EPILOGUE
Shortly after my father passed away, in October 2012, Hurricane Sandy bombarded New Jersey. It was one of the worst storms in the history of the state. High winds and torrential rain washed over the population like a biblical disaster. People lost power for weeks. Roads were closed, and gasoline was scarce. Yet the weather did not prevent scores of family and friends from ignoring the travel cautions and descending into town to pay their respects.
They were determined to come and bid a proper goodbye to Gene.
The pews at Christ the King Church in Harding Township were filled with rows of friends and family, knitted together, knee-to-knee, like revelers along the benches at Oktoberfest. Wacky Joe and the snowmakers came in suits, the first time I had seen them in anything other than flannel. Generations of Laziers mixed with Gene’s country-club friends. John Steinbach sat quietly, six decades of friendship heavy in his heart.
Father Boland spoke for all of us. He recalled the bond that had started with Gene screaming about litter and deepened through a well of mutual generosity. He revealed a dimension to his friend’s personality that was rarely detailed, telling us of the leaky roof Gene had sent his men to fix, and of all the times Gene listened when Father Boland brought him tales of parishioners who couldn’t pay their mortgage or their hospital bills. Quietly—so quietly that few of us had ever heard such stories—my father would take care of those in need.
Other times he was not so subtle. Once, Father Boland recounted, he was looking to sell some church property that wasn’t properly zoned. He was sure he would be taxed into oblivion as a result. Gene stood up at a town meeting, as he often did, but this time it was not to argue over the Aerodium or hamburgers. It was to defend his friend.
“Father Boland is a saint!” he railed at the board. “This is a church that gives back to our community! I can’t believe how you’re treating this poor priest!”
The town knew my father could keep this up for weeks. Father Boland got his commercial approvals that day.
There was the marine scholarship fund he had started, a nod to his own military service. The radioactive soil rallies. The golf tournaments for charities. The condos that acted as housing for people who needed a place to stay. The jobs he created when his friends needed to work. The wine he poured freely. When a childhood friend of his named Henry Porter became a prison chaplain, he received unsolicited checks every three months to underwrite his calling. When a friend named Billy Imgrund had serious eye surgery in New York City, Gene dispatched Vinnie Mancuso to drive his wife to and from the hospital. When Jimmy Sturr casually mentioned wanting to start a local variety television show, my father walked away, then reappeared with a check for ten thousand dollars.
Whatever Gene was fortunate enough to have, he shared. He kept nothing to himself, including the park, where kids of modest means, accompanied by Father Boland, were ushered in and fed for free.
The church filled with memories of his time among us. He was loyal to his friends. He stood behind everything he sold, whether it was a ride or a vacuum cleaner. He trusted his troops, including his own children, to march alongside him. He went to church weekly. He was, in all ways, a believer: in a higher power, in people, and in himself. Someone spoke of the fact he had squeezed in one last New Jersey Oktoberfest a few months before he passed, and we all agreed that was good.
After the service, I remained in the front pew with my siblings. Pete had arrived from New Hampshire. Jimmy came in from Colorado. Someone brought up the old family station wagon, which he would cram with six kids, our mother, and luggage for eight. Down the highway my father would go, toward the Glen, toward a ski trip in Aspen, the speedometer nudging up to seventy miles per hour. We did not always know our final destination, but we trusted that he did, and that he would get us there.
It was like that now, the feeling of all of us squeezed into a small space, accelerating down the road. But now, he had disappeared from behind the steering wheel. Suddenly, we didn’t know where we were going, and no one was driving the car.
I saw him two nights before he passed. He invited me over for dinner. That was not unusual, but he insisted on making me a drink, which was different. Often, I would just grab a beer from the refrigerator. This time he brought the glass to me and smiled. It was not like him to be so doting.
“This is for you,” he said.
More strange occurrences followed. The day he died, I walked out of my parents’ house to see five rainbows appearing in unison. A day or two later, when Hurricane Sandy smacked into the Jersey Shore, it knocked over a roller coaster at one of the ocean-side pier parks. It was as though he was taking one last swipe at the competition.
There had been no time to prepare his affairs. Until his last moments, when his salt-rich diet likely contributed to a suspected heart attack, my father was in fine health and good spirits. If he thought at all about the winter of his life, it was to make passing mention of taking a few of the resort rooms and combining them to make an assisted-living area for himself if the need arose. When Julie asked what else he had considered, or if he had made out a will, he looked at her strangely.
“What if you hit your head or something?” she asked. “Who’s going to figure all this out?”
