I, however, didn’t need the excitement that comes from surviving a traumatic experience - in my house that was a daily occurrence.Īs with most things about my childhood, later on in life I began questioning if the wild things I saw that day could possibly be true. I laid low as my friends seemed hell-bent on suffering a major head injury by day’s end. The park was poorly maintained and smelled of leaking go-cart gas and chlorine. When I finally did go in the early 1990s, I quickly realized something wasn’t right. Read next: Stuck in quarantine, these guys built roller-coasters in their backyards.As the theme song boasted, “The action never stops… at Action Park” - and neither did the life-altering injuries. Unofficially known as Class Action Park, Traction Park and Accident Park, it was Lord of the Flies with a Jersey twist and a higher death count. While Disneyland is described as the Happiest Place on Earth, Action Park might be considered the most dangerous (in 1984–1985, the Alpine Slide alone was responsible for 14 fractures and 26 head injuries). The trauma of it all only made me want to go more. I remember listening in terror as someone recounted going down an intensely steep waterslide and receiving what they called a “freshwater enema.” They proudly showed me the skid-mark-like scars that burnished their thighs after riding down the Alpine Slide. I began hearing the war stories of kids who had been. While the ad screamed family-friendly virtues, I soon discovered it conveniently edited out the horror show that actually awaited you once you got to the park.
Who could blame me? Everyone was doing it, and if there was one type of peer pressure that worked on me, it was proving that I was scared of nothing. When I recently saw an old ad on YouTube, it reminded me exactly how I felt the first moment I discovered the park’s existence: I was desperate, begging my mom to let me go to Vernon, New Jersey, as soon as humanly possible. If you were a kid who grew up in the tri-state area in the 1980s and 1990s, just hearing the words “Action Park” will unleash a flood of memories as overwhelming as the park’s infamous wave pool, affectionately known as the “grave pool.” The popular theme park featured rides so unsafe they seemed almost designed to injure.
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