“As the park’s name implies, participation is the name of its game, but you will find spectators oohing and aahing at the base of the high-speed Kamikaze Slide. Bathing suits are a must, and it’s advisable to wear shorts over them because the ride can have . . . an abrasive action.”
Daily Record, September 5, 1980
Of the many inspirations my father took from the Disney parks, he held a special affection for their monorail. Debuting in Walt Disney World in 1971, the electric-rail passenger vehicle shuttled guests from the entrance to the hotels and on toward the park at an efficient fifty-five miles per hour. Another transit method, the PeopleMover, transported people above Tomorrowland in what amounted to a sightseeing tour.
As Action Park began to grow and expand, the problem of what to do with locomoting guests became more and more pressing. To get from Motor World to the aquatic area dubbed Water World, you had to hike up a big hill and then cross Route 94 on foot, dodging traffic and hoping a distracted driver in an AMC Gremlin wouldn’t turn you into paste. On the other side was another hill leading toward the rest of the rides. It became a test of physical endurance for young and old alike, a gauntlet guests had to navigate before they could earn the right to have fun.
My father’s solution was the Transmobile, a three-thousand-foot-long electric artery running from Motor World across the road to the ski lodge and on to the entrance to Water World. It would, he said, revolutionize how people maneuvered around the park. Instead of intoxicated and stumbling, they could be intoxicated and stationary. While Disney’s monorail resembled an elevated subway train, the Transmobile featured small, open-air carts that held four passengers over a raised track and moved at four to seven miles per hour. Given its considerable height of ten to twenty feet, it was one of the few rides in the park that came with a safety belt.
My father bought it from DEMAG, the same West German outfit that had sold him the Alpine Slide. (Undoubtedly, he negotiated a package discount.) It was cutting-edge, which he loved, and expensive, which he didn’t. Bob Brennan took care of the latter, raising money for what Gene considered a necessary weapon in his arsenal. The Transmobile was not only the present but the future. Eventually, it would connect the park sections, the park to the resort, and the resort to the nearby Playboy Club. (The Club was a hotel once earmarked for the legalized gambling that had failed to spread across the state. Now, it lurked in the margins of the area like a blacked-out adult bookstore.) My father hoped the Transmobile would someday run through the entire valley, enabling his planned domination of the area. Some of the snowmakers called it the People Mover, after the Disney transit system.
The People Mover had one issue. In order to fulfill its practical function, it needed to cross Route 94 via a bridge. While only a narrow two-lane path, Route 94 was nonetheless subject to the jurisdiction of the New Jersey Department of Transportation, as well as Vernon’s own supervisors. These were entities whose gears turned slowly or not at all. Clearing the red tape to build a bridge could take years.
My father did not think in years. He had started constructing the Transmobile before asking anyone for permission, trusting he would solve that problem later. His men worked on it seven days a week. He had become the cartoon coyote who laid railroad track right off the cliff before bothering to look down. He could not cross the road, but he could not stop, either. It appeared to be an untenable situation, one that set the stage for what would become a years-long struggle between the quaint township high on its own bucolic nature and my father, whom the townspeople perceived as a threat to their tranquillity.
To him, it was as if Anaheim didn’t want Disneyland. To realize his dream, he would have to smother the opposition, be it local, state, or federal.
“What do you think he’ll do?” I asked Julie as we stared at the ever-growing People Mover track.
“Probably something he shouldn’t,” she said.
Vernon’s population had blossomed in the 1970s, with more and more people from the tristate area considering it a slice of Vermont within driving distance. They bought up homes and filled its single high school with their children. From some of the windows of those homes, they could not see any cars or roads. Vernon had all the charm of a rustic scene in an oil painting. When my father talked of building a sprawling amusement park that would bring millions of dollars to the local economy, some of the residents were wary of what else it might bring.
They were known as NIMBYs, as in Not In My Backyard. Sometimes my father used his own term, “the Crazies.” The NIMBYs and Crazies spoke up at town meetings, peppering him with questions on how big he expected the park to get, what kind of patrons he anticipated attracting, and how bad traffic would become. Vernon was a bedroom community, and it wanted to remain that way. People didn’t usually open or operate major businesses in town. Most commuted to the city for employment. My father was introducing a new industry—recreation—that threatened the serenity of their quaint little utopia.
