“Since 1983, Action Park has been the target of more than 100 lawsuits, with defendants alleging everything from negligence on the part of ride operators to faulty equipment. . . . The park’s most popular ride—the Alpine Slide—accounts for the most accidents, the majority of the lawsuits, and 40 percent of the citations against Action Park.”
New Jersey Herald, May 21, 1986
“The phenomenon is, where there are accidents, the riding public can’t wait to get on them. I don’t know what it is—maybe thrill-seeking.”
William J. Clark, director, Office of Workplace Standards, New Jersey Department of Labor, 1986
It was Smoke who first told me about the drowning.
In 1982, the same summer that Surf Hill opened and marketing was fueling record attendance, a fifteen-year-old named George Lopez went under in the Wave Pool and drowned. No longer a lifeguard, I was not there, but the consensus among the Wave Patrol was that, following another rainstorm, some of the overflowing muck from the adjacent hill had again clouded the water, affecting visibility. Given that and the sheer volume of humanity in the pool, no one noticed Lopez failing to resurface.
Lopez’s drowning rocked the guards. It marked the first time they had failed to save someone. Everyone felt a little more on edge, more conscientious. I decided to begin moving guests to the shallow end of the pool when the water grew murky. We stationed guards in the water with buoys, hoping their presence alone might encourage more respect for the waves.
My father’s reaction was neither impassioned nor impassive. He simply regarded it as a tragedy as one would when hearing of a casualty at a beach. To him, Action Park was a natural structure, like the ski slopes or the oceans, and thus similarly prone to potential hazards. His reaction wasn’t a lack of compassion so much as it was resignation.
The Lopez family did not see it that way. They sued the park and several of the guards on duty, including Tommy Smith, charging negligence. This, I knew, was not the case. The guards were never indifferent or lackadaisical. They were simply tasked with managing an entity that had outgrown their ability to police it.
A week later, I awoke in the condo to someone pounding on my door. It was Julie.
“Come now,” she said.
We drove over to Motor World, where she parked in one of the adjacent lots. Inside the park was the typical commotion—Lolas buzzing along the track, the tennis-ball tanks spinning like tops—but off to the side of a building was a small group of people standing almost perfectly still, their body language heavy.
They were crowded around the entrance to the Kayak Experience, a ride that my father had installed just a few weeks prior. He bought it from a company named Inventex. The Kayak Experience combined elements of the Wave Pool and rafting, with fans agitating the surface of a one-thousand-foot-long circular water channel. People would paddle against the current in a kayak. You could have twenty of the single-person vessels going in the ride at once.
Jumping inside one of the kayaks when the whole thing was close to finished, I found it to be a fairly mundane experience and not up to the level of excitement of the other attractions. The water was choppy, but not in a white-water rafting kind of way. It just lapped against the boat, giving it only a slight nudge. It wasn’t deep, either. You could stand up in it, though you weren’t supposed to. If anyone bothered to conduct an exit survey of people coming out, it would have been the written equivalent of a shrug.
Despite being an expensive undertaking, it drew only a fraction of the attention of Surf Hill or the Kamikaze. Compared to those rides, which were simplistic but effective, the Kayak Experience was something my father usually avoided—a big mechanical thing that cost too much and didn’t provide a quarter of the same thrill as a slippery foam mat worth just a few dollars. Not long after installing it, he bemoaned the decision.
Still only half-awake, I recognized a couple of the inspectors from the Department of Labor. One man had a police badge on his hip. I didn’t understand what was going on. Following the Lopez tragedy, my heart began to flutter.
“What is it?” I said.
“Three people got electrocuted,” Julie said. “One of them is dead. Don’t talk to the press.”
In the 1930s, an industrial-accident analyst named Herbert Heinrich argued that 88 percent of mishaps he analyzed were caused by a human decision to carry out an unsafe act. He also stated that reducing the number of minor accidents would minimize the number of serious accidents. The thinking was that, for every major mishap, there are three hundred near misses that go unobserved. To reduce the big disasters, one had to address the comparatively less catastrophic events. The theory came to be known as Heinrich’s Triangle.
