Surviving Spring Break (in the 70s)

The birds are singing, the weather is warming and even though it's been decades since you've had a true Spring Break Vacation, you continue to yearn for those blissful spring days. There's swimming in sub-zero lagoons. Water slides made of concrete. A freshwater wave pool that kills. Your best friend had to leave earlier in an ambulance, and no one is even talking about the baboons on the lawn! 

Not the spring break you remember? We wish it was a fever dream, but it was 100% real if you lived in New Jersey during the 70s. 

Listen to "Surviving Spring Break" and all the memories our followers have shared about Action Park. Can you share your personal account of Jungle Habitat? We can't be the only ones.

Transcript

Eileen Kelly (00:00)
they were just loose. Like hundreds of baboons were just loose in Western New Jersey.

Hi, welcome to Strangers with Kittens. I'm really happy you're here. It's just me. So ⁓ you're not gonna hear the annoying echoing that you heard last week when Carrie was my guest. Sorry about that, you guys. We just got so cozy that we were echoing through each other's microphones. So I've learned from that experience and that won't be happening again.

how are you guys? It's, I don't know. It's, it's spring right now. It's March, almost April. I'm just feeling such a lift from the increased daylight and the not single digit temperatures. I hope you are too. Um, so.

I've talked about Action Park a couple of times in New Jersey and how that was a quintessentially Gen X experience. so Ashley, my producer, posted an Action Park post on TikTok. And we got so many fun responses that I just wanted to read a few of them, because if you are not in this area or didn't grow up in this area or didn't,

have the misfortune slash fortune of going to Action Park. I don't think I would believe people had I not experienced it. These are just a few of the responses. And a few people that responded worked there.

Caroline Carr 54 was a wave pool lifeguard, which talk about setting someone up for failure. The wave pool it was a freshwater pool. And the thing about ocean waves is ocean water is salty. Saltwater keeps you buoyant. It keeps you floating. Freshwater doesn't. So freshwater plus waves equals death.

I mean, the fact that Caroline Carr 54 was a lifeguard at the wave pool, shout out to you for, I'm sure you had a lot of saves. I hope you didn't have any deaths on your watch, because I know there were some. And yeah, you're in the right place. I got, someone just with the name M, the letter M says Millennials, also went to Action Park, so sorry for leaving you out.

⁓ That slide, Stephen HKNYC says, that slide was literally made of cement. The whole place was a death trap and our parents took us there. ⁓ And what's funny is if parents took you there, like I went there on my first date, it was the only time I went. After I got 100 mile an hour enema, I felt like, you know what, I don't really need to come back. ⁓

But if parents did bring their kids there, there was a beer garden, a big German-themed beer garden next to the racetrack, by the way, where you didn't need a driver's license to drive cars at like 80 miles an hour, little race cars. So if your parents brought you, they were getting drunk at the beer garden, which was super fun, and then probably driving drunk home down the tree-lined.

mountainous roads of Vernon, New Jersey. and it's like it's so much fun to talk about, but it's definitely not something I would ever let my kids do. Okay, Michael Malley says that place was so dangerous. We thought it was great. Class Action Park, which is a documentary. I don't know if I've mentioned this is a documentary,

You really got to check it out. There was a fictionalized movie about it. But this one is a documentary talking to real people. the people that talk about it are so cool and so fun. And you just want to be friends with them.

John Doe, 1701, says, me and my friends went there a couple of times. We barely survived. Every time we would leave with bruises and cuts, Monday at school, everyone would know we went to Action Park because of their wounds. And our parents let us go there thinking it was safe like great adventure. Luna11206 writes, I almost died at that place. ⁓

CR1234 said I got so hurt at Action Park. Pleasure Size says the two best days of my life were spent at Action Park. A part of my heart died when it closed.

⁓ Poised beast says that place was the best man. The tube slides were awesome, but the water was freezing cold in all caps lol. I miss that place. The roaring rapids ride was awesome. I would pay to go to a park like that today. ⁓ Never too old to talk says I miss action park, but I don't think I'd take my kids there, but I loved going there as a kid. ⁓ Yeah, it.

agreed on all all fronts. ⁓ Bear's brother says all the best stories started with I almost died.

at Action Park. ⁓ Danny P says, hitting the water shooting out of the cannonball was like hitting a wall. The water was ice cold. Knock the wind out of you. And then I think I talked about this. It's kind of creepy since this guy's name is Jersey Dad, but just keep in mind he wasn't a dad when he was there. I I hope he wasn't. He says, girls would lose their tops at the bottom all the time. I guess he means the bottom of the Alpine slide.