“Don’t they realize,” he said, working up a head of steam, “that big business means their property taxes will go down?”
There was another problem, one that largely went unspoken but seemed to metastasize over time. In building a resort within driving distance of New York City, my father was inviting a multi-ethnic brand of tourism. For decades, Vernon had been predominantly white. There was no mass transit to or from the area, cutting it off from the multiculturalism of the city. That led to a shielded perspective, one that feared an influx of people who did not look like the average Vernon resident. A local could wake up, drive their truck over to the gas station, and thanks to the park, encounter the first black person they’d seen in years. A contingent of citizens didn’t like these visitors and didn’t want them—“the element,” some called them—in their town. While those objectors were not many, they were vocal.
My father, who didn’t care about color, religion, or class, tried to assuage their concerns, dancing delicately around institutional racism. He tried to tie in what he was doing with taxes that would cover the cost of their children’s educations. Vernon had no other industry, he said. His was free of factory pollution. (We would wind up accidentally gassing several people with ozone, but that came later.) It employed all the teenagers in town. He argued methodically, pointedly, reasonably. They would nod. Then he’d leave the meetings and the townspeople would begin to buzz with unease about his growth strategy and ethnic mixing.
He knew of their whispered concerns because he had sources embedded in the community. One of them was Father Boland, an Irish-Catholic priest who bonded with Gene over their shared Irish roots. The two had met when Father Boland came into Vernon for the first time and visited the mountain on Charlie O’Brien’s invitation. As Father Boland explained it, Charlie had brought him around to the Hexagon Lounge, when my father appeared, face red with rage, and began a torrent of verbal abuse directed at Charlie about litter.
“Why would anyone come here?” he screamed. “Look at these papers everywhere!”
There was one piece of paper on the ground, Father Boland remembered.
After letting Gene spew profanities, Charlie introduced Father Boland as the new priest in town. My father’s demeanor changed immediately. He tried to make friends with priests, he once said to me, because he found their company comforting.
With his thick shock of dark hair and kind face, Father Boland became a regular sight at the park. He seemed charmed by my father’s imagination and concrete convictions. His ability to will things into existence excited the reverend.
“What will be going here?” Father Boland would ask, staring at a mess of tubing and shovels. My father would paint him a picture of something grand. Sometimes Father Boland would be awed. Sometimes he would shake his head. My father once described plans to mount a rope across the water so people could swing on it.
“Gene, that’s just an old swimming hole,” he said. “You can’t charge admission for that!”
“Can and will,” my father said.
Thanks to chatty parishioners, Father Boland had all the town gossip and sometimes relayed which way the wind was blowing. Gene could then try to curry favor in targeted spots. The town might need a parking lot repaved or a soccer field seeded. He would dispatch the snowmakers like a band of merry drunken men and have them toil until the land was transformed, earning my father points for civic and charitable duty. He wanted to be Vernon’s favorite adopted son.
It wasn’t so much bribery as a microcosm of politics in the real world. When one of his proposals came up for a vote and there was little resistance from township officials due to his philanthropy, he smiled, knowing he had scored one over the NIMBYs and Crazies. If it failed, he would go in search of another blight or project to tackle, another town fundraiser to host.
Father Boland sometimes found himself in the position of defending Gene, stirring into the local conversation that Gene had installed a pool free of charge for local migrant workers who worked with a group of nuns. Such information kept people on their toes. Yes, Gene Mulvihill was taking over Vernon, but he had also helped the nuns, so how bad could he be? Father Boland had an impeccable reputation and was able to deliver a perspective on my father that was not immediately obvious to people dealing with his development demands.
It was not until later that I discovered the bond between my father and Father Boland ran much deeper. A month after meeting Gene, Father Boland visited a man who was sick and dying. It was raining, and the man’s roof was leaking. Drops of water collected in cups and saucers the man had set down on the floor. Despondent, Father Boland mentioned it to Gene, who was busy directing contractors on a project near the resort. Gene huddled with his men, then sent them away.