Of course, Heinrich wasn’t thinking of amusement park rides. In a factory, averting minor accidents was good for employers, for employees, and for business. In the theme park industry, the manufacturing of thrills—the nagging possibility of danger—is what sells tickets. Heinrich would argue near misses needed to be eliminated. Park operators would argue near misses are the entire point.
Bob Krahulik, one of our lifeguards, illustrated this dynamic when he visited the State University of New York at Albany one weekend. Bob was scouting the campus with thoughts of possibly attending in the fall. He wore an Action Park T-shirt. He noticed people were staring at him.
“They came up to me in awe,” he told me. “They asked if I worked there. They asked if I had scars.” When he shook his head no, they showed him some of their own.
“Alpine,” one said, pointing to a dark wedge of skin on her elbow.
“Lola,” another said, his disjointed finger unable to extend completely.
Word-of-mouth became incredibly important to us, as it was for many businesses. But the way people spoke about Action Park was very different from how someone might describe their experience at Great Adventure or Disney. With those places, it was about the fact you said hi to Mickey Mouse and Pluto and came out with a cool hat. At Action Park, it was like describing how you were T-boned by a tractor trailer and narrowly escaped with your life. How you endured each ride was a story you passed on to family and friends.
This kind of early viral marketing was completely unintentional. In the days after someone rode the Alpine and suffered superficial wounds from the friction, they’d attract attention as their skin began sloughing off to reveal a scar. People would ask what happened. Action Park is what had happened. Human bodies were our billboards. We never hid what we were doing. The whole conceit of the park was that the operators assumed their own risk.
I don’t know exactly when I first heard the phrases “Traction Park” or “Class Action Park,” but, at some point, they entered into common parlance, even making their way into a few newspaper articles. Julie hated it, but my father was unfazed. He was elated that the place had gotten big enough that people were bothering to poke fun at it. When Julie told him people were describing Alpine gouges as the “Action Park tattoo,” he immediately realized it was free advertising.
If our guests were sobbing as they showed off their contusions, it would have undoubtedly upset him. That they did it with a sense of pride, the same way a skateboarder displays road rash was, in its way, gratifying. It meant he was succeeding in his own unique brand of escapism. It was also a signal that people understood the mission statement of the park. When you laughed at your own injury, you did so because you knew you were, in some way, culpable, just as you would blame a sore thumb less on the hammer than on the person swinging it.
It was hard to define the parameters of safety, in part because nothing like this place had ever existed before. My father was in one corner, believing that none of it was any different from someone driving a car, riding a bike, or sledding. Their free will and skill determined the chances they took and whether they might need a bandage. A heavyset man with no upper-body strength should have been able to discern that he would not be able to hold on to the rope in the Tarzan Swing after watching fitter people struggle with it. But Gene did not believe that man should be denied the chance to try. My father would not pass up a ride that required good judgment simply because some people might exhibit poor judgment. If he did so, he believed he would be failing the people who could rationalize risk, make a decision, and enjoy the resulting thrill.
In the other corner were guests who categorically did not understand this premise. They were going to a recreational destination, and those traditionally eliminated any kind of risk. They left their critical thinking at home. I believe this was why we continued to pull so many people from the Wave Pool who seemed astonished that their lungs were filling up. In their minds, that simply wasn’t supposed to happen. While at the park, they forgot the reality that a body of water could take their life. There was a presumption of safety that was supported only by their belief that they couldn’t get hurt at a theme park. It was a social contract that only they had agreed to.
