“We try to generate excitement, what the parks call ‘safe danger.’ The rides provide the danger, but the environment provides the fantasy, an escape from everyday problems. People go to parks to escape.”
Grady Larkins, amusement park designer, August 1979
We all stared at the ball.
The ball was a giant plastic sphere at least ten feet in diameter. It resembled the kind of thing you stuck a hamster in, except this ball was scaled for a human. A human who would, by virtue of being willing to climb inside, presumably possess an intellect comparable to that very same hamster.
I don’t know how the ball had been transported here. It had been absent one day and here the next. No one thought it unusual. Workers walked by it without comment. In my father’s orbit, the sudden appearance of a medieval-looking contraption was simply not remarkable.
“Go on and get in the ball, Frank,” my father said.
I turned to look at Frank, a thirty-something who gave off the chill-dude vibe of someone who ate cereal for dinner. Frank was apparently an employee of the resort’s wintertime operations. I had never seen him before. Depending on what my father had planned, I might never see him again.
“Mr. Mulvihill,” he said. “Mr. Mulvihill, I don’t think . . .”
“Come on,” my father said. “You’ll be fine.”
Frank touched the surface as though it were an alien spacecraft made of a strange alloy. He nudged it as though physical contact might reveal its mysteries. The ball wobbled a bit before growing still. He slid a hand behind the railing surrounding the exterior. It got stuck, prompting a brief panic. With a sheepish grin, Frank plucked it out.
This would soon be the least of Frank’s problems.
Inside this ball was another ball, one equipped with a seat and a shoulder harness, like the kind found in race cars (just not our race cars). Ball bearings separated the inner ball from the larger exterior ball, which allowed the inner ball to swivel independently and orient itself so that the seat always remained upright. Behind Frank, stretching in a zigzag pattern down the foot of the mountain, was a long track made from PVC piping like the kind used in plumbing, five or six inches in diameter. On the outer surface of the ball were casters and wheels like the kind found on office chairs. With these context clues, I began to understand Frank’s apprehension.
“Once you’re in the ball, Frank,” Gene said. “You’re going to roll along that track . . .”
“I don’t think—”
“Don’t worry,” my father said, acting as though climbing into a giant ball was routine. “You’ll roll along the track and come to a gentle stop. You get in there and try it out, and we’ll take it for a spin when the ride inspectors come.”
Before Frank could protest further, my father handed him a one-hundred-dollar bill. Frank stared at the cash, temporarily placated. He opened a hatch on the ball and Charlie and Big Al helped him in. Once Frank was strapped to the seat, the two began rolling him around the grass like they were bored children playing with a toy, shoving him from one side to another. Inside, a stoic Frank remained upright. Mostly. The seat sometimes drooped to the side, leaving Frank to rotate into the fetal position, knees bunched up to his torso like the world’s most bizarre ultrasound. Though he was one hundred dollars richer, Frank still seemed very concerned.
“You’re not gonna find this at Disney,” my father said, beaming.
Rarely did he stop to consider that there might be a very good reason for that.
By 1979, the Vernon Valley Fun Farm was undergoing a metamorphosis. For one thing, it was no longer the Vernon Valley Fun Farm, a name few people had used and which had never even appeared on an entrance sign. He trusted that people would find their way to our mountain theme park and not mistake it for one of the other mountain theme parks, of which there were precisely zero. Dismissing the Fun Farm label as too rural, he declared we would undergo a “massive rebranding.” On our shoestring ad budget, that amounted to printing up new brochures and correcting newspaper copy. He was now referring to his summer escape as Action Park and had become obsessed with locating attractions that would live up to the promise of that name. Motor World and the Alpine Slide were drawing crowds, but visitors would stay for just a few hours, at most. He wanted them there all day, migrating from one ride to the next, stopping only for food and beer or to marvel at the towering contraptions in front of them. He wanted people so drunk on fun that they would have to be ushered out at closing time, dismayed at having to return to a life of rules and regulations.
