Action Park was created by a man named Gene Mulvihill. He was one of the biggest people on Wall Street in the 1970s. He created a company named Mayflower securities. Bob Brennan became CEO of the company when Gene was kicked off of Wall Street. Gene created and started making rides at Action Park. Gene wanted the people in the park to have the freedom to do whatever they wanted. The employees at Action Park called him Uncle Gene because he was so carefree. The local parents had no idea how to handle him. Gene didn’t believe in insurance but he needed one to keep the park open. No insurance company was going to support the park, so he created a fake insurance company. The state investigated this insurance and Gene pled guilty to fraud and theft. He had to give up control of Action Park so he stopped paying bills and filling out paperwork. This led to New Jersey selling him the land and the park expanded and grew. Gene died in 2012 and some people celebrated his death. In his life, he was a villain and a victor.

Action Park was located in Vernon, New Jersey with Route 94 running through the middle of it. It was created in 1978 when Gene Mulvihill purchased two ski resorts, Great Gorge and Vernon Valley. The park was created because there was a lot of downtime in the summers when the ski season was over. Gene wanted everything in the park to be do-it-yourself. Bob Brennan would find money and investors for Gene when he started creating his rides. Action Park became the first-ever modern waterpark. The attractions were designed by people without engineering degrees. Amusement parks like Six Flags and Disney World wanted nothing to do with these people, so they tracked down Gene. Gene designed most of the rides. When he designed the cannonball loop ride, he drew it on a napkin and then hired local welders to put it together.

There were six recorded deaths in the time that Action Park was open. Death seemed like it was tolerated at the park and it was just part of the numbers. On July 16, 1980, George Larsson was the first person to die at Action Park. He went on the Alpine Slide and the brake on his sled wasn’t working. His sled jumped off the track and he hit his head on a pile of rocks. He went into a coma and died in the hospital 8 days later. The park blamed it on the rocks and not the ride. Two years later, George Lopez drowned in the wave pool at the age of 15. A week later, a 27-year-old man was electrocuted on The Kayak Experience. His kayak had tipped over and as he was trying to get back in it, one of the underwater fans short-circuited. On August 27, 1984, twenty-year-old Donald DePass drowned in the wave pool. In the same year, a park visitor died from a heart attack after going on the Tarzan Swing. This heart attack was believed to have happened because the water in the spring below the swing was extremely cold. The last death occurred in 1987 when 18-year-old Gregory Grandchaps drowned in the wave pool.

In the mid-1990s, the attendance of Action Park dropped. Parents never supported the park and teenagers grew wise of the injuries and moved away from the park. Bob Brennan was found guilty of money laundering and bankruptcy fraud and spent the next ten years in prison. Since Brennan could no longer support Gene, he ran out of money. The parent company of Action Park declared bankruptcy and the park closed in 1996. The legal environment of New Jersey changed and so did everyone’s mindsets. No one wanted to take the same unbridled risks of the 1980s. In 1998, the park was purchased by Intrawest, the company behind Whistler Mountain. The park was stripped of all its old attractions and renamed Mountain Creek. Since then, it’s been a generic regional water park.