By the end of the day, the dying man’s roof was no longer leaking. No one brought it up at meetings, and my father asked Father Boland not to use it as currency for his plans. Like many of his better deeds, it would remain a well-kept secret for years. Sometimes, he wanted the camera pointed away from him.
Father Boland was not Gene’s only conduit to Vernon. Often, my father would let a man named John Steinbach run interference. The two had been friends since grade school. My father was extremely loyal to John, just as he was with all of his close friends, but the bonds forged in youth were strongest. When he bought the resort, he hired John as a bartender at the Hexagon Lounge. Soon, word spread among the town gossips that John’s stepfather was famous. This was true. He was once the biggest mobster in the state of New Jersey.
Abner “Longie” Zwillman was six feet two inches tall and got his start selling produce from a rented horse and cart in Newark. When people paid for their fruit, he also offered to sell them a penny or nickel ticket to an illegal lotto. It was a numbers racket, and it introduced Zwillman to the pleasures of trafficking in vice. A teenager during Prohibition, he imported alcohol from Canada and carried himself like a veteran bootlegger. When the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped and held for ransom in 1932, Zwillman offered a fat reward for information. The police roadblocks were cramping his business.
Eventually, Zwillman stepped up for a piece of the syndicate crime dynasty when it looked like a fellow member, Dutch Schultz, was headed for prison. When that didn’t happen, and Schultz returned to claim his territory, Schultz was gunned down in a diner. While Zwillman wasn’t implicated in the crime, it was a convenient bit of homicide.
He later married John’s mother, Mary, and seemed to ease up on the criminal mayhem a little bit, hunkering down in a twenty-room mansion with his bride and stepson in West Orange, New Jersey.
Gene once took my mother over to John’s before heading out for New Year’s Eve. Soon, it began to snow, and the roads steadily got worse.
“No one’s going anywhere,” Zwillman said. “You’re going to have your party here.”
My parents spent the evening under the care of a mobster serving them lobster and champagne. Later, when my mother’s Protestant parents objected to her marrying Gene, they claimed it was due to his Catholicism. I imagined evenings spent in the company of Longie might have also played a part.
I don’t think my father considered Zwillman much of a big deal. His own father, Dockie, was a union organizer and ex-boxer. He had no connection to organized crime but was not to be trifled with. (Dockie was always lovely to me, taking me out for ice cream and to Woolworths, lazy afternoons he called “bumming.”) To add to my father’s protective umbrella, his cousin Donna was married to a West Orange police officer. Between the three of them, you’d be hard-pressed to mess with Gene or John and not have someone to answer to. I don’t know if it taught him to ignore authority, but my father often acted as though there would be no repercussions for his actions—as if Zwillman, Dockie, or a relative with a badge would forever be there to make a phone call and allow him to slide.
Longie’s lawless ways ended when he died under some controversy. He was found hanging in his basement, and bruises on his body indicated it might have been an “assisted” suicide, an act possibly perpetuated by those concerned he might talk to law enforcement to avoid a tax problem. When John’s mother passed and John received his inheritance, he stopped bartending and started investing money in whatever my father was cooking up. The money wasn’t his only useful trait, though; he was also devilishly handsome. John looked like Paul Newman and was always well dressed. Women liked him. So did men. He befriended local officials. The mythology of the mob appeared to captivate people. John, for his part, would do pretty much anything Gene asked, always mindful that his old friend had never considered him a pariah because of his infamous stepfather. Rather, Gene took a mischievous delight in the loose association, embarrassing John whenever the two were in the company of new business partners.
“Do you know who his father was?” Gene would ask. “My God!” Then he’d mime holding a machine gun. Some people felt this was a very subversive method of intimidation, as though Gene was implying he was connected and not one to be crossed. In truth, my father’s relationship with the mafia following Zwillman’s passing extended to having seen the Godfather movies. But if people believed it, he wasn’t in a hurry to correct them. It was a tool to be put in the box and deployed when necessary.