More important, he wanted rides that defined his park, just as It’s a Small World defined Disney. The tennis ball tanks were one-of-a-kind. They may have come at the cost of Kramer’s sanity, but my father wanted more.
In scouting for these thrills, he became part of a national movement that had started more than twenty years earlier. The success of Disneyland, in the mid-fifties, kicked off an amusement park gold rush. Investors clamored to erect the Disneyland of the northeast or the Disneyland of the Rockies, all with singular ride experiences. Magic Mountain opened in Golden, Colorado, in 1957 with themed areas including an Old West mock-up and Storybook Lane, a fairy tale destination. Guests could ride a boat ride similar to Disney’s Jungle Cruise with a tree rigged to fall and narrowly “miss” the vessel.
Pleasure Island opened two years later near Boston. Boasting a space rocket ride and a mechanical Moby Dick, it was hampered by Boston’s short summers and closed in 1969. So did Magic Mountain, which suffered from cost overruns and reopened as Heritage Square under different management in 1971. Both were designed in part by Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood, who had helped Disney with his parks but decided to strike out on his own.
Wood also designed Freedomland USA, which opened in the Bronx in 1960 and carved out sections to pay homage to American history. The park set controlled fires to recall Chicago’s famous blazes, giving visitors the opportunity to experience a tragic historical event for their own amusement. Kids could face the flames and pump water to try to extinguish the gas-powered inferno. (Inevitably, some uncontrolled fires started before the opening. The resulting ash was dumped near the caved-in buildings for authenticity’s sake.) There was an earthquake simulator meant to make visitors feel like they were in San Francisco as the ground opened beneath them. Admission was cheap—fifty cents at first—and people stayed all day, but it was a lost cause. Construction and development expenses kept the park from turning a profit. It closed after four seasons.
The lesson, if one could learn it, was that amusement parks were among the most volatile of businesses, prone to shifts in consumer tastes, cost overruns, hazards, weather, and even cultural context: Freedomland’s attendance was said to have plummeted following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. In trying to avoid the unpredictability of the ski seasons, my father had simply traded one kind of uncertainty for another. It was easy for a theme park to misstep, to bankroll the wrong kinds of rides. None of these other parks found a sustainable model or an enduring theme, even with the help of a Disney-anointed genius like Wood. Yet here was Gene Mulvihill, an independent operator without the massive financial support of the big conglomerates like Warner Brothers, which owned Six Flags, or Marriott, Mattel, and Anheuser-Busch, which backed other parks. When industry people came by and saw Motor World or the Alpine, they would ask which third-party operator he had hired to oversee them, which massive corporation was giving him his funding.
There was no one. It was just Gene and his kids.
Though he looked for attractions year-round, his opportunity for making additions was the lull between the end of the ski season and Memorial Day. My father’s clock started when the snow began to melt. In that window, he had to erect rides, test them, make adjustments, and then open them. All this activity was compressed like a film played back at double speed and scored by a symphony of expletives from overworked snowmakers.
In his search for the unique, he was willing to entertain ideas from anyone. He met inventors at industry conventions he attended in Florida and answered letters he received in the mail. He had a stack of brochures that leaned precariously from a perch on his desk, all of them full of breathless copy about “rip-roaring excitement” and rides that were “the new standard in fun.” They had names like Avalanche, Slide-a-Ride, and the Wave Pool. I stumbled across a pamphlet for Robinson’s Racing Pigs, with photos of determined little hogs tearing across a dirt track like fat, pink stallions.
At night, he sifted through piles of concepts, asking himself questions about whether an attraction would be a worthwhile addition. Was it fun? Was there anything else like it? Most important, did it leave the person in control?
He worried about capacity—the number of guests who could pass through a ride in an hour. The higher the number, the greater the admission take. Someone could go down the Green Water Slide in fifteen seconds, which worked out to 240 people an hour. This was excellent churn, reducing the amount of time they had to spend in line and increasing the overall capacity of the park. Lower-capacity rides needed a bigger wow factor. As in, “Wow, that looks amazing,” or, “Wow, that looks dangerous.”