As soft-tissue injuries grew, so did our reputation. In a way, it became an example of confirmation bias. Of course someone got hurt at Action Park, because they were at Action Park. But when something happened at another park, one with a flawless reputation, it was an aberration. Fights at our park were publicized and reviled as signs of loose management. Yet, when a teenager was stabbed to death during a scuffle at Disneyland in 1981, it surely was not Mickey’s fault. When the Spin Meister at Six Flags hiccupped and bruised eleven patrons, sending two to the emergency room, the public waved it away as an unavoidable mechanical error. Such incidents passed through the cultural consciousness only fleetingly, even as the family of the Disney victim sued because employees had failed to call outside paramedics, relying instead on their in-house staff to treat the wounds. To the public, Action Park had become a dangerous place—for better or worse, depending on whom you asked.
However skewed the guests’ perspectives may have been, it was clear that injuries and the resulting lawsuits were going to be part of the park’s operating expenses. My father offered risk. People took him up on it. Some had regrets. To survive, he would have to invent a way to not be sued out of existence.
So, that’s exactly what he did.
I wasn’t privy to managerial oversight that went into processing the wounded. It is only now, decades later, that I have been able to assemble the pieces. What they reveal is a man determined to remain sovereign, never to allow Action Park to become a homogenized area that only simulated risk. The thrill was not in being bolted down to the Alpine. The thrill was in deciding how fast you wanted to go without being constrained by rules or seat belts. What broke the reverie was when someone sped into trouble.
As my father added rides and expanded the property, our once-favorable newspaper coverage—of the skiing in Vernon or the announcement of a new addition to our amusement utopia—began to change. Now, when New Jersey newspapers mentioned Action Park, it was in relation to an injury. Skiing or recreational accidents were not newsworthy. But here, as a result of man-made attractions, they became regular bulletins. The lawsuits piled up.
In 1980, Laurence Franzel sued after being thrown from a dune buggy and suffering a compound fracture of his left arm. He argued that our employees were not properly trained to safeguard the public.
In 1981, Alfred Sorge sued after fracturing his ribs on the Alpine. He had driven a charter bus to the park and decided to try out the ride. He argued it was defectively designed.
In 1982, Wilfred Juan sued after driving a speedboat and colliding with another vessel. He argued that we did not properly supervise the ride.
In 1982, Israel Schwartz said he suffered “permanent disfigurement” after being allowed to use the Alpine Slide without supervision.
In 1983, Philip and Delores Shaw sued after falling near the Wave Pool entrance.
In 1983, William Sussie sued, alleging three drunk men crashed into him on the Alpine.
In 1983, Ruth Richards sued after a Lola car driven by a high school student with a fake driver’s license struck her, breaking her nose and tearing cartilage in her knee.
In 1984, Logan Pemberton sued after breaking his left femur on a water slide and spending six months in a body cast. He claimed that a sharp turn meant the slide was defective.
In 1984, the father of three-year-old Cherie Fu sued after his daughter got her hand stuck in the Alpine brake while riding with him, severing a finger.
These were just a few of many.
As the park evolved from a small-scale operation, its growth led to the perception that the park had a Disney-sized pocketbook, prompting many of these lawsuits to be filed years after the incident took place. Legal consequences, once rare, became something for which my father kept a file folder on his desk. We logged 110 reported injuries in 1985 and 330 in 1986, the latter making us responsible for roughly half of all theme park accidents in New Jersey that year. That may seem excessive, as though scores of the walking wounded populated the park. But this was a place the size of several city blocks that hosted a highly concentrated population of fifteen thousand to twenty thousand people on some days, a swell that meant we were going to experience a certain number of medical incidents. People had heart attacks they would otherwise have had at home. They choked on food. We were highly responsive, dispatching a staff of EMTs to calls of accident or injury anywhere in the park. If it was minor—a bruise, a small cut, a dislocation—they’d treat it on-site. More serious cases, such as someone being knocked out or breaking a bone, were herded onto golf carts equipped with stretchers and driven to the first-aid station.
This is where my father’s preemptive actions began to take place. The park was required to report serious accidents to the state Department of Labor within forty-eight hours of the incident. State language was murky, though. What qualified as “serious” was open to interpretation. Was a broken bone serious on its own, or only if it resulted in an overnight hospital stay?
