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Concrete sledding
The Alpine Slide, which was the park's first ride two years before Action Park opened on July 4, 1978, was bought from a manufacturer in Europe by park owner Eugene Mulvihill."The Alpine was on a big hill, not a little baby hill," said park security guard Jim DeSaye. "It’s basically you on a sled on a concrete track. And there is nothing keeping you on."
The healing potion
Apparently, it was rare for visitors to come out of rides unscathed, particularly the Alpine Slide. So what do you do when someone arrives at the bottom with rug burns from head to toe?"I can’t believe we used it, actually," Thomas Flynn, who worked in first aid at the park, told Mental Floss. "It was like 70 percent alcohol and 10 percent iodine. Imagine spraying 70 percent alcohol on a rug burn. We’d spray these dudes down and take bets on who would do the craziest dance. They would run out of first aid like we had just set them on fire."
Nothing was wrong with a ride that killed a man
After work hours on July 8, 1980, Action Park employee George Larsson Jr. rode down the infamous Alpine Slide ride. As he did, according to Mental Floss, he was flung from the track, hit his head on a rock and went into a coma before dying a few days later. “The ride didn't injure Larsson. It was a rock 25 feet away that hurt him,” park spokesperson Wesley Smith told reporters, according to the oral history. The state's Department of Transportation also found nothing wrong with the ride.Five people died after incidents at the park in the nearly 20 years it was in operation. According to the Mental Floss story, 176 total deaths were
reported in 125 amusement parks across the country from the 1980s to 1997.
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'It was like a Hot Wheels track'
The Cannonball Loop, which debuted in the summer of 1983, was only open sporadically for the next 13 years, and with good reason.To start, Andy Mulvihill, Eugene's son, said "there wasn't really any engineering" and the testing was "just trial and error."DeSaye described it elegantly as a "giant metal tube on a tower with a 360-degree loop and people would go shooting out of it."Alison Becker, who visited the park, said: "It was like a Hot Wheels track with a friggin’ loop in it. No human should do that. I never saw it open. It was like a relic of a more dangerous time."