If a ride had a brochure, that meant it was being peddled everywhere. There could never be a guarantee it would not rise in another park, diminishing its stature at ours.
He needed innovators. He needed men like Ken Bailey.
Ken Bailey was the man who came up with the idea for the ball. He called it the Man in the Ball in the Ball. When everyone got tired of saying that, which happened immediately, we just called it the Bailey Ball.
Bailey was a very excitable man who had a childlike enthusiasm for rides. He peddled the ball, his most sensational idea, at the amusement conventions my father frequented. Ken said he got the idea while working as a custodian in a Kmart and accidentally spilling a bunch of Wiffle balls on the floor. As they rolled around, Bailey imagined a person inside of each one.
The amusement people listened to this and wrote off Ken as insane. Rather than raise alarms, their abundance of caution pleased my father. It meant he would be the first to have a Bailey Ball.
“This,” he announced, “is what ambition looks like.”
To me, it was what a janitor moonlighting as a ride engineer looked like, but that did not appear to dissuade him. He loved the idea of an eccentric in his midst. He adored Ken’s enthusiasm and thought he could be the next big thing in amusements. He envisioned Ken as one of his Imagineers, the famed theme-park developers who brainstormed ideas for the Disney parks. My father flew him to New Jersey and told him he could start laying his track on the side of the mountain.
“When?” Ken asked.
“Today,” my father said.
I think the decisiveness surprised Ken. There was no protracted deliberation or projection sheet prepared. Some of my father’s friends would later describe this business approach as Ready, Fire, Aim.
That day, I watched as Ken immediately got to work. I asked if he had built a trial ball back in Canada, maybe a smaller prototype, something to demonstrate that it was practical.
“Nuh uh,” he said, tongue jutting from his mouth as he glued the PVC together. “First one.”
As Ken made major and potentially destructive alterations to the face of the mountain, no one acknowledged that my father didn’t have permits or approvals for any of this. He had absolutely no patience for things like site inspections, zoning restrictions, or feasibility studies. There was really no infrastructure in place for the state to cope with any of it, either. New Jersey’s Department of Labor was responsible for granting permits for amusement rides, but my father argued that he wasn’t installing “rides” in any conventional sense. They were “sporting attractions,” and thus the state had no actual jurisdiction. The state never wanted to test that theory and thus was reticent to hand out fines or make demands for changes, lest a court of law find my father’s argument valid. Getting the state’s permission was mostly academic, anyway. It just wanted proof of insurance and evidence that the ride was not currently on fire. My father boasted of coverage from London and World Assurance, Limited, a company bold enough to cover his liability-prone participation park. He would proudly hand over proof of insurance to skeptical state regulators. No one bothered to question London and World’s endless confidence in him. That would come later.
By the 1970s, amusement park safety was becoming a hot button topic not only in New Jersey but around the country. In 1975, the state had passed the Carnival and Amusement Ride Safety Act, which mandated annual inspections, maintenance records, and liability coverage, among other things. New Jersey was one of the few states that bothered with such legislation. In two-thirds of the country, there was nothing at all regulating rides. That always became controversial when an accident occurred. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that between six thousand and eight thousand people were injured in theme parks every year, bruised or clobbered in their pursuit of escapism. At Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California, a woman fell to her death from the formidable Colossus coaster, which reached speeds of sixty miles per hour. At Disneyland, a teenage worker was caught in a revolving wall and crushed to death in the America Sings attraction, prompting her parents to sue, and the park to offer a settlement.
Following one of these well-publicized mishaps, editorials in newspapers pondered whether there should be some kind of federal regulation of amusement parks. Parents of victims ruefully pointed out that Pennsylvania regulated hair stylists and charm schools but not amusement rides. Park owners wanted to remain self-governed and often blamed guests for their own injuries. When the CPSC wanted information from Disney about the Skyway tramway rides following three deaths on a similar gondola ride at an Illinois park, Disney management revolted, getting a court injunction that barred officials from investigating it. The industry knew it was in an arms race, building bigger and faster and more audacious roller coasters and attractions, and did not need the plodding oversight of government to slow them down. Today, it would be the gondola. Tomorrow, they would come for Goofy’s Playhouse.