We were not alone in this regard. At a Jersey Shore outfit, Gillian’s Island Waterpark, fifty-one people were hurt on the Serpentine Slide over a three-year period. Of those, only seventeen were reported to the state. In Florida, home to Disney World, only 10 percent of theme parks reported 75 to 80 percent of their accidents. Traveling carnivals hardly ever reported any. No one wanted their customers to feel imperiled. Unless states were aggressive in demanding reports, they often never left the parks’ offices.
My father saw no reason to behave differently. We filed nothing that was not clearly mandated by law and, at times, stretched the definition of “non-serious” to include fractures. Major head, neck, and back injuries were noted, but anything else was often left to the discretion of EMTs and other workers dealing with guests. My father did not want the state to decide what was too adventurous for people. He believed they could decide for themselves, and that the serious injuries were often self-induced.
While the EMTs were treating an injury, a staff member would ask the guest what had happened. Inevitably, they would begin their story with, “I was horsing around,” or, “I thought it would be funny if . . .” They might also admit to not knowing how to swim, or steer, or having ignored safety instructions. The staff member would nod, taking copious notes.
Wounds that required off-site treatment were directed to the office of Dr. DeLuca. Dr. DeLuca had what was probably one of the first urgent-care centers in the area, if not the entire East Coast. His office was on Route 94 and could easily be reached by driving along the property. EMTs would bring the injured party to Dr. DeLuca’s on one of the first-aid carts to get their head examined or broken bone set. As a private-practice physician and someone who had a business relationship with my father, Dr. DeLuca was essentially Action Park’s only in-network provider. As such, on the occasions when the park was found at fault and ordered to pay a guest’s medical bills, it avoided the inflated expenses of an ambulance ride and an emergency room visit.
In building this conveyor belt for broken toys, my father was able to sidestep repercussions from the Department of Labor and the financial implications of major medical treatment. But that didn’t mean that someone who had been knocked unconscious was no longer a legal threat. Often, people would decide they had not been sufficiently protected and decide to sue.
My father stifled some of these potential problems by enlisting a man named Eric Karg, who was the claims adjuster for the insurance company covering the park, London and World Assurance, Limited. A day or two after an accident, Karg would phone the individual and offer a nominal sum to cover medical costs and smooth over any lingering resentment. Someone who wiped out on the Alpine might agree to a $750 payout to let the matter drop. If you’re a teenager, and you’ve been hurt worse playing sports or climbing trees, you took the cash. It was not unusual for guests to consider a broken nose part of the price of a fun Saturday. If Karg believed the park was in some way negligent, he would increase the amount. If he believed the patron was trying to scam us—the equivalent of spilling water on the floor of a business and then proceeding to slip on it—he would tell them to pound salt.
Karg couldn’t dissuade everyone, however. In those cases, my father dispatched a lawyer named David Chaffin. David was a preserved hippie who wore his long, gray hair tied in a ponytail and carried a cane to support a limp, a morbidly amusing trait for someone representing Action Park. His services were needed often enough that he kept an office across the street from the property. He’d open a dialogue with the plaintiff’s attorney by informing them that he was going to challenge the claim every step of the way.
The opposing lawyer would scoff, incredulous that a major business would want a legal skirmish. That’s when David would introduce the statement the plaintiff gave at the time of the accident, the one that usually began, “I was horsing around,” or “I closed my eyes on purpose,” or “I don’t know how to swim.” He argued most all cases on the premise that the guest was assuming risk. If their assumption of risk involved goofing off, then the park was not at fault. At least, that’s how a jury was likely to see it.
David made it clear that the suit would go before a jury. He didn’t settle cases, which meant defense attorneys would be tied up for months or years in what they initially thought would be a quick phone call to get the park to admit wrongdoing. This insistence on not settling quickly made the rounds in the legal field. Action Park didn’t do what big, liability-prone places are supposed to do, which is roll over. It became difficult for people to find attorneys to take on their case. “I’m sorry,” they would say. “That place fights.”
