Andy Mulvihill - Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of Americas Most Dangerous Amusement Park

The Cannonball Loop, open only sporadically over the years due to its uncanny ability to maim our guests.

PROLOGUE

My knees will not stop trembling.

Im standing some sixty feet in the air at the mouth of an enclosed water slide, padded hockey equipment cinched tightly to my arms, legs, and torso. The artificial bulk is intended to protect my adolescent body against whatever trauma is waiting at the other end. Leaning precariously against a dirt-strewn hill in an empty parking lot, the blue tube resembles a giant drinking straw with a knot inexplicably tied at the bottom.

The hope is that, if I jump in, my momentum will push me through the improbable three-hundred-and-sixty degree vertical turn at the far end and out the other side. It feels like the kind of thing NASA would force astronauts to do to assess their fitness for space. I envision a doctor using a penlight to look at my unfocused pupils in the aftermath, offering a dismissive shake of his head at my poor judgment.

As he wraps my head in bandages, I will tell him it was not my idea. It was my fathers.

According to my older sister, Julie, Im the first human to make the attempt. Prior to this, someone had tied off the ankles and sleeves of an old janitorial jumpsuit, stuffed it with sand, and fabricated a head out of a plastic grocery bag. The makeshift dummy cleared the loop but emerged decapitated.

We havent told Mom youre doing this, she says, by way of encouragement.

Today, a mechanical engineer would use computer software to calculate the exact pitch of the chute required for riders to make it through successfully. An army of lawyers would pour over the injury statistics for comparable attractions and demand changes based on risk mitigation. A feasibility expert would evaluate plans and anticipate logistical issues.

This being 1980, none of that happened. Instead, my father drew the slide on a cocktail napkin and hired some local welders, who had just been laid off from a nearby car factory, to cobble it together. On windy days, it wobbles back and forth, perilously unanchored to its temporary location in the lot.

Looks feasible, he said.

I peer into the opening. The smell of the industrial glue that adheres the foam to the tubing stings my nostrils. (Later, the fumes from this same glue, combined with a lack of ventilation, will cause workers erecting other rides to pass out, angering my father with their reduced productivity.) Its so completely and utterly dark inside that jumping in seems like attempting interdimensional travel. Ive tested rides for my fathers amusement park before, and teenage bravado has always trumped common sense, but this thinghe calls it the Cannonball Loopis giving me second thoughts.

Im sixteen years old and about to become the Chuck Yeager of this monument to the total perversion of physics.

Andy!

I look down at my father. Hes tall, about six-two, with a booming voice that adds a few inches. His hair, neatly combed, gives him the immaculate appearance of a G.I. Joe doll. Bellowing is a standard method of communication for him. Its strange to see him look so small.

Come on!

Today he is impatient. Theres just a month left before we open for the summer season. The Loop is supposed to be a flagship attraction. It looks like it promises total mayhem, an illusion of risk that is the backbone of any amusement park.

Except that here, in the place my father calls Action Park, risk has never been an illusion. If something looks dangerous, thats because it is.

Andy! We dont have all day!

Paranoia enters my thoughts. There are six of us kids. Maybe six is too many. Maybe hes decided five is better.

My hands grip the edges of the Loops entrance. My father never twists my arm. He never has to. If I dont test it, hell offer an employee a hundred bucks to do it. I know its my choice, the same one he gives anybody who passes through the turnstiles. Buy the ticket, take the ride. I think Hunter S. Thompson said that, but surely, even if he were on all the drugs in the world, Hunter S. Thompson would not go down the Cannonball Loop.

I blink sweat from my eyes. The words my father recently uttered to a visiting newspaper reporter ring in my head. Im going to be the Walt Disney of New Jersey, he said, gesturing at the tangled and dysfunctional aberration he expected would launch him into amusement park history.

Being the son of the Walt Disney of New Jersey sounded pretty good, I had to admit.

I take a deep breath, tuck my arms into my chest, and do what I always do when my father calls me to action.

I jump in.

When Disneyland opened its gates for the first time on July 17, 1955, seventy million people were watching on television. In less than a years time, Walt Disney had turned 200 acres of orange groves in Anaheim, California, into a wonderland. Cinderella hugged little girls. Rides spun, and children laughed like they were on helium. A future president, Ronald Reagan, hosted the opening ceremony. Staring into the ABC cameras, Disney beamed. He had willed his $17 million dream into reality.