This suited my father just fine. Regulation was a nuisance. He had no patience for bureaucracy of any kind and was happy to wade into the Wild West of ride design. Permits and approvals were red lights that slowed progress and made him restless. Most of what he was installing was new to the East Coast, if not the entire industry. Early on, it was difficult for inspectors to gauge potential dangers because they had no idea what they were looking at. As a result, they were just as inept as my father believed most government agencies to be.
We would watch as officials from the state eyeballed the Alpine, looking at the track for any obvious cracks. They stood on the carts to make sure they would bear their weight. Then they’d stack sandbags on them and send them down the chute. When the carts didn’t fly off the track, they appeared satisfied. The whole exercise was pointless, since no two rides on the Alpine were ever the same. Give those sandbags two beers and control of the joystick, and things would be much different.
If my father thought there might be even a slight amount of pushback, he enlisted an orthopedist named Dr. Sugar to stand by while the inspectors made their rounds. Dr. Sugar was in his fifties with snow-capped hair and a perfectly groomed beard that gave him the air of an authority figure—a theme-park surgeon general. He blithely endorsed whatever it was my father wanted to do. Like Frank, Dr. Sugar had seemingly materialized out of nowhere.
“It is my professional medical opinion,” he would say, “that the Man in the Ball in the Ball is safe.”
“Why is a medical doctor here?” Pete asked Splinter.
Splinter shrugged.
If inspectors found a problem that couldn’t be soothed by Dr. Sugar, like the abrasive joints on the Green Water Slide, my father took their recommendations for repairs as suggestions. “Thanks, guys,” he would say. “We’ll address that immediately.”
When they left, I asked, “Should I ask Charlie to look at that?”
Sometimes, he would say yes. Sometimes, he dismissed the recommendations as minor gripes. It could be difficult to persuade him to refine or perfect rides that were in operation. Once something was up, it was considered done. He was not irrational or negligent. If there was an immediate issue, like a nail sticking out of a railing, he would have it fixed. But maintaining attractions was not as interesting to him as building new ones. Part of it was his desire to have a sprawling park. Part of it was that he had waited all winter to begin playing with his toys. And part of it was the thought of people walking by a ride bearing a Closed sign and coming away disappointed. Like brown sod, this was unthinkable.
“Is it safe?” someone might ask of a new and winding attraction that could have used another week of fine-tuning.
“Safe enough,” he would say.
Perhaps the best illustration of my father’s approach to risk assessment is the day we realized he was not interested in performing any. During a family vacation to some ranch land he had bought near Aspen, Colorado, we piled into a Jeep to make a short drive along a steep dirt road. As more of us piled in, clown-car style, it became obvious that we would not all fit. My father ordered Julie and Pete to climb on top of the roof and cling to the luggage rack. As the Jeep lumbered along the bumpy road, we could hear the two of them swearing and protesting, asking him to slow down. An Adidas sneaker sometimes popped in and out of view as they lost their footing on the slick surface.
“Hey, you two!” he said, barking out the open window. “Stop fooling around up there!”
Armed with a complete disregard for risk, he found it fun to conceive of things that would excite and delight people and drew crude sketches of rides that were almost purely conceptual, lacking principles of engineering, human anatomy, or physics.
“What are you doing, Dad?” I once asked him as he hunched over a piece of notebook paper with a red marker.
He held it up. A stick figure appeared to be plummeting from a building. An inscription appeared next to it:
DEATH DIVE
“How does that work?” I asked, not entirely certain I wanted to know given that I might be compelled to testify about it at some point.
“Guy climbs up to a platform,” he said. “Guy jumps off. Real high. Real scary.”
“Where does he land?”