He shrugged. He could not process what she was asking. He never thought he would run out of time. Even slowing down seemed impossible.
My father’s business interests had been innumerable and ongoing. Puzzling through them was overwhelming. His habit of writing contracts on napkins, or not at all, made our heads spin. Scores of business associates came out of the woodwork, insisting Gene had promised them this, hadn’t delivered that, or owed them money to cover a deal that was never completed. Most seemed sincere. Some were just opportunists hoping to capitalize on his haphazard bookkeeping. It took years to make sense of his complicated portfolio.
At the forefront of it all was the park, which had been run in his absence once already. We were determined not to let it fall into mediocrity again.
Not having him around for the final word, Julie and I made our best guess as to what he would have done. The rides were uniformly expensive and required what seemed like endless analysis of their potential for success. The full weight of his approach hit us between the eyes. It took a tremendous appetite for risk to buy an attraction costing hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of dollars without a firm idea of whether it would be popular enough to turn a profit.
Looking for a port in the storm, I called Stan Checketts. He began pitching me on an attraction that had been gestating for years. Gene had been high on it, he said.
The idea was similar to the Space Shot, using compressed air to launch people into the air. This time they would not be strapped to anything. It was like the human cannonball in the circus. After sailing through the sky for one hundred yards or so, they would land in nets. Or maybe they would land in water. Stan wasn’t totally sure of that just yet. He figured it would take six months or a year of testing to prove it was safe. He would install it on the Las Vegas Strip, and then, if all went well, bring a version of it to the park.
I listened. If it worked, it would be unbelievable. And Stan, unlike some of the engineers who crossed my father’s desk, was recognized by his peers as a genius in the industry.
I told Stan we would talk more about it, then hung up. I thought of all the times my father had been pitched something almost as crazy. Rides that sent people down asbestos chutes and flayed them alive. Race cars powerful enough to evade police on highways. A giant ball that rolled down a mountain and shot across a busy highway. Each time, he said yes. There was no hesitation. He needed no context and no justification beyond asking himself if it was something that would thrill people and give them an experience they would talk about for years to come.
In the end, I never called Stan back about the human cannonball. I could never take the risk. I was not my father.
In the summer of 2014, we reverted to the Action Park name, ditching the Mountain Creek label. Some of the investors fretted, worried the connotation would dredge up stories of maimed visitors and apocalyptic landscapes.
“Don’t worry,” I said. But they were proven right.
Internet commenters began to detail injuries sustained long ago that read like case studies in a medical textbook. The national news media picked up on our throwback ad campaign and began running articles about our heyday. BuzzFeed published a laundry list of anecdotes people sent in about their brushes with disaster at the park. (Despite this testimony, I was sure no one had ever contracted hepatitis from the water, and that no one called the town ambulances the “Action Park Express.” Everything else was pretty much true.) The ever-expanding Wikipedia page read like a workplace safety report. People traded stories about scars earned or mishaps narrowly avoided. The park had become a symbol for a generation that didn’t need warning labels on its hair dryers.
The investors demanded a slogan to clarify that the new Action Park would not be the same liability wonderland. We came up with “All of the thrills and none of the spills.”
All of this attention paid to my father’s creation was oddly heartwarming. So much of it led with the bombastic wipeout tales, but they were inevitably followed by comments about how much people remembered and loved the park. Time and again, they said it was the most fun they had ever had. Rather than being “architects of their own doom,” as one colorful newspaper article put it, they were the authors of their own happy memories. Enough years had passed that people could look beyond some of the more sensational headlines and see it for the innovative creation it truly was.
People were finally acknowledging Gene’s pioneering spirit, too, a credit I felt was long overdue. In the late 1970s, a water park was an anomaly. Today, virtually every theme park has a “wet” component, promising to soak guests in increasingly elaborate ways. Interactivity has become a permanent fixture. Universal and Disney spent billions to immerse people in fantasy worlds like Harry Potter, where they can move freely and engage with the attractions at their own pace. After opening Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World, Disney Parks chairman Bob Chapek said his goal was to make guests “active participants in their own stories.” A swinging cart ride in development by an amusement manufacturer measured how loud guests in two separate compartments screamed and waved their hands. The ride sprayed the less enthusiastic group with water. Other designs in the pipeline aimed to give riders control over the direction or speed of rides so no two experiences were ever the same. My father didn’t have the budget of these places, but his philosophy of leaving people in control predated them by decades.
