This Little Blog: Never Never Land

I was going through files earlier and came across something quite bittersweet. Never Never Land at our treasured Pt. Defiance Park here in Tacoma. So many wonderful memories from childhood and well into adulthood, this enchanting place we were so very fortunate to have. As a child it was truly like stepping right into your story books. Walking down the cobble lined path in the thick woods and coming upon all the little houses and and characters of this fairy tale land. So real and magical.

I have some very specific memories....the earliest is of going to Never Never Land when I was around 6 with Mom, my Aunt Donnie, my brother Scottie and our cousins Pam and Joey who were exactly Scottie and I's age. Oh what a treat we were in for!

The sight of the gigantic Humpty Dumpty and books brought such excitement, we couldn't run to it fast enough! First stop after passing under the massive books and Humpty Dumpty was the sight of the little dutch boy standing in the water with his finger in the dike and then on to the cute little gift shop where we'd get a big pink billow of cotton candy and balloons, then start down the enchanted trail.

Each stop had a little striped painted post with a mailbox and on the door which you opened to read was the corresponding fairy tale to the scene before us. Looking back, I'd have to say the craftsmanship of these little houses and characters were exceptionally well done and intricate with no detail overlooked. Capturing so completely the true aura of Mother Goose and Grimm's fairy tales.

And some of these tiny houses you could go into! Like the Three Little Pigs and The Hansel & Gretel Ginger Bread House. They were so awesome. I was in pure kid Heaven. I can remember pleading "Mom, can't we build one of these in the yard PLEASE!!"

When we got to the There Was A Crooked Man's House, you entered in to a wood paneled maze, it was dark and a little creepy. Then you had to climb some rickety crooked stairs and at the landing was a very steep silver slide. I, naturally, stood at the top too afraid to ride it down when all the other kids had...my Mom standing down below encouraging me to go ahead, in the end I chose to chicken out and walk back down and back through the dark maze, disappointed in myself.

There were many many more visits to this magical land, I never tired of it. One time my older brother Steve and his friend Bill, who was a complete nut, took Scottie and I out on a summer late afternoon not too long before it would be closing. There weren't as many visitors there at that time. And Bill being his crazy self proceeded to climb into Old Mother Hubbard's house... this was not one of the huts that was to be entered, only a stoop and a large open window ledge to step up to and look in. Well, he just jumped right in there (showtime!)

He got in there and started hugging, kissing and talking crazy to Old Mother Hubbard, oh how we laughed! And Steve was freaking out a bit "Bill, get the hell out of there or we're going to get in trouble!!" Which only made us laugh that much harder. Such a fun memory.

Then another beautiful summer day my Aunt Donnie brought my cousin Pam and the three of us had a picnic on the grass right outside Never Never Land, I still remember enjoying the rasberries we had with our sandwiches on a big checkered blanket. Then going down this wonderful path again. One of the neatest scenes on the path was a crooked wooden bridge with giant striped painted polls and rope along the sides. And high above in the trees was Jack In The Bean Stalk... he was so real. I still wouldn't go down the Crooked Man's House Slide, I don't know what it was about that slide. But this time did go down The Old Woman Who Lived In The Shoe slide...what a hoot! It was a yellow plastic slide..and really fast--I loved it!!

I still have my Humpty Dumpty Bank too, let's see, it's like 45 years old now. I treasure it...I can look up at it as I'm writing. It has been sitting on a shelf in my bedroom all those years.

The love of it did not stop as I grew older...one of my best dates ever was with my highschool sweetheart...he had just graduated in very late June 1979 and I just finishing up my sophomore year. Very late because we hadn't started the school year the previous fall until October 2nd due to a teacher's strike, so we ended up with a very short summer in 1979.

I think it was the first weekend after school was out and he called me and told me to be up and ready to go at 10am on a Saturday morning...he had a surprise. He took me to the park and we spent the whole day...going through Ft. Nisqually, Camp Six (neat sites in the park) and of course Never Never Land. He was so patient as I rode the shoe slide again and again. Such fun!

I rode it like 20 times as a 16 year old! LOL... I wouldn't hesitate even today to climb up and ride it. I was so young, so in love. The world felt perfect walking hand in hand with him through this magical forest in the summer sun, stealing tender kisses where we could.

I still treasure the memory of that day. And laughing to myself right now wondering if he does...does he even remember? LOL. I have forever been more sentimental than most. We broke up five years later... it was not a pleasant parting (most aren't though are they). But I found as the years passed, the bitterness faded and I was just grateful for the wonderful experiences I was fortunate to have. And this day was one of them.

Then the next generation's time came...how fun it was to cart my little neice on our shoulders through the magical trail and watch as she pointed with glee at the Big Bad Wolf. How wonderful those times were. By this time, early 80's, Little Black Sambo was ousted--he was no longer politically correct.