He looked at the paper. “He slides, really. First, he’s perpendicular. Then the path slowly starts to curve. In time, he’s traveling horizontally and comes to a stop. The slope slows everything down.” For my father, the thrill came first. He worked backward from there.
When he was ready to begin building, he looked for investors. Some capital came from park profits. Some came from his other businesses, which were wildly eclectic and ranged from real estate investment to smelting silver on a hunch it would rapidly increase in value. Others were more pragmatic, like magnetic imaging used in medicine and, later, a wise bet on the future of a personal cell phone network, which he correctly believed would revolutionize the world. (After securing a gigantic early portable phone, he would call us at home and implore us to guess which street he was calling from.)
At times, it seemed as though my father pursued other ventures just so he would have money to sink into the park. Yet, even when his wells were tapped dry, he could count on a reliable stream of cash from Bob Brennan, the tennis partner who traveled with him to Puerto Rico and a hugely successful businessman in his own right.
My father first met Bob when Bob was just a teenager. Bob’s father sold my father insurance, and Gene would sometimes go over to the Brennan house to pay the bill. Just a kid, Bob was awed by this energetic, enthusiastic man ten years his senior who seemed to be working on a dozen things at once.
“Stay away from that man,” Bob’s father told him. “He’s a crazy man. He’s from the moon.”
Bob didn’t listen and found major success under Gene’s tutelage at Mayflower Securities. He stayed on at Mayflower after Gene got out, converting it into First Jersey Securities and making a fortune. Bob was fond of affirmations and acronyms, which he found useful for motivating himself. BAYCOB was Be All You’re Capable of Becoming. SCHRIDE was Self-confidence, Courage, Honesty, Responsibility, Impatience with yourself not others, Determination, and Enthusiasm (that one was rather unwieldy). This shorthand was adopted by his fleet of aggressive salesmen, who later pushed shares of Great American Recreation, Incorporated, or GAR, the Action Park parent company, as the next Disney. GAR had an eclectic board of directors, including a man named Amos Phillips, who was well connected in Vernon and very wealthy from his steelmaking business but incredibly frugal. Missing an eye like Charlie O’Brien, Phillips opted to cover the empty socket with a Band-Aid, which would flutter as he inhaled. It was quite horrific, but you got used to it.
Gene, Bob, and Amos would walk the park grounds, Gene selling Bob on blobs of mud where towering rides with delighted patrons would one day rise. When Bob found a lead on some financing, he would sometimes co-sign the loan for Gene, lending significant heft to the transaction. In addition to being wildly successful, Bob feted Jimmy Carter at his residence. He appeared in Super Bowl commercials, stepping off a helicopter and inviting people to invest with First Jersey. His name meant a lot, and he deferred to Gene, whom he considered his mentor. He demanded no profit forecast, no complex web of accounting. There were other investors, but Bob was the most loyal. Gene was equally devoted to his friend, even when Bob later went to prison for bankruptcy fraud.
So the assembly line was in place. Anything my father dreamed, anything he found, he could fund and build. No inspectors would oppose it. His army of mountain men would build it in record time, and it would open before the industrial glue could cure. No obstacles prevented him from taking his impulses and rendering them in steel or fiberglass.
One day, not long after Bob came for a visit, there was a flurry of activity in one of the empty parking lots. Charlie and some out-of-work welders began assembling an enclosed slide with a loop at the bottom. It was one of my father’s ideas. He had sketched it out on a napkin. He called it the Cannonball Loop.
“That’s fucked up,” Jimmy said, staring at it.
My father offered some of the employees one hundred dollars to try it out. No one would.
Given the choice, I would have spent the entire year helping build my father’s park, nodding sagely over blueprints and suggesting strategically placed soft-pretzel stands. In reality, trips to the park in the spring were discouraged, and working there after school was out of the question because of the hour-long commute each way. Instead, my parents expected me to be a studious tenth grader. My brother Pete was at Dartmouth. Splinter was studying engineering at Lehigh. My father took education seriously, as though one generation of wayward Mulvihills would turn the whole family tree into the shanty Irish. We all spent hours on homework each night and on weekends. My mother bounced from one kid’s absurdly difficult math question to another, leaving my father undisturbed in his office to make phone calls and sketch unfathomably precarious rides.