When religion and implied organized-crime affiliations failed him, my father turned to the other weapons in his arsenal. His children.
At the park one day, he pointed to a kid about my age. He was working on the Alpine Slide. “You see that guy?” he asked.
I did.
“You’d better make friends with that kid,” he said.
I asked him why.
“You just be friends with him,” he said, and walked away.
As ordered, I struck up a conversation with the kid, a lanky teenager with dirty blond hair and a farmer’s tan from wearing a muscle shirt at the top of the Alpine. Hefting carts off the lift had pumped up his shoulders. His name was Chuck Kilby.
“My dad is on the township committee,” he said.
“Right,” I said.
When my father realized Chuck and I had no interest in exchanging intelligence, he turned to Pete’s girlfriend, Ellen, whose father happened to be a state trooper who lived next door to the Kilbys. Slowly, the trooper tried to ingratiate Gene into the Kilby household, occasionally bringing his name up the same way vaccines introduce low doses of a virus. But nothing could persuade Kilby to turn away from the idea that Gene had come to swallow Vernon whole.
While my father navigated the waters of small-town diplomacy, I had political concerns of my own. My chance at being named school president was in danger due to a nemesis named Harold Grodberg.
I had been elected class president in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades, and elected vice-president of the school that last year. It amounted to a popularity contest with a tiny voting base, but I didn’t care. I saw my father able to organize people and shift their thinking, and I wanted to see if I could do that, too. Candidates ran on joke platforms seeking more variety in school lunches and getting homework credit for watching the ABC Afterschool Special. I took it seriously. I was friends with the departing incumbent, who provided a valuable endorsement. My appointment seemed all but assured.
Then Grodberg showed up. He had a slight potbelly and wore sweater-vests, sometimes the same one two days in a row. I scoffed at his candidacy and glided through my campaign without a care in the world. I was like JFK to his stodgy Nixon. I could speak to anyone, from the burnouts to the football players. In this, I mirrored my father, who refused to pay attention to class distinctions and treated everyone equally.
I thought I had positioned myself well, but I underestimated Grodberg’s tenacity. Knowing older kids were indifferent to school politics, he went after the six, seventh, and eighth graders, whose minds he could easily manipulate. He was a hungry upstart, rallying students with rousing speeches and outlandish guarantees.
“If I’m elected, I promise you this,” he said, pounding a makeshift podium that housed the AV equipment. “I will sit on the school’s board of directors!”
“That is such bullshit!” I said. No student had ever sat on the board. I turned to Mac, who was staring out the window at nothing. “They’re not gonna let him do that.”
“Raise an objection,” Mac said.
“It’s not court,” I said.
“I vow to you,” Grodberg said, “that our mac and cheese will be warm again!”
This platform of lies and deceit swayed people I had counted on to be loyal. Grodberg won the election, albeit by a slim margin.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Mac said, sipping a beer. “People just want a fresh face.” Despite the damage he was doing to his brain cells, Captain Heineken was sometimes capable of sage insight.
Still, I didn’t handle the loss well. I spent time ruminating over which wheels I should have greased and whose soccer field I had proverbially failed to seed. To his credit, Grodberg made good on his promise to join the board of directors. When I edited the school yearbook, I had him hold a picture frame over his face and stand next to the wall with the rest of the board members’ photos. I suppose it was my way of conceding the victory.
While wallowing in my defeat, I discovered my father was friends with someone who knew Morton Blackwell, a conservative activist involved with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign.
“Do you think you could get me a job with the campaign?” I asked him.
I wanted to do something after losing office. Maybe I could win vicariously through Reagan, whose values I admired. We shared a love for freedom and a distaste for socialism, and helping out with his candidacy was appealing. The problem was that my father was anticipating an explosion of visitors at the park. Workers swarmed the property, racing to get new attractions open in time for the start of the season. Ride attendants in bathing suits pulled double duty, picking up shovels. The place was vibrating with a mania and energy, my father bouncing from one half-finished ride to another on his dirt bike. There was always a rush, but this was unprecedented.
“Tourism is going through the roof,” he said. “Great Adventure is turning away cars!”
