Vahe H. Apelian
I had often wandered what happened to Action Park that was in Vernon Township, in NJ, an hour’s drive from our house or a bit longer. It so happened that the father-in-law of one of my colleagues was a partner, a silent partner he would tell me, in the company that operated it. For a year or two he gave me admission tickets, which our son Daniel who was in elementary school, and I used by going to the amusement park, week after week.
Recently I checked on the Action Park and found out that the park was opened in late 1970’s and that its most successful years were the early and mid-1980s during which time most rides were operating, and the park's reputation as a dangerous amusement park had not yet developed while the park entertained over a million visitors per year, with as many as 12,000 coming on some of the busiest weekends. Indeed, the park used to be jam packed whenever we went on weekends.
It was during those years that Daniel and I went to the park on the weekends. Little did I know then the park was being nicknamed “Accident Park” or “Class Action Park”.
Among the many attractions, Wikipedia noted that the Alpine Slide was notorious and had resulted not only in many injuries, some of which had been very serious; but also in a death in 1980. Surprisingly it had not made the news for us to be aware of. Alpine Slide consisted of three chutes that descended down the mountain slope that was used for skiing during winter. The chutes differed in their steepness making each progressively more challenging than the other. The riders were moved on ski lift to the to the top of the mountain, sat on small, wheeled sleds that had a stick to control the speed of the descent. “The tendency of guests to ride in bathing suits made the problem worse”, notes Wikipedia. That is exactly what happened to me.
During our descend, Daneil was following me on his sled, as he usually did. But this time around he was accelerating behind me and shouting at me, “Dad, go faster, faster !” To speed up I needed to let the control stick looser. It is then that my wheeled sled jumped out of the chute tract, and I landed face down, fortunately on a grassy part of the mountain slope. I had bruises on my face and on my arms. I did not give much thought about it, let alone reporting it. I took it as the price to pay for the excitement and the thrill going down the chute with our son trailing me and having lots of fun doing it. It turns out that the park officials had not reported to the authorities the death that had happened a few years earlier on one of those very chutes ! Nor had they reported the many accidents happening because the wheeled sleds could jump out of the tract if not very carefully manipulated. The death had occurred when the person's sled had jumped out of the chute and the person had landed on rocks, possibly on a steeper part of the mountain slope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US9mll_cOaA
*****
One of the other popular attractions was the wave pool. It was a very large pool. The excitement did not come from swimming in a very large pool but experiencing its huge waves that would overtake the pool repeatedly.
On that day, Daniel was swimming in the shallow part of the pool. For good reasons, we had no intention of going to the deeper end of the pool where the large waves would be at their highest. All Daniel knew was to stay afloat and I had not accompanied him anywhere in the pool I could not comfortably stand. The deeper end of the pool was way deep.
For some reason I excused myself for a few minutes and upon my return I saw the waves in action but I did not see Daniel. I started frantically looking for him around the pool area never bothering to check the deeper end of the pool that was way too far from the shallow front for him to go there on his own, or so I thought. But In desperation I ran towards the deeper end of the pool where most swimmers were and to my surprise, I saw him there. He was with his floater, nonchalant riding the crowded waves.
It is just now that I found out the reason for Daniel being in the deeper end of the pool. Ocean waves push a person towards the shore. It turns our that in the Action Park wave pool, the machines that created the waves created under currents that swept the swimmers from the shallower frontal part into the deeper end of the pool and thus had pushed Daniel clinging to his floater there. That explains to me now why the deeper end would be full of people while the rest of the large pool would be mostly empty whenever the waves started.
A report claimed that “The Action Park's wave pool was the state-of-the-art. In fact, it was one of the very first wave pools in the country. The large freshwater pool was a marvel of engineering, the report claimed, that created random tidal waves up to 3.5 ft. tall. But for the swim guards it was getting to be known as the "grave pool" where three of the park's six deaths had occurred and every weekend the guards would come to the rescue of many swimmers caught in the waves.
I would be stating the obvious that it was irresponsible of the management to conceal the injuries and the deaths from the public. Decades later, reading about Action Park sent shivers in me. But apparently the public had remained mostly ignorant about the accidents that were prone to happen in the amusement park. The safety regulations, the report noted, were laxed during those years and the park officials did not need to report to authorities the accidents in the park. It turned out that the park was closed in mid 1990's not under public pressure but because of the mounting lawsuits which, the report claimed, the park almost always had won but at great financial cost, exacerbated by the economic depression of the decade.
Of the amusement parks I have been over the years when our sons were growing, Action Park has a special place in my memory. Otherwise, I would not have inquired about it decades later only to find out that it was an accident prone, if not outright a dangerous amusement park. I also would not have reminisced about the park in this blog. But I would like to end my blog quoting from the video below. Action Park amusement park has become a myth, an urban legend of sorts and yes, many happy memories were also made there.
Journalist Chris Gethard has summed the general feeling about Action Park in an article for Weird, N.J., stating that “ Action Park was a true rite of passage for many New Jerseyans of my generation. When I get talking about it with other Jerseyans, we share stories as if we were veterans who served combat together. I suspect that many of us may have come close to death on some of those rides up in Vernon Valley. I consider it a true shame that future generations will not know the terror of proving their grit at New Jersey’s most dangerous park.”
The attached video gives a glimpse of the New Jersey's notorious amusement park.
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