I attended Newark Academy, once an all-boys institution that taught grades six through twelve. The school had an air of informality to it, with long stretches of time between class periods. Nomadic students could crawl out through a window to a reservoir that was just behind the building and get some sun or burn off excess energy. The school was also across the street from the Livingston Mall, where we strolled around giant water fountains, messed up record store displays, and gawked at older girls. The latter often proved difficult because the mall was dimly lit, like an Italian restaurant.
I had a core group of friends and rarely strayed from their circle. There was Artie Williams, who manned the Human Maze in Motor World; Mac Harris, whom I had known since grade school; and Chaz, a wrestler who was constantly starving himself and running around in plastic in an effort to make weight, the cuffs of his garbage bag pants engorged with collected sweat. I also hung out with kids a year ahead of me. There was Benji Bressler, who never had money but carried a wallet anyway; and Fast Eddie, whose older brother bounced at the hottest bar in New Jersey, the Final Exam, and regaled us with tales of drunken indiscretion.
Any of them could have landed a job at the park in a flash. Artie was one of the few who accepted. I managed to get Fast Eddie hired for one summer, but he kept people slightly on edge. He carried a water jug filled with juice to work but wouldn’t let anyone drink from it. The working theory was that he didn’t want what he considered the unhygienic trash of Sussex County giving him some kind of disease. A rumor grew that he had mixed vodka in with the juice, and that was why he refused to share. The truth was probably a little of both.
Mac caddied at the golf course and argued that my father, who played there, was already paying him pretty well in tips. Gene liked Mac quite a bit. Once, when over at the house, Mac emerged from our pool and grabbed a towel with the Heineken logo on it, wrapping it around his shoulders. Seeing this, my father pointed at him.
“Look,” he yelled. “It’s Captain Heineken!”
Mac seemed astounded that my father had put us all to work in the service of his park. “You’re like the von Trapps,” Mac said.
“Well,” I said, “I think he sees potential in the recreation business.” I said this as though my father had ever consulted a projection or had any kind of long-term plan other than getting people inside the park and letting them run amok.
When Mac was not caddying, he preferred to spend his time in pursuit of alcohol with a level of dedication usually associated with graduate studies. He drank like a fish and would stop at nothing to acquire beer. I seldom drank before the state’s legal drinking age of eighteen, but Mac’s enthusiasm for underage imbibing sometimes became infectious. Finally, I agreed to go on what amounted to my first beer run.
“We’ll take a friend’s brother’s ID,” Mac said, announcing his latest methodology. That weekend, the two of us biked into Madison, a neighboring town where we were less likely to be outed as the sixteen-year-old children we were. We pulled two empty wagons behind us and found a liquor store. I stared at the sign on the counter: MUST BE 18 OR OVER TO PURCHASE ALCOHOL.
“Give me two cases of Michelob,” Mac said, handing over the license. We thought it was best for Mac to do the talking because he was sprouting a little fuzz over his lip.
“Why Michelob?” I asked him when we were back outside. No one remarked upon two kids heaving beer into their little red wagons.
“You don’t want to ask for Budweiser,” he said. “Michelob sounds more sophisticated.”
We rode the bikes uphill, our thighs burning from the effort. We headed for my house with the beers because my parents were both away for the day, my father off to see some structurally suspect ride, and my mother tagging along. The beer drowning out coherent thought, I decided it would be a good idea to place a golf ball on top of an empty bottle and try to smack the ball without breaking the glass.
We broke all the bottles from both cases, sprinkling shards of glass around my father’s golf tee, which he hovered over regularly. Seeing the mess was sobering. I could not believe I had been so brazen. Even this minor rebellion gnawed at my stomach. My mother was prone to corporal punishment with a wooden spoon, from which Jimmy often ran, but which I accepted with resignation. “A wooden spoon to tune you to the moon,” she’d say, taking unusual delight in the word play while lashing her children with kitchenware.