Because it had tolls, the Atlantic City Expressway was a good barometer of how many people were visiting the state. According to reports, more than eleven million people went through the Expressway during the first half of the year, up from roughly eight million the year prior. There was a recession, and gas prices had gone up, so people were seeking out day trips closer to home. Atlantic City, and its legalized gambling, beckoned them. So did national parks. The state blanketed the population with tens of thousands of brochures touting tourist destinations, including Action Park. The cover read: Jersey’s Got It!
My father saw this as an opportunity to wow a stream of visitors with attractions they couldn’t find anywhere else. He added two new lanes to the Alpine, for a total of four. (We’d eventually have six, three of which were serviced by a second chair lift.) Miniature speedboats were up and running. He told a reporter he was preparing a hot-air-balloon landing port, though that never materialized. The tourism board had even corralled German journalists to visit attractions in the state in the hopes they could get Europeans to plan overseas visits. The Germans sat in the dining hall of the ski lodge and watched as one of the publicity people showed them projection slides of the rides.
“This is the Alpine Slide,” she said, clicking over to a photo of a man in a tight graphic T-shirt and two-toned sunglasses spiriting down the track. The journalists murmured and nodded at each other, smiling.
“And this is the Cannonball Loop,” she said, showing them a picture of a giant death straw. They looked astonished. We later learned many of the journalists were actually editors of prestigious publications, and some had PhDs. Our flippant attitude toward gravity alarmed them.
While international visitors were unlikely, people from inside the state were a different story. My father sensed an influx of attendees coming, and he wanted to dazzle them. It was no wonder that he was trying to charm and squash his political opposition by any means necessary.
For these reasons, I expected him to say no, to require me to remain at the park as it was on the verge of a major expansion. Part of me wanted him to insist I stay and continue to help. But he was also an admirer of Reagan and seemed impressed I was taking an interest in the future of the country. “If it won’t be for long,” he said, “I’ll make a call.”
Within the week, I was told to report to Reagan’s national campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. I borrowed the family station wagon and drove there. Walking into the offices, banks of phones buzzing and purposeful young adults weaving between metal desks, I felt reinvigorated. I was convinced that, with Reagan at the helm, the nation would escape its fiscal crisis. Under the oppressive leadership of the incumbent Jimmy Carter, we could only slide further into debt. I was prepared to give it my all under the tutelage of these hungry and impassioned volunteers. Let Harold Grodberg worry about the school lunch menu. In my own small way, I might have some effect on the future of the country.
Some days, I stuffed envelopes at the campaign office. Mostly, though, I made copies and ran errands. I also went on road trips with volunteers to different cities, where I assisted in training college students to conduct mock elections so they could identify Reagan supporters among students who were largely apathetic about politics. With Reagan winning the school elections, and the results getting coverage in the local press, the impression would be that the youth of America was behind him. It was an intriguing sleight-of-hand that clued me in to the importance of appearances, of controlling the narrative in a way my father had perfected.
In July, we traveled to Detroit for the Republican National Convention, where it was all but assured that Reagan would officially be named the Republican nominee. The day we arrived, a virus turned me into a bedridden mess. I felt so sick that I wasn’t sure I was going to live to see Reagan’s triumph in November. I held my campaign button like a healing crystal and dialed my parents from the Michigan State dorm where the campaign had put me up.
My grandmother answered. (My grandfather called her Turkey. No one was really sure why.)
“Is Mom there?” I said, rasping.
“Your parents are in Europe,” she said. “I think your father is looking at some of those amusements.”
My mother would never hear my dying words because my father wanted some German-made deathmobile.
“Okay,” I said, and hung up.
After a few days convalescing, I made my way to the convention floor, my brain feeling like it was stuffed with gauze. Reagan was giving his acceptance speech, and I wasn’t going to miss it.
As he spoke, I headed over to the phone banks and called Mac. “You hear that?” I said, lifting the receiver above the din. “That’s Ronald Reagan!”
“Holy shit,” Mac said. We discussed my contributions that helped lead to this historic moment. Then he asked me, “Did anyone tell you about the Larsson kid?”