If a plaintiff and their counsel somehow cleared all those barriers and decided to pursue litigation, David flourished. He made sure park employees gave depositions like dullards, poorly dressed and slack-jawed. When they got to court, they were sharply dressed and well spoken, completely throwing off the attorney who had been counting on making the employees look stupid. When David deposed the opposing side, he exhausted them with questions. Depositions that should have taken an hour took a day or more. By the time someone got on the stand and saw David approaching, they were already hostile. Juries wondered why the plaintiff or their witnesses were so belligerent toward David, who had a warm presence and appeared undeserving of scorn. It made them less sympathetic, a fatal flaw in a negligence case.
David’s theatrics became the talk of the sheriff’s office, with bailiffs arguing about who got to sit in and watch the Clarence Darrow of Action Park ply his trade. David often jumped on an Alpine cart in the middle of the courtroom, demonstrating the brakes that allowed anyone to slow down to a crawl. “That’s all you have to do,” he’d say, “to avoid a problem.” He parroted my father’s belief about skiing and the responsibility bestowed upon the person on the slopes, raising his cane to punctuate his point. “It’s called Action Park,” he bellowed. “Of course you can get hurt if you’re not careful!”
The variable nature of the rides, which long confounded regulators, wound up being a benefit for David, who would often argue that just because something like the Alpine had logged a number of accidents, it didn’t mean that the trip taken by the injured had to follow suit. Each experience was so unique, he said, that none of them could possibly set a precedent. The only constant was how often people would operate it with recklessness.
Jurors who walked in expecting to be sympathetic toward the injured soon found themselves hanging on his every word, convinced the plaintiffs had wronged themselves. In one case, in which a man had flipped off his mat after hitting the landing pool at Surf Hill and had to wear a halo brace for months to heal what was known as a hangman’s fracture in his neck—another half inch and he would have been a quadriplegic—Chaffin accused him of engaging in “horseplay.” A judge agreed the man had been behaving irresponsibly. He found in favor of the park.
The legal theory that the rider, not the operator, was negligent held water most of the time. But whether juries would be as convinced in the event of a death was another matter entirely.
The family of George Larsson, who had died after taking a chance riding the Alpine in the rain, had sued, and that litigation had been dragging on for years. Because he was there after hours, it was hard for his parents to back their claim that there was inadequate supervision. No one could monitor a ride around the clock. Employees were told not to get on the track in bad weather.
That was the only fatality at the park prior to 1982. It was rarely anything other than bruises and broken bones. People taking a chance and coming up short, miscalculating the odds and paying for it. Lopez drowned, a possibility in any body of water. There was only one time in my memory that my father wondered if he had done something wrong: the Kayak.
His name was Jeff Nathan. He had come to the park for the first or second time with his cousin, Steve Langenthal, and Steve’s wife, Janet. All three were on the kayak ride, wading in the water after getting knocked over and out of the boats. The next thing Janet and Steve knew, they were waking up in the hospital. Jeff didn’t. He was pronounced dead by the emergency room staff. The only information we had was that he had experienced some type of cardiac event.
Of the people who were on the scene immediately after the accident, I knew only Kevin Curley. “I got a code red call,” he said. Along with other employees, he ran to the Kayak and saw three people unconscious and floating in the water. “We made a human chain across our arms to get them on a stretcher,” he said. Curley thought it had been a lightning strike.
If the park had largely been leading a charmed life given the nature of the rides and their risks, the Kayak accident, coming so quickly on the heels of the Lopez drowning, broke the dam wide open. The town’s building inspector wanted the ride drained and closed so he could look at it. The Department of Labor inspectors wanted to do the same. A police detective opened a file. The Sussex County district attorney said he was “monitoring” the situation. All of a sudden, there were questions about the state’s jurisdiction over “sporting” rides and whether it had somehow dropped the ball. The Department of Labor quickly came out and insisted that the ride had been inspected five times before opening. The deputy mayor of Vernon, Nic Roseto, said that the state had no oversight of non-mechanical rides—things like Surf Hill. When the Carnival and Amusement Ride Safety Act was passed back in 1975, water slides weren’t even in the state yet, let alone regulated. (They would finally be subject to oversight in 1983.) Whether the fans that produced the waves made something like the Kayak Experience or the Wave Pool something other than sporting became a crucial issue of semantics. Was the Alpine open to review because it involved a mechanical ski lift? No one knew. Everyone was quick to blame someone else. No one wanted to declare anything an accident if it wasn’t or take responsibility if they didn’t have to. The Kayak accident had provoked these forces into admitting that the park was a no-man’s-land.
