,” Artie said, a New York Times tucked under his armpit.
As Motor World swelled, so did the rest of the park. New attractions seemed to erupt from the ground weekly, and other areas found new purpose. My father put in batting cages and basketball courts. The ski lift became the Sky Ride, a “scenic forty-minute tour through the mountain landscape.” Trails of pot smoke surrounded the lifts.
Then there was the water slide, which would change everything.
Water slides were a relatively new phenomenon in the country. In 1971, a California campground owner named Dick Croul laid out the first one, a concrete trough covered in resin. People liked it, and soon slides were popping up on the West Coast, where the weather generally cooperated. George Millay, the guy behind SeaWorld, had opened Wet ’n Wild Orlando in 1977. No one thought much of doing anything similar on the East Coast except for my father, who again saw an opportunity to cede control to the guests. Unlike other parks, we didn’t need to build expensive and ugly towers over flat land. We built our slides into the hill.
Our first, which was later known as the Green Water Slide, was made from fiberglass and had two lanes that curved to a pool at the bottom. Julie spent days filling the pool with water she siphoned from one of the lakes and carted over to the job site using an old fire truck my father had bought from the Vernon Township Fire Department to move water for the snowmaking machines. Julie drove it in halting spurts across the park, throwing herself violently about the cabin. When she stopped, she would unwind the massive fire hose and aim it in the general direction of the pool, every muscle in her body working to keep it under control.
“You’re doing great, Rosebud!” my father shouted.
Compared to the demolition derbies in Motor World, the potential for misadventure on the slide was minimal, though it still harbored hidden dangers. The snowmakers had not done the best or most complete job of connecting the joints of the sections, causing some to jut out. If you went down the four hundred feet of track without riding one of the required foam mats, you could scrape your exposed skin over the joints. The defect would result in anything from a bruise to a gash. The slides also angered anyone who rode down with the paper driver’s license needed for Motor World: The paper would get soaked. We charged two dollars for twenty minutes of this.
While popular, the slide couldn’t hold a candle to Kramer’s secret project. Encouraged by Gene to come up with an idea unique to the park, Kramer devised what he called Battle Action Tanks. These were small, engine-powered four-wheelers with a protective chassis built over the driver’s seat. A cage crafted from chicken wire allowed people to see out of the camouflage-colored body. Inside, a joystick triggered a series of tennis balls, which shot out of a custom-made cannon at an absolutely ridiculous one hundred miles per hour, allowing the drivers to fire upon one another. Along the perimeter of the area, mounted tennis-ball guns allowed spectators and people waiting in line to attack the tanks. Kramer rigged them to go into a tailspin when someone scored a direct hit, the balls making a satisfying and foreboding donk against their armored panels. It was Wimbledon meets Vietnam.
The problem was that we had no efficient system for retrieving the ejected tennis balls. A Roomba-like machine that was supposed to canvass the area and vacuum them up was often broken. Employees would wait for lulls in combat, then sprint into the battlefield to retrieve them. The drivers would immediately turn and fire at the unprotected victims, the balls drilling their heads and torsos.
“Stop, stop!” the attendant would plead. You could hear muffled laughter from inside the units as they emptied their clips: Thwock-thwock-thwock.
“Unbelievable,” my father said, laughing as the attendant sprinted away from the crossfire. He was ecstatic at the gladiatorial aspect of it all as crowds cheered the roving machines.
As my father soaked in the atmosphere, an attendant absorbed a shot directly to his groin. The worker groaned, folding into himself and falling over, the tennis balls continuing to bounce off him.
“Wonderful,” my father said, taking in the landscape of warfare, largely oblivious to the wounded. I soon learned that supervisors assigned Motor World employees who were chronically late to the tanks as a punitive measure.
Kramer was pleased with his handiwork. Rather than idly suffer the destruction of his equipment, he had designed something engineered for abuse. He seemed resigned to the hunger for risk that permeated the park. Attendants at the Alpine would take the carts to his shop, where mechanics fixed the broken ones and modified others to fly down the chute faster by giving them four wheels instead of two. These carts were for employees with advanced expertise only and kept tucked away from the general population. They were liable, Kramer said, to kill somebody.
As Kramer’s tanks began to draw long lines, my father grew convinced that the best rides, the rides that would be talked about, not only had to be unique to us but packed with thrills. The concept of the Vernon Valley Fun Farm was already too quaint. The park was evolving, reflecting the increasingly rabid tastes of its patrons. The diesel-drenched success of Motor World and the failure of the comparatively serene skate park proved that people wanted speed and danger, competition and risk. Each tennis ball that threatened to crush a testicle was an exclamation mark on this demand for more.
They did not want a fun farm. They wanted an action park.