I mean, not the Alpine slide, the Kamikaze. I think it was called the Kamikaze. I don't know. There were a bunch of water slides. the one that was really bad, I think the one that I went on was the Kamikaze. That was the one that gave me the 100 mile an hour enema. ⁓ Girls would lose their tops at the bottom of that all the time. The shallow water would smack their swimsuits just saying. So yeah, there was just like a gathering of guys at the bottom of these rides because the girls would come

half naked by the end because either the force of the water would rip their bathing suits off or when you came to the bottom, you got spit out at the bottom of the slide, there was just like a mat, like a of a yoga mat with, I don't know, an inch of water on it. And you just tumbled and got hurt and your bathing suit came off.

It was really, it was really bad. And when I tell you that I had warm water trickling out of my ass for a couple of hours after that, I'm not kidding. And I didn't say anything to ⁓ Rachel, who you know, and, ⁓ and Scott and Fred, who I was with. I didn't mention it to them at the time, but I just kept thinking, I wonder if they also have.

Warm water trickling out of their asses. It was really unpleasant for a teenage girl who was on her first date and like wanted to look cute. Just kept getting more scraped up and bloodied and humiliated. It really was like extreme, extreme, extreme dating.

Okay, this, I could read these all day.

one place that I may not have mentioned, but it was just reading these responses, was bringing up memories of, I don't know, Western New Jersey was particularly insane in the 70s. And I think it may have closed by

like 1980, I don't know, but there was a theme park in around that area of New Jersey, like West Milford, Vernon Valley, somewhere in Sussex County called Wild Habitat. And people now are like sharing memories of...

Action Park, but I've never heard anyone talk about Jungle habitat. And when I bring it up, most people are totally puzzled. And I'm like, I know I didn't dream this. It was like a wild safari where you drove through this park, and there were wild animals.

we went in the summer. I was young.

And I was like a huge animal lover. If I saw a dead animal hit by a car on the side of the road, I was wrecked for certainly the rest of the car trip, like crying and just could not compose myself. bringing me to a safari park in New Jersey where there were giraffes and lions and bears and baboons.

those I remember because they were like climbing on our car and they would snap your, windshield wipers off. And like, we didn't have air conditioning. You had to roll the windows up because you didn't want your face eaten by a lion. And, so was like a thousand degrees and you just drove through slowly while animals walked around.

suburban New Jersey, African animals walked around suburban New Jersey. And I was the type of kid that thought about, like, where do they go in the winter? They don't belong here. This isn't the right climate. This isn't the right vegetation for them. Like, these are the things that I would think about when I was, single digit age and be stressed out and worried. And not to mention, I got car sick all the time. So it was the most miserable trip for me, and I'm sure everybody around me, because I

I just remember crying and feeling so sorry for the animals and just being so like, people, do the people that work here understand that New Jersey has four seasons and that these animals don't belong in New Jersey? And what are they going to do in January? And what do they eat? Like they don't make lion chow. Like what are they feeding them?

I did a little bit of research because I was like, know I didn't dream this. This happened. And also consulting my older brother, I have two older brothers, but one is three years older than me. And he blocks things out that are unpleasant or he just doesn't care to remember. He's like, I don't remember that happening. And so you feel so gaslit because he just keeps these blinders on and.

It can be like the most consequential memory and he's like, I don't know, because he just, he doesn't want to think about it. so I did a little, a deep dive, not a deep dive. I did a little research to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating and came to find out that the baboons used to get out all the time. They're baboons. They can climb up.

anything. They can escape anything. Like, there's no fence that's too high for them, right? They're basically like very fit, flexible, much stronger humans. So they're going to figure it out. They've got the physical capability. And

they were just loose. Like hundreds of baboons were just loose in Western New Jersey.