Donald Allen, a New Jersey policy maker, took the opportunity to begin pounding the podium. “Someone has got to start looking at Action Park,” he told the press. “The number of accidents has crossed the line.”
Julie’s main mission was to prevent our father from speaking to the media about anything relating to either incident. “The press already has their story written,” she told me. “They’re never going to write good stories about the park.” She always stayed on message, getting out what she wanted to say even if it didn’t answer the reporter’s question. She was unflappable.
My father, however, couldn’t help himself. He wound up picking up the phone when reporters called and went on the defensive, partially to protect the park’s reputation and partially because he truly did not believe we had been negligent. He went back and forth with the coroner, Mary McPhillips, in the newspapers. McPhillips insisted Jeff Nathan’s death was due to electric shock, or “rapid contractions of the heart due to electrocution.” My father produced records from the company that built the motors for the fans—coincidentally, the same company, Flyght, built the Wave Pool fan motors—saying that there was no possibility that could ever occur. McPhillips hired an inspector of her own who found a damaged underground cable. My father said her inspector wasn’t a licensed electrician and that the cable was fifty feet away from where the accident had occurred. The state inspectors who examined the ride had found an intermittent short in one of the motors, but it was impossible to discern whether that had directly led to the accident. It went on and on like this, the ambiguity causing everyone involved to arrive at different and contradictory conclusions.
I asked my father what he thought had happened. He kept repeating that the ride had been inspected many, many times before opening, not only by the state, but by his own contractors. He looked at the motor-inspection reports over and over, searching for any fine detail that would reveal whether it was a random event or the result of some kind of mistake. Unlike some of our more haphazard ride construction, the motorized Kayak had been handled with care. He had hired top electricians to do everything correctly. One of his employees had even written to Flyght an entire year prior, when the ride was still being planned, to make absolutely certain the equipment wouldn’t pose an issue. My father took the idea of an underwater motor extremely seriously.
“I don’t understand it,” he kept saying. “I don’t understand it.”
It seemed odd to me that for all the park’s potential hazards, a fluke occurrence had led to a tragedy. Jeff Nathan wasn’t a daredevil. He hadn’t tried to cross any boundaries. In my father’s ski analogy, he hadn’t run into a tree. It was like the tree had erupted in his path. This, I believe, is what bothered my father the most. If the blame couldn’t be placed on the rider, then it had to fall on him.
That didn’t happen. Not officially, anyway. The Department of Labor eventually announced that the park wasn’t guilty of any wrongdoing. The Kayak had been properly installed and maintained. There was no violation of any safety law. A short circuit was a no-fault situation. We were, at least in terms of public opinion, exonerated. My father closed the ride permanently. Bulldozers came and buried it. The Nathan family sued and met David Chaffin in court. This time David’s histrionics and persuasion were of little use. This time there was a settlement.
I am often asked about Traction Park, the mythic property that often replaces Action Park in the popular imagination, a frenzied battlefield of moaning and groaning guests who were left to navigate an obstacle course of malfunctioning, hazardous attractions, a human mulcher masquerading as innocent fun. I have heard it compared to Vietnam or Lord of the Flies, that my father did not care if people were hurt, that we took no notice of them. It did not help that my father was often inscrutable in these moments of tragedy, rarely discussing them or lashing out in the newspaper in an effort to defend the park.
I think that, if he had confided in anyone, it would have been Father Boland. Many years later, I called him.
