The Early Days of Aquarena Springs

No, these aren’t passengers on board the Titanic, but are in fact visitors to Aquarena Springs’ Submarine Theater, waiting as the water level slowly rises. The history of the park, and my family’s patronage of it, was addressed in a previous post, where I stated that the theater was introduced in 1951. That makes these October 1950 photographs, taken by Life Magazine photographer Joe Scherschel, among the first views of the attraction.
Google, in conjunction with Life Magazine, has made available a spectacular archive of photographs taken by Life photographers, and among those are a number from this 1950 Aquarena Springs series. I’ll probably include more of these in future posts, but for now I’ll show just one more, this one revealing aspects of the theater that had changed before I visited the park. Absent is the volcano that became a staple in later years (it would be in the left foreground), and the diving platform shown was gone by the late ’60s. It would be interesting to see a time line of the parks progression and modifications, but such data is hard to come by. Perhaps over time, as further information is accumulated, a proper history can be compiled.