Posted: December 18th, 2008 | Author: Mark | Filed under: Childhood Memories, Vintage Postcards | Tags: amusement park | 3 Comments »
I’ve already mentioned Aquarena Springs in San Marcos, Texas, but there was another great amusement park we patronized, one much closer to home: Six Flags Over Texas. Six Flags was a key factor in establishing the city of Arlington the playground of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex that it is today.
Six Flags opened in 1961 and was conceived as a Disneyland-like theme park, but with a regional market instead of a national one. The late ’50s and early ’60s saw the opening of a number of similar parks, slow-paced family oriented theme parks that showed no sign of the thrill-ride emphasis that would gain favor years later.
My memories of the park are primarily from the 1960s, and until this past summer I hadn’t visited the park since “Senior Night”, 1976. As I expected, a lot had changed in 32 years. I missed the old rides, many having undergone major transformation or complete replacement. Two personal favorites, the La Salle Riverboat Ride (see postcard) and the Spee-Llunker Cave were both lazy water rides that have been replaced by the Roaring Rapids and the shamelessly commercial Yosemite Sam and the Gold River Adventure, respectively. I’ll cover The Cave and other attractions in future posts, but this time I’m going to focus on the Riverboat Ride. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: November 24th, 2008 | Author: Mark | Filed under: Childhood Memories | Tags: amusement park, aquarena springs | No Comments »
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.
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Posted: October 29th, 2008 | Author: Mark | Filed under: Childhood Memories | Tags: amusement park, aquarena springs, vacation | 2 Comments »
I’d imagine that most people, particularly those of my generation and before, have fond memories of family vacations, in particular those that are today often called “road trips”. It’s funny to hear younger people refer to driving vacations that way, because during my childhood most all vacations were road trips, so no such descriptor was needed. My childhood vacations frequently centered around Tennessee and Ohio, my parent’s original “stomping grounds”, although we did hit Disneyland a couple of times. But sometimes a shorter, less epic journey was in order, and Aquarena Springs filled the bill nicely. Located in San Marcos, Texas, just a little over 200 miles from our Fort Worth home, Aquarena Springs was the sort of amusement park that was commonplace in the 1950s and ’60s. Unfortunately those parks, and the values that made them so popular, are all but extinct today.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve already mentioned Aquarena Springs in San Marcos, Texas, but there was another great amusement park we patronized, one much closer to home: Six Flags Over Texas. Six Flags was a key factor in establishing the city of Arlington the playground of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex that it is today.
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