“How did my father feel when someone died?” I asked. I reminded him of George Larsson and Jeff Nathan and George Lopez.
“He felt awful, always, as anybody would who had kids themselves,” Father Boland said.
“Sometimes I wonder,” I said, “if we could have done better. How much is enough? But when you take chances . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence. It felt like assigning blame.
“With the child from Sparta, George Larsson, I asked him. I said, ‘Gene, have you talked to the family? Make arrangements to meet with the family.’ And he turned to them and said, ‘Any costs for the funeral, we’ll take care of them. And I will well understand if there’s an insurance case afterward.’”
“The other times?” I asked. “The other tragedies? What about then?”
Father Boland was silent for a moment. “When the park is a special place for people to enjoy, and then it isn’t that . . .” He trailed off.
“He didn’t always act contrite,” I said.
“He found it hard to listen to criticism.” Father Boland paused, searching for the words.
“Yes?”
“He was always heartbroken.”
Danger and responsibility. Acceptable risk. Liability and negligence. I think about these things often.
Jeff Nathan should not have died. He did nothing wrong. George Larsson was a tragedy. He bent the rules until they broke. George Lopez succumbed to the water, realizing any lifeguard’s worst fear. There would be two more deaths, including another Wave Pool drowning in 1987, when an eighteen-year-old named Gregory Grandchamps went under. When people remember, I want to tell them the park admitted millions of people across decades, and we failed only a few of them. I wish it were none.
When an eighteen-year-old named Jim Higgins fell out of a car at Space Mountain in Disneyland in 1983, seriously injuring his head and back, no one called for the dissolution of the park. When it tallied six deaths in its first twenty-five years of operation, no one wanted it shuttered. At the Happiest Place on Earth, an injury was an anomaly. At Action Park, it was framed as inevitable. This was the consequence of my father’s design. In promoting risk, we could not cry foul when it sometimes proved to be consequential.
Still, I wonder. When someone sailed off the Alpine, into the air and into rocks, should we have protected them? Should we have padded those surfaces—those trees—in case of misadventure? Should we have doled out helmets? At the Wave Pool, we could have counted people and restricted entries when capacity grew too cumbersome. There were always ways to make it safer.
But safe is not what theme parks sell. They sell excitement and the promise of a break from the mundane. Our problem—my father’s problem, Action Park’s problem—may have been that people assumed the thrills were an illusion, just as they were at other parks. People step into a park and experience a detachment from reality, doing things they never would dare in real life. On a lake, you would not ram a speedboat into another. Here, people thought that was the point. An admission ticket was like a waiver from responsibility. Admit one. Admit nothing.
The numbers spin in my head, arguing for and against. There were ten thousand injuries reported in theme parks across the country in 1984, a relative drop in the bucket compared to the tens of millions of visitors who entered their gates. Disneyland reported scant few. But what was their definition of serious? Was it like ours? And were we even a theme park at all? “This is not a fantasy land,” Julie told reporters. “You stay with what . . . you can handle at the level of ability you can handle. Our guests are responsible for themselves.”
With those two deaths, only days apart, we garnered more bad press in the summer of 1982 than at practically any other time in the history of the park. The weather had also been lousy, extended rainfall hurting our attendance. We closed down on two Sundays due to the heavy precipitation, a step my father reserved for nothing short of nuclear war. We steeled ourselves for even more of a decline. Our park had been stigmatized, possibly for good. Parents would prevent their children from attending. Teenagers would steer clear.
At the end of the season, we looked at the numbers. The previous summer, five-hundred thousand people had come through the gates. That summer, it was eight-hundred thousand, a number that surprised even my father. It was our best year yet. The accidents were not and never would be a deterrent.
A few days after Jeff Nathan died, a newspaper reporter approached a young man in the park to get his thoughts on the accident. The man did not know what had happened. The ride was closed, the reporter explained, because of a death.
The guest thought about it. He said he hoped it would reopen. “It makes it more challenging and daring,” he said.
What would Heinrich think of that?