On it went, going again with my husband to be..our first real date in summer 1984...Treasured days. Our last time, which I didn't know it would be, was in Aug. of 1995. There was an advertisement in the Tacoma News Tribune for free admission to Never Never Land if you brought your teddy bear with you. Well, that was right up my alley as I was a teddy bear collector. Allen took Opie and I took Oatmeal (my scrumfy bear who looked like oatmeal). Boy am I now glad we went that day and that we finally had a good camera and actually TOOK pictures for once! I sure wish we had taken alot more. Little did I know that just a few years later it would all be gone.

Tom Tom The Piper's Son

Tortoise And The Hare

Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater

Rub A Dub Dub Three Men In A Tub

Little Boy Blue

Three Little Kittens Who Lost Their Mittens

The Big Bad Wolf

The Three Little Pigs

Goldilocks And The Three Bears

Mr. McGregor and Peter Rabbit

Allen & Peddler

Mary Mary Quite Contrary

These pictures are of course very treasured, the only ones that exist in the family photos of all the years of enjoying this local treasure, which is now sadly like a graveyard. In 2001 they had closed it and took away all the statuary and buildings.

When we went to the park in 2005 only remnants were left. A shock as I wasn't aware it had been closed. The Old Shoe was still there, but very weathered, the slide, steps and roof gone. Also was the Hickory Dickory Dock building (real mice were in it when we were kids) A very eerie sight indeed. I was SO sad and I did not want to stay there at all...so desolate and a ghostly feeling. Now it is completely devoid.

We went to the park this last January, it is now as if it never even existed. It is very hard to see. It certainly speaks to the simpler more innocent times we were so fortunate to grow up in, before all the technology, video games and smart phones. I am go grateful to have been a part of those times and I cherish these wonderful memories and the few pictures we have that do not even begin to capture the magic that was Never Never Land.

As it was virtually all gone 2005.....

The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe

Hickory Dickory Dock

•~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~•

Never Again Land

A Hungarian sculptor gave them life.
Tacoma's favorite theme park gave them purpose.
Then the city took them away.

The Orphaned Sculptures In Hewitt's Tacoma Basement

Granted, he was a fast-talking born salesman given to fits of elation. But this was a dream come true: the grand opening of a fairy-tale theme park at Tacoma’s Point Defiance. The ticket booth was besieged. Car after car arrived, and all of them drove away with the words “Never Never Land” stuck to their bumpers. He built it; thousands came.

Forty-five years later, the visitors have left — forever. The parking lot beside the stack of books where Humpty Dumpty once sat stands empty. The odor of Coney Island hot dogs has been replaced by the smell of Douglas fir. The Old Woman’s shoe, which generations of Tacomans slid down, is boarded up, condemned. Little Bo Peep, Jack Sprat and the Three Little Pigs have disappeared. It’s almost as though Never Never Land never was.

But as the forest inexorably reclaims its curb-lined paths and crumbling foundations, Never Never Land’s uprooted cast lives on in an underground diaspora. Tacoma Metro Parks stores a cracked Humpty Dumpty and other fiberglass figurines, and a nearly identical collection resides in the downtown basement of eighty-one-year-old Tacoma businessman John Hewitt Jr.

Humpty Tastes Brief Freedom From His Tacoma Cell

Hewitt flips through an antique rolodex.

“Here it is,” he says. “Alfred Pettersen. This number must be forty years old.” He picks up the phone and dials. Wrong number.

“He was quite a fellow.”

Eventually, I track down Pettersen’s new number in Victoria, BC, and give him a call. “I was twenty-five going on eighteen,” Pettersen recalls, laughing. In 1963, he had arrived in Tacoma hoping to replicate the Wooded Wonderland theme park he had built for Victoria the year before. On his way into town, he saw an advertisement for the Bank of California. He liked the ad so much that he decided to ask for a loan.

“They asked me what my assets were. I said, ‘What are assets?’ I literally didn’t know what an asset was! Can you imagine?”

Not knowing his assets may have been Pettersen’s greatest asset. He had the dauntlessness of the young and ignorant. His infectious enthusiasm soon had the loan officer sold on his idea. But not on his personal credit.

“He said, ‘Why don’t you call Chauncey Griggs?’”

Pettersen called the Tacoma lumber magnate. Soon Griggs, John Hewitt Jr., and several more investors signed on. The next July, Never Never Land was born. “We did about $1,350 that first day,” says Pettersen, now seventy-one. At fifty cents admission for adults and twenty-five cents for children, that’s a lot of visitors. And they kept coming. By the end of the first year, more than ninety thousand visitors had passed through the gates.

Hewitt eventually became the principal owner of Never Never Land, and in 1986 he sold it to the city. He also owned a stake in another Pettersen park in Hill Island, Ontario. When that one closed in the late 1970s, Hewitt traveled to Boston, bought a