They would turn up in people's

backyards. were ransacking. They were ransacking the town pharmacy near the closest town to where this was. Who thinks this up? And then it gets through how many channels of people that say, yeah, baboons in suburban New Jersey seems like a fantastic idea. Like how many pets were, I mean, baboons are the ones with the giant.

not to hate baboons, they have a place in the world and you know they're great but like they have giant they're carnivores they have giant teeth and fangs and they're super strong and they can climb into and out of anything so I don't know who thought it was a good idea for to bring those animals to New Jersey ⁓ but someone did and by the way it was

I guess Warner Brothers because I remember there being Looney Tunes. Like Disney World had Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Jungle Habitat had Bugs Bunny. And I them feeling,

amateurish, like the art work and stuff was not real high end. It wasn't like high production value stuff. I kind of remember like seeing, I don't know, cutouts of Bugs Bunny and maybe Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd and thinking like, I could draw that. Like I could have made that.

But I don't think they were, I think they were licensed, even though they were a little, amateur looking. They were, there was too much of that around for it to just be somebody just stealing intellectual property. I'm assuming it was Warner Brothers, because I think that's who was at like in the Looney Tunes credits.

sanctioned this and was like, yeah, lions in New Jersey sounds fantastic, like a real moneymaker. It was like the inverse of Disney, you know, like Disney, mean, say what you want about Disney, but they do a lot of things right. I mean, I know that one kid was eaten by a crocodile that time, but that was because his parents were letting him swim in a pond and...

that was roped off and said don't go in the water and they did anyway and you know it's Florida there's freaking cougars and alligators and snakes big ones so you know you gotta you gotta have some common sense they can't control everything but this is way before animal kingdom and I don't know I just like how do you how do you deal with

Animal welfare aside, which that's a hard sentence for me to even say, but animal welfare aside, how do you import dangerous carnivorous animals, put them in suburban New Jersey, and you're just like, yeah, that should be good. Let's see what happens.

I don't know if other states did crazy stuff like this, but between Action Park and Jungle Habitat, I mean, I was here for all of it and I love reminiscing about it, but somebody was asleep at the wheel. ⁓ And maybe there were things like this all over. I know there were like, you know, whatever, side, ⁓ roadside, like horrible circuses and terrible things like that where

you know, the animals were not, shouldn't have been there. And that's an improvement. That's something that's gotten a lot better. There are a lot more protections there. So I feel like sometimes I focus on, I don't know, the bad side, the bad parts of having an iPhone or just technology or streaming services like Spotify. And I wanna

point out the positives too. And one of the positives is I haven't seen a baboon in my backyard, so that's good.

But you gotta laugh like cruelty and danger aside, it's just so funny how it was just like anything goes. Let's just try it and say, let's build a cannonball tube that's a loop to loop.

for a human body, like not for a rocket ship to go through, but for a human body to go down and around and out. And that should be good. so that was visible when I went to Action Park. That was one of the first things you saw was this cannonball ride, but it wasn't open.

I came to find out later that that was a ride that the guy who came up with Action Park, I think, came up with and was like, yeah, let's build this and try this. And you got to love the can-do spirit of just like, let's try anything. However, not really with like kids and their bodies and their lives.

I don't know. You should work for NASA But to just be like, let's take somebody that's not me and put them through this thing and see if they live. Like, what? this cat and ball slide.

People, kids who worked at the park would go through it. And I think there was some incentive to be, you know, ⁓ a guinea pig on this thing. But people who worked there, kids who were teenagers who worked there, volunteered to try it and had their teeth knocked out.

and their teeth got embedded in the material inside the water slide. So then when other people went down, they got injured by the teeth that were sticking out inside the slide. They'd get banged up against a sharp human tooth. So they'd come out with cuts on them. What?

New Jersey's theme parks. Great Adventures, the only one that's really survived. I mean, I know that they have something in the action park space now that I can't think of. Not Camelback, but I forget what it's called. But they do have something there that is more reasonable. Things have been modified, closed down, taken away. There are water slides and stuff like that.