I was older now, but a tuning to the moon, or beyond, was assured. I took a wet/dry vacuum to the yard, quickly sucking up the glass and periodically turning off the machine so I could listen for my father’s car pulling into the driveway. By the time he arrived, we had erased all evidence of our misbehavior. We repressed our beer burps and waved to him as he walked inside.
“Captain Heineken!” he yelled, pointing at Mac.
Normally, Mac and I didn’t behave like such degenerates. I considered myself an athlete and looked up to Pete, who had captained his soccer team to a state championship. My father was very fit, staying active via tennis, basketball, and early-morning jogs, though his unusual gait—more of a limping hobble, as though he were an escapee from a chain gang—drew attention.
“I saw your father out jogging,” a neighbor once said. “If you can call that jogging.”
He encouraged us to play sports. I enjoyed soccer, even making it to the state finals one year, but soccer was not my father’s game. Long and lean, he preferred basketball, and the Mulvihill siblings spent many evenings squaring off in physical games on our home court. These were not playful skirmishes but serious competitions, which sometimes resulted in Julie crying, storming off the court, and then returning with a vengeance.
Soccer and sibling basketball did not fully satisfy my need for cutthroat competition. For this, I turned to the violence of hockey. The Newark Academy Minutemen were a scrappy team but effective. We played teams that appeared to have a surplus of resources, including their own home rinks and sparkling equipment. We were like beer leaguers playing the Soviet Red Army. If I got smacked, I would bide my time until the perfect opportunity arose for a crushing retaliatory hit. I did not realize it then, but this tempered reaction to violence would later serve me well at the park.
My mother attended many of the games. My father rarely came. He was not aloof, but six active kids meant he had to choose his spots wisely. He also didn’t relate to hockey the way he related to basketball.
“Not sure I get it,” he said, doodling on a napkin.
When we won the Northern New Jersey Interscholastic League’s Division B State Championship, I had the game-winning assist, passing the puck to co-captain Andy “Fat Man” Rothschild. I don’t recall my dad attending, or even knowing that I was the other co-captain. I snipped out some newspaper notices, just in case he wanted to get the highlights later.
One day he looked over at my bag full of equipment, stink lines practically emanating from the sweaty foam padding. The season was long over, which meant I hadn’t aired it out in months. As he stared at the gear, I thought he might ask about the big game.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said.
Two hours later, the Cannonball Loop was ejecting me like a spitball through a straw out onto the mats that had been laid down at the exit. (It’s too bad he didn’t ask after I guzzled the Michelobs. The beers might have helped numb the limb-trembling terror.) At the bottom of the Loop, I was elated to be alive but also very disoriented.
I was the first human to make it through, a badge of honor that helped quell the grilled cheese fighting its way back up my esophagus. The descent through darkness, my body contorted by centrifugal force, was unpleasant in the extreme. Space and time ceased to have meaning. The enjoyment came not from the experience but from the bragging doled out thereafter. My father had created the first amusement ride to be endured, not enjoyed. He thought it would become our trademark and returned to his doodling, this time for a slogan. Can you survive . . . the Cannonball Loop?
The Loop would require another trial without the benefit of armor, as we could never mandate that guests wear padding to descend a water slide. Like someone who had already broken the sound barrier, I watched from the sidelines as a new maverick ascended the hill. His name was Glen Smocovich. I had seen him around, working construction and later as a ride attendant on the Green Water Slide. He was from Queens and about my age. His parents kept a lake house in Vernon. He was not wearing any equipment. Instead, he was shirtless and applying copious amounts of suntan lotion. He was sinewy, like an Olympic diver, with gobs of lotion clumped all over his torso. I realized he was using it as a lubricant, greasing himself up like a gloved finger going in for a prostate exam.