The public appreciation of Action Park’s past made me enthusiastic about moving forward. With Bill Benneyan, the park’s president and chief operating officer, I traveled to the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Expo, the amusement convention where my father was a celebrity. Strolling around the exhibition, I came to a dead stop in front of a booth. On the display was a photograph of a tube that ended in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle.
It was a modern-day version of the Cannonball Loop.
I hurried to find Bill. “You need to see this,” I said.
We talked to the men behind the booth, who were from Ohio. They explained that patrons would be strapped into small pods and loaded into the ride. Because they were basically immobile inside of the pod, which was in constant contact with all sides of the tube, they would clear the loop without running the risk of slamming their face into the slide. They had made it tragedy-proof.
“This is like the Loop at Action Park,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, we’ve seen that,” one of them said. “But this is kind of the perfected version of it.”
I disclosed the entire story, from my hockey-equipment-encased test jump to our repeated efforts to keep the Loop open and free of catastrophic injury. I could think of no better way to come full circle than to finally give people the experience my father had long pursued. With no time to lose before the next season, Bill and I flew to Ohio to see it in person as soon as we could. It happened to be December.
The company had built the prototype and set it up outdoors. The temperature outside was barely ten degrees. To keep the water inside the tube from freezing, they ran ethylene glycol through a heating element rigged to a huge furnace. It kept the water flowing, creating a fine mist that rose up like stage smoke at a concert. These were my father’s kind of people.
Far removed from my daredevil days, I was not about to go in first. Erin, the salesman, volunteered instead, stripping down to his underwear and strapping himself into the cage that would propel him down the slide and through the loop. With a thumbs-up, he descended into the chute and disappeared. We waited for him to emerge. We waited some more.
“He’s fucking stuck,” Bill whispered.
Or worse. I remembered the endless trials of the Loop and the way it mercilessly devoured flesh and teeth before expelling riders, as though it were teaching a lesson. It was possible no version of it could ever be safe.
After an extended moment of panic—the water continued to flush through the tube, providing ideal drowning conditions—they pulled Erin out through the hatch. He was conscious and unbloodied and explained that the water was still frozen in some spots. He had almost made it through.
“It’ll be good to go now,” he said. He smiled. I was relieved to see all his teeth intact.
I looked over at Bill, who had developed an appetite for building out the park with bigger and more ambitious attractions. I suggested he make the voyage. He was shaking like a leaf.
Mr. Mulvihill, I don’t think—
You’ll be fine, Bill.
He squeezed into a wet suit, promptly had a panic attack because it was too tight around his neck, and finally settled down enough to go through with it. The ride ejected him intact. It was perfect. They had eliminated the unpredictability of the Loop.
My excitement was short-lived. Crunching the numbers based on our projected attendance was sobering. Julie insisted it was more money than we could afford, and I had to agree. Doodling something and then tasking a ragtag crew of snowmakers to build it, I learned, was economically feasible in a way that cutting-edge ride technology was not.
After much deliberation, we decided not to take the risk. It was a sentiment that extended to the park itself.
The amusement business was more volatile than ever. Roller coasters ruled the day. The major parks all had branding from movies and intellectual properties. The one thing that made us distinct—the freedom—was being regulated out of existence. The park had been stripped of its novelty. When Julie and I looked to expand or add an attraction, we had to present the idea to the board of directors who had invested with Gene back in 2010. While civil, they made it clear they had agreed to do business with Gene, not Gene’s kids. They trusted his judgment. Ours was another story.
Julie and I decided it was time. We sold the park to one of the investment partners, the Koffman family, in 2015. Almost as soon as it was out of our hands, the state decided to close the Tarzan Swing and the Cannonball tubes, the two remaining fixtures from the early days. A third party had come in and done biometric testing on the swing, outfitting a volunteer with a motion capture suit. Its determination was that the potential for injury began as soon as someone grabbed the rope. An activity that had been allowed for close to forty years was suddenly too hazardous. The new owners didn’t have my father’s temerity to fight back. They were content to be just another water park.
The Action Park entrance sign came down. This time it was for good.
Three years after we let the park go, I invited members of the Wave Patrol over to my home for dinner. Smoke, who now sells elevators, was there. So were Bob Krahulik and Chuck Kilby. Artie Williams of Motor World came. I also invited Mac Harris, though he never soiled his hands in the park.
“Captain—” I said.
“Heineken,” Mac said. “Yeah, yeah.”
Smoke brought his original Wave Patrol jacket, which stretched around his shoulders, the cuffs stopping just above his wrists. The letters on the back were breaking free of the stitching and folding in half. He strutted like a prizefighter who had slipped on his old ring robe.
