A billion years before I moved to the Theme Park Capital of the World, I visited my first theme park ever. At the age of five, my aunt Leona (Neuna), my father's older sister and my godmother, took me to a theme park called Pleasure Island in what turned out to be the last year of its operation - 1969.
Since I was so young, I grew up remembering only fragments of that visit and with Neuna passing away a few years after that special day, there wasn't much reminiscing to be done through the years. It got to the point that by my early 20s, I started thinking the fun-filled day at an awesome amusement park was just a dream. After all, according to my random snippets of memory of it, it was on a scale comparable only to what I would much later discover after coming to Orlando. No amusement park in New England could come close to what I thought I saw when I was five. I was shaky even on the name of the park since I never heard of a place called Pleasure Island anywhere in the vicinity of my hometown in northern Rhode Island.
This confusion continued for years and even when I'd get into feelings of nostalgia over happier days in my youth and decided to search out where this park might have been, I ran against brick walls. Was it Crescent Park in East Providence, RI? Nope. I'd been there as a teen and young adult before it became defunct and it was small and dinky compared to my visions of my dream park. Was it Jolly Cholly's in North Attleboro, Mass.? Again, way too small and I had been there many times as a young boy, even with my normally non-travelling parents. For years I'd come to assume that, if the visit was real, we'd gone to Riverside Park (now Six Flags New England) in Agawam, Mass. near Springfield. Now that's a haul from Woonsocket but it did fit in that I remembered it'd been a long ride to get there. But I never since had visited Riverside and it became a bigger park under the Six Flags ownership only after I'd moved to Florida. An online glimpse of what Riverside entailed didn't ring any bells either.
In my dreams of that special trip with Neuna I remembered a big sign at the entrance and as we drove up through the parking lot I could see the tops of some landmark rides. I clearly remembered an awesome seemingly full-sized silver rocketship. I remembered an old tyme chitty chitty bang bang car ride and a lighthouse by a lake. I remembered a boat ride and a western town section. I seemed to recall being afraid of some animals in a petting zoo area and, of course, I shied away from most "scary" rides. I don't remember my aunt chiding me for being a bit prissy like her sister Ruth did during my summer trip with her though. I think my godmother knew and was comfortable with the fact, even though I was just five, that I was a bit of a, shall we say, delicate boy.
But today I finally found it. It was real!
I stumbled across an article about a long-defunct park started by a former Disneyland general manager called Pleasure Island. He built it soon after leaving Disney and the park, during its short 10 year existence was billed as the "Disney Land of New England." It was in Wakefield, Mass. which, north of Boston, is much further than I would have expected Neuna to drive. But, if it was what it appears to have been, it would have attracted visitors from even much further away, much like a world class theme park today would.
I can't say I remember this Moby Dick feature in the water but being as I was very delicate, I might have blocked that memory out due to sheer horror. Either the concept of a fake creature that big possibly coming to life or the gruesomeness of "harpooners" trying to "kill" it (ie. us riders, since I think it was an immersive-style experience where the narrator of the boat tried to excitedly get us ready to "take 'er down, boys!" very much like the Lake George fort recruitment mentioned in the FLASHBACK linked above....or maybe I'm imagining that part of it?)
And I'm pretty darned sure I had a pennant like the one pictured above for years, but like so much ephemera from our youth, it was lost a long, long time ago.