It's not the death trap that it once was. mean, there's some risks that comes with any of those places, but you know, action park was like way, way, next level. now that it's getting warm out, I'm just thinking about, you know, people are going on spring break trips and thinking about some, you know, planning summer vacations and, ⁓ yeah, there was, there was nothing like action park and

I will continue to read the replies on TikTok and laugh because, here's another one from Sunny. I worked there and we would take the ski lift up to the top and camp out overnight in the summer and go on the rides in the dark. So many skin knees from the Alpine slide. Wow. It's like, it wasn't dangerous enough. They're like, I'm going to do it blind. ⁓

Someone says they have, they still have a shin scar from the alpine slide. ⁓

It's so fun when you guys interact Still that the answering machine on strangers with kittens calm if you want to share a story about action park if you want to I would be so grateful for anyone that could share a story about jungle habitat because even though I did

confirmed that I'm not hallucinating and it did exist. I haven't actually spoken to anyone who went there. So if you have a story, if you ever went there, if you know anything about jungle habitat and wanted to leave a message, Click on the answer machine icon and leave a message on strangerswithkittens.com or

send me an email at hello at strangerswithkittens.com. That would be so much fun and I'll read it the next episode. Because yeah, as much as I know now that I did not, this was not a nightmare, this was real life, it would be really fun to just. ⁓

be validated in that story. ⁓ OK, this is my last reply. There are seriously, there are like 570 comments. I'm actually practicing ⁓ restraint in not sharing all of them because they're so great.

this is Tyrone shoelaces. Tyrone shoelaces. Action Park, still have scars from the Alpine slide, had to take a friend to the emergency room after a bad fall off the Tarzan swing and saw a guy die at the cliff jump. Wow. So I went off the cliff jump. This was after I,

had three tries on the Tarzan Swing and three full body flops, where my brand new, very expensive, a week working at Grand Union Supermarket as a cashier to pay for this fabulous bathing suit that became completely see-through when I hit the water.

⁓ three separate tries trying to do the Tarzan swing. And for some reason, when the rope would come down and at the bottom of the arc, I, ⁓ I'm almost six feet tall. I, and I was like very just skinny and lanky as a teenager. And I would just unravel like a piece of string at the bottom and then just do a full body flop face plant into the water. So I was bright red.

just slapped over and over again. ⁓ Then did the water slide where I got 100 mile an hour enema. And then went to the cliff diving and I felt like I needed to save face because everyone else was, I don't know, not injured or complaining. So I was like, I really gotta get it together. What is the matter with me? So I was the first one. I ran and jumped and like held my knees and did a cannonball.

Because I just A. wanted to get it over with and B. wanted to not show any fear and just be the first one and I It was so high. I don't know how high it was, but It felt like I was falling forever Then I hit the water I don't when I hit the water or whatever I had the water and something else

It felt like I had gotten slammed in the mouth with a hammer. It felt like someone just wham, hit me in the mouth with a hammer. And then I just sank down, down, down, down, down. And I was like kind of disoriented from hitting my face on whatever and had to get like reorient myself and swim up toward the, follow the bubbles and swim toward the light. Cause I couldn't.

figure out I was, I had gone so deep and and I ripped the skin that holds your top lip to your face. So I was all bloody, you know, when you're wet and then blood looks so much worse. So I was all bloody down my face and chin and neck. ⁓

That was my cliff diving experience. what I don't know that I was aware of, I think because I just was so, I didn't want to even look because I had had so many bad experiences and I was embarrassed and I just like wanted to save face that I didn't even look down at where I was jumping. I found out later that there were just swimmers swimming that didn't know that right above them was cliff diving. They didn't keep it clear. They didn't.

time it to make sure, ⁓ like at the pool diving board, there's a lifeguard sitting there making sure that people go one at a time and the other, a kid has to swim and be at the ladder before another kid can dive. This was anarchy. And on top of the fact that there were the people in the water that had already like had just jumped off the cliff, there were people in the water swimming.

not knowing that there were people above them that were going to land on them. So when this person, when Tyrone shoelaces says that he saw a guy die at the cliff jump, I don't doubt it. I'm shocked it didn't happen daily.

I'm ⁓ happy to have the memories. Glad my kids aren't asking me to take them there, because I wouldn't. ⁓ If you know anyone or you went to Jungle Habitat, please leave a message or send an email or, I don't know, leave a comment on the Strangers with Kittens Instagram or TikTok. ⁓ It would be so much fun to read about it.

Okay, you guys enjoy the rest of your week. Thanks for listening.