We spoke about the days long since gone, the summers spent corralling lunatic teenagers while we turned the color of wood varnish. I told them I had recently spoken to a veteran Vernon newspaper reporter who floated the old rumors that my father had been involved with organized crime.
“Just because your dad’s best friend’s father was the biggest mobster in New Jersey doesn’t make him one,” a slightly tipsy Bob Krahulik said, railing at the slander.
“This is not helping,” I said.
Smoke reminded us that he tested many of the rides, including Surf Hill and the Aqua Skoot, in exchange for a case of beer, which he found just as desirable as the hundred-dollar bill. Smoke later used some of these liquid rewards to throw an employee party at his house while his parents were away. He thought he had cleaned up enough afterward to keep it a secret, but when they came home, they immediately confronted him about it. He had forgotten he had spray-painted ACTION PARK PARTY on his driveway with an arrow pointing to his house.
Artie, the lone veteran of the greasy Motor World crew, remembered the engine jockeys being ostracized from the park’s social hierarchy, a rejection that sometimes led to criminal behavior. A mechanic who worked with Mike Kramer decided to swap out one of the Lola engines with the one in his beater car, a substantial upgrade in power. When he was found out, employees lured him back on the promise that he wouldn’t be turned in. Kramer then locked the gate and called the cops. No one knew what became of Kramer, who left sometime in the 1980s. We all agreed he was probably still smashing a wrench into something.
We talked about the mountaintop parties, where Smoke insisted someone had caught fire. I didn’t recall that level of idiocy, but we were prone to leaping across bonfires, so it was possible. Chuck Kilby reminded us the park once hosted the New Jersey State Lifeguard Championships, held in the Wave Pool. Doug Rounds won the first year, Smoke the second. A finer lifeguarding force you could not find.
“The bathing suits gave me jock itch,” Smoke said.
“STDs have the same effect,” someone said, and Smoke grew quiet.
Some of the guys who sanded down paint on the rides or were exposed to toxic fumes in the tubing expressed relief that they hadn’t developed cancer. Chuck Kilby, one of the most dependable of all my friends and a man who seemingly feared nothing, admitted he never once considered going down the Cannonball Loop. He was too afraid he would get stuck and drown.
Someone brought up Blizzard Beach, a Disney water park that opened in 1995 and centered around an invented backstory that it was a ski resort that had “melted,” with warm-weather attractions springing up in its place. It was either some kind of acknowledgment of my father from the Disney people, a rip-off, or the most bizarre confluence of events possible. He had longed to be the Disney of the northeast. Disney had co-opted him instead. It felt fitting.
We spoke of the now neutered Vernon property, where Mountain Creek attracted a modest number of visitors annually and was struggling financially, and of what it once was—the park we knew. People were crazed, yes, and we were part of the crew of misfits who ran it. But the chaotic atmosphere sometimes obscured the fact that my father had constructed a monument to exhilaration, a place to step outside the boundaries of everyday life. In its own unique way, the park was a fiberglass metaphor for adversity. Here was a place to navigate danger, to test your constitution and sharpen your judgment. Life doesn’t follow a preset path. It doesn’t roll along a track as you sit comfortably behind a safety bar. It throws obstacles in your way. It flings you into uncharted territory and threatens to knock you down. It hits you in the testicles with a tennis ball at violent speeds. You have to be tough. You have to hang on. You have to learn how to steer, bank, and navigate the curves.
Inevitably, some people will forever think of my father as a berserk Willy Wonka, an eccentric purveyor of amusements who thrived in an era of limited regulatory oversight, a man who bent the rules until he heard them crack. In truth, his goal was to make sure everyone had the time of their lives, and we all did. The evenings he spent sketching rides, the time and effort that went into securing money, the juggling he did to keep it open summer after summer was never anything he had to do. He had plenty of success in other businesses. He did not need to enter a world as volatile as the theme-park industry, one man against corporate giants. He did it because that was his nature, because fun outweighed virtually every other consideration. He never wavered from his philosophy that life was for living and that risk was part of it. There will never be another Action Park because there will never be another Gene Mulvihill.
“Who the fuck builds a water park on a mountain?” Chuck said. “Who does that? But it worked out.”
As the night wound down, and people began heading out the door, Smoke handed me his cell phone. On the screen was a picture of the Wave Patrol in our prime, a collection of young people who were tasked with more responsibility than they realized. I looked at the kids in the photo and wondered if they knew it would be the greatest job any of them would ever have. I wondered if they knew how good they had it then, and if they knew the reason why.
When I was thirteen years old, my father decided to open an amusement park.