I had trouble hearing Mac through the roar of the convention. “Who’s the Larsson kid?”
“He wiped out on the Alpine, man. It’s not good.” The crowd smothered his words.
“The Alpine? How bad?”
“He’s in a coma.”
We tried speaking more, but the noise was too much. I hung up on Mac and listened as Reagan chided the current administration for weakening the economy and failing to combat the energy crisis. He said the system had grown fat and needed a diet. Tax cuts were necessary. We could no longer allow the Soviets to stockpile arms unchecked. Most important, he said, the government would do the work of the people without intruding on their lives.
It sounded familiar. My father didn’t have professional speechwriters, but the sentiment was the same. I began to see what he had been driving at and how it matched the country’s mood. The park was a metaphor for individuality. People didn’t need to be legislated into submission, relegated to narrow corridors of living. Action Park was America. Six Flags and its pre-set coaster paths was communist China. I did not understand how anyone could support any authority forcibly dictating how others should live. It was too George Orwell, too suffocating.
Thousands of balloons were released, bouncing around the arena. Reagan stood for rapturous applause, waving to the throngs of people who held up signs and roared their approval.
Freedom was a good thing. Individualism was a good thing.
What was that about the Larsson kid?
“You’re pale as shit,” Julie said. While I was indoors stuffing envelopes, Julie had been operating the Green Water Slide and its new neighbor, the Blue Water Slide, for weeks. She looked like a Coppertone ad.
The shame I felt over my albino complexion worsened when I caught sight of a new water slide employee. After extensive prodding, Julie told me her name was Ginette Molina. Ginette was a stunning beauty with a fetching overbite in a tight blue bathing suit. She and her sister, Nicole, had started as ride attendants while I had been away serving my country. I contemplated going up to her, but Julie pointed out my new Young Republican outfit: a button-down shirt, shorts, black socks, and loafers. I thought I looked sharp.
“You look like an idiot,” Julie said.
I took a final, longing look at Ginette as Julie pulled me away. The park was erupting, just as my father had vowed, construction debris shunted off and piled into isolated mounds. Before, I had been there on a near-daily basis and had grown accustomed to its steady evolution. Seeing it after some time away was startling. It had morphed into a mini-metropolis, with new attractions thrilling the deluge of guests my father had anticipated. Despite an increasingly vocal chorus of dissent, his political jockeying was working.
Julie and I continued walking uphill, past adults in flip-flops and children dripping wet from the slides. Speakers mounted on poles blared “Stayin’ Alive” with a persistent crackle. Bulky Sony Walkman tape players, just introduced, tugged on the flimsy waistbands of bathing suits. It seemed busier and more vibrant than ever before, throngs of people racing around us, our lagging bodies an impediment to the next attraction.
“There,” Julie said, and pointed to the left.
Sunken into the hill below was a grotto, a coagulation of people milling around on a platform next to the water. Over the pool was a rope that dangled from a high steel bar that traversed the surface. Separate from the group was Glen Smocovich, the kid from the Cannonball Loop. He held a giant metal hook on a pole, which he used to pull the rope back toward the group. I couldn’t hear him, but I could see he was demonstrating how to grab the line, squatting down until his knees were in his chest. This was the swimming hole my father had told Father Boland about.
“Dad is calling it the Tarzan Swing,” Julie said. That was smart, as Tarzan was not copyrighted and therefore not subject to licensing fees. “Watch.”
Glen passed the rope to the next person in line, who broke away from his giggling friends to grab it like he was about to climb it for gym class. His body was rod-straight, knees locked in place, completely the opposite of what Glen had just demonstrated. He swung across the water in a wide arc, legs outstretched. Suddenly, he lost his grip. As he came down, his frame took on the limbs-askew pose of the figure on those folding signs that warn of slippery floors. He belly flopped into the water, then paddled back to the deck while the entire crowd heckled him.
Glen corralled the rope a second time, again bending his knees to illustrate the correct posture. The next guest also ignored him completely. The kid swung, but his thin arms didn’t have the strength to hold on. He fell straight down. A girl let go almost as soon as she clenched the rope, falling into the water with the grace of a cinder block. I winced. The crowd roared. Glen used the pole to drag people back to shore. Emerging, they seemed to be shivering violently.