In a flash, Glen disappeared into the tube. There was a loud thud from inside, like the sound a shoe makes bouncing against the drum of a dryer. He shot out the other end and skidded fifteen feet, slamming into the hay bales someone had dragged out. He held his nose as blood poured from between his fingers.
My father handed him a hundred dollars.
The ride didn’t open.
Not that summer, anyway.
Upon learning of my maiden voyage down the Loop and Glen’s shattered nose, my mother forbid me from going into the Bailey Ball. That’s when Frank materialized.
We gathered at the foot of the mountain—me, my father, Charlie O’Brien, Dr. Sugar, and Ken Bailey. Also present was an inspector from the Department of Labor, who seemed to recoil at the sight of the mountain track. That he was there at all was something of a formality, but the Bailey Ball would nonetheless need to demonstrate some basic regard for human life in order to be rubber-stamped.
My father had wanted to see the ball in action first thing in the morning, hoping to get it open the following day, but the inspector was running late. It was growing hot, the first searing day we had experienced that summer. Because of the delay, Frank had been in the ball, cooking, for more than half an hour. He was already at the mouth of the track, six hundred feet up the mountain.
When everyone was in place, Ken gave a thumbs-up. Big Al pushed the ball from its starting position down the graded slope. Things went well for the first fifteen seconds or so, with Frank remaining upright in the center of the ball. But on the first turn to go back across the mountain, the ball didn’t stay in the groove. It broke free and began rolling straight downhill.
Ken’s face fell. He had been working up until the last minute gluing the PVC pipes together, not realizing they were warping under the heat. I could already see gaps in the tubing. Damaged by the hot sun, the plastic was expanding, severing the rail that was supposed to give the ball direction. Now it was free, unburdened by the track. The ball had achieved autonomy.
It gained momentum, tumbling uncontrollably down the face of the slope and picking up tremendous speed. Inside, Frank spun helplessly, unable to stop. He could not abandon the craft, as the door opened only from the outside. At this speed, the seat was unable to keep him secure. One second he would be upright. The next, his feet would be pointing toward the sky. His mouth was open in what I could only presume was a scream, but the ball sealed off any sounds.
When the contraption made it to the bottom without any visible damage, and Frank still appeared conscious, I exhaled. But it didn’t stop. It began rolling at high speed toward us like the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. We scattered, my dad and I scurrying to the left, and Ken and Charlie to the right. Dr. Sugar and the inspector were frozen, each of their faces a rictus of terror.
We gave chase as Frank and the ball rolled through the parking lot, narrowly missing the inspector’s car. It spun past construction workers, who looked up from their shovels and heavy machinery to see a man bouncing around inside what appeared to be a diving bell. It cleared a small hill, briefly going airborne, then zipped right across Route 94, the two-lane road splitting the park. Cars honked and slammed on their brakes. If there had been opposing traffic, Frank would have become part of a real-life game of Pong, volleying from one bumper to another.
Still in pursuit, we followed the ball toward a small lake in Motor World that had been earmarked for a fleet of tiny bumper boats for children. The area wasn’t open yet, but the empty boats were being tested and floated on the surface. The ball soared over the grass and smashed into several of them, scattering the others with rippling waves from the impact, which launched some of the boats several feet in the air.
Charlie and Ken waded into the water looking for the hatch. After some difficulty, they got it open. Charlie pulled Frank out by grabbing him under his armpits like a baby. Frank crawled up the bank, coughing and sputtering. There was blood on his shirt, but it was hard to know where it was coming from. He splayed across the grass as we all stared at the ball, which bobbed in the water like it was attached to a fishing lure.
We did not ask for the inspector’s report, nor did we ever hear of it being filed. Ken Bailey returned to Canada. The snowmakers cleared away the PVC. Told to dispose of the Bailey Ball, they rolled it into the woods, where it remained for many years.
My father was unbowed. He kept drawing and doodling, telling us about things that were not yet there but soon would be. “Just wait,” he said. “Just wait.”