“The water is from the mountaintop lake,” Julie said. “It’s fifty degrees.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, watching more of them land with a splash. “Does anyone make it?”
“You’re just supposed to make it to the middle of the pool,” Julie said. No one had yet managed that. “But the crowd has fun either way.”
I saw money changing hands.
“Are they betting?” I asked Julie.
Longie Zwillman would have thrived here.
We continued to walk, surrounded by the sounds of screaming, roaring, and splashing. “Look up there,” Julie said. “That’s the Kamikaze.”
There, at a forty-five-degree angle, stood a massive slide surrounded by the biggest crowd I had ever seen at the park. From the top, I could see tiny figures shooting down its surface and creating a break in the water tension like a car tire zipping through a puddle. I had never seen human bodies move at that speed outside of a vehicle. They came down the slide screaming before the surface turned level, slowing their momentum and allowing them to skim across a long, narrow pool. When they reached bottom, the crowd threw their arms up in a wild and raucous applause.
“Why is everyone just standing around at the bottom?” I said.
“You’ll see,” Julie said.
A woman sailed down the slide and into the pool, bouncing over the water like the surface was made of rubber: plip-plip-plip. She stood up, slightly discombobulated, and waved to the cheering crowd. They seemed overly enthusiastic about her success. Through a part in the mob, I suddenly understood. Everyone could see her bare breasts. The water had blasted her bathing suit top completely off. Numb and disoriented from the ride, she was oblivious.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “Oh, my God. Does Dad know about this?”
Julie nodded. It was obscene, obviously, but not premeditated. The ride wasn’t designed to disrobe. I could imagine Dad’s reaction. It’s not a big deal, he’d say. No one is complaining. I wondered how Ronald Reagan would feel about this.
Julie stationed me at the top of the Kamikaze. For the rest of the summer, I watched as growing lines of people funneled themselves down the slide. Some women told their boyfriends to tighten the knot of their suit before they went down. Men lost their loose-fitting bathing trunks, exposing their genitals to crowds as they scrambled to find them. Tops floated in the pool like water lilies. Kids passing by were fascinated by the display. From the top of the ride, I could see the whites of their eyeballs soaking in the anatomy lesson.
When Julie asked Kamikaze attendants to rotate to other areas, they protested. Some threatened to quit. “You can see more tits here than a strip club,” one whispered to me, a spotter who stood midway down the slide. He looked to be about fourteen.
Julie seemed exasperated by the display. She thought it was lurid and argued that families might be reluctant to drag their children along if there was a possibility of seeing nipples.
My father shrugged. “It happens by accident,” he said. “Should I shut the ride down?” That, we knew, was rhetorical.
The Tarzan and Kamikaze rides were huge hits that summer. Near the Alpine, though, the mood felt overcast. The lines wound down the mountain, but near the top, attendees hefted carts without their usual gusto. The Larsson story had spread among the employees like a campfire tale, and I slowly gathered the details.
George Larsson was a nineteen-year-old from the neighboring town of Sparta. He had worked at the resort as a ski-lift operator for part of the winter and had come back to socialize. I had never met him but knew someone who had. He told me Larsson was a good wrestler and had gone undefeated the previous season. In the summer, he worked for his dad’s roofing firm. He spent an entire day riding down the Alpine’s fast lane. He had become adept at careening down at a near-record clip, just as Jimmy had, and decided to ramp up the difficulty level by using one of the carts that had been customized by the Motor World mechanics to go faster. Worse, he had insisted on continuing even after it had started to rain. The ride always closed in bad weather because the brakes stopped working.
At roughly six in the evening, the ride was shuttered to the public. Larsson, still riding, turned to look at a friend on a parallel track while banking into a ninety-degree turn. He lost control, flew off the track, and rolled down the embankment, coming to a stop only after he struck his head on a rock. The area was inaccessible to ambulances, so employees carried him down the slope. He wound up in the intensive-care unit with severe brain trauma. He spent a week in a coma before he died.
The ski resort’s general manager, a man named Wesley Smith, was doubling as our spokesperson. He decided to play offense with the press. “The ride didn’t injure Larsson,” he said. “It was a rock twenty-five feet away that hurt him.” He found it necessary, I supposed, to deflect the notion that the park was negligent. Wesley Smith was controlling the narrative. Still, it bothered me a lot. Smith also noted that Larsson was on the ride without authorization and after normal operating hours. He referred to a sign posted near the slide: RIDE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
Employees seemed divided. Some believed Larsson pushed things too far, discounting common sense for a thrill. He had overdosed on adrenaline. Others believed the ride attendants had been too permissive in letting him put himself at risk. A sign wasn’t enough, they said. Someone should have told him not to do it.
My father shut the ride down for two days. An inspector came out, put a sack of potatoes on the cart, and watched it go down the mountain without falling off. They deemed this successful and said Larsson had gone down at an “excessive speed,” though no one really knew what constituted excessive speed on the ride. There was no rule book. My father had a paved access road put in so EMTs could get to injured guests. The park received citations for the lack of ambulance access and failure to report the accident in a timely fashion, but no fines. Rumors swirled that Larsson’s parents would sue.
Whatever my father may have thought about rider responsibility—and Larsson clearly tempted fate—he was shaken up by what had happened. He peppered employees with questions about what Larsson had done wrong. He took Jimmy and me aside. “You treat this with respect,” he said. He meant both the accident and the Alpine Slide. All three of us felt the same shivering dread. It could have been one of us.
After Larsson’s death, the Department of Labor got a stack of overdue accident reports from the park. Ninety-five people had been treated for injuries ranging from bruises to fractures, scrapes to burns, bumps to concussions. Over forty percent of the injuries came from the Alpine. I didn’t know who had withheld the reports, but I knew my father’s philosophy when it came to cooperating with agencies that could slow him down. One had to minimize interference. Missing paperwork was another strategy for maintaining course.
The accident sparked another wave of conversation about the safety of amusement parks. A water slide in Wildwood, New Jersey, had recently come apart, causing six people to fall thirty feet. Luckily, their injuries were moderate because they landed on sand instead of the boardwalk. For a time, it felt like theme parks had become the next big evil in the eyes of the media, replacing video games and rock music. Dorney Park in Pennsylvania told the newspapers they used on-site inspectors. We could only remind people what our park was and what it was not.
“The ride is in the control of the individual,” Smith told a reporter. “This is an action park where people are doing physical things to themselves. Their situation is not totally in our control.”
It would become a mantra.
The only thing that drew anyone’s attention away from the accident that summer was the Transmobile. In August, it became fully operational, and my father held a dedication ceremony for it. “This is the transportation system of the future,” he told the press. New Jersey state senator Wayne Dumont attended, lending the whole thing an air of importance. Despite the pageantry, the system seemed kind of rickety, the carts trembling as they carried people from one area to the next. When a state inspector named Harry Crane gave it a cursory once-over, the cart he was riding in slid backward and careened down a slope in the track, smashing into another cart and sending him to the hospital with bruises. Harry was affable enough, and usually seemed more interested in the show at the Kamikaze than anything else. No fine was issued.
I was less impressed with the mechanics of the system than the fact it existed at all. A bridge had materialized overnight across Route 94. I couldn’t believe my father had somehow persuaded state bureaucrats to cooperate.
I asked Julie and Jimmy what had happened. I asked my father, who shrugged and credited “an efficient workaround.” I asked Charlie O’Brien. No one had the entire story, but each had details. In the middle of the night, someone—Charlie would not say who—operated a crane that lifted the flat section of bridge over the road. Workers scrambled to secure it in place. The next morning, a town official drove under it as the work was being finished. He pulled into the park and demanded to know who from the state was responsible for approving it. A Department of Transportation employee emerged, shook his hand, and explained all the necessary permits were in place. Satisfied, the man went on his way.
I asked who the transportation worker was. No one knew, but people kept saying he was well dressed and quite handsome, like Paul Newman. They said he looked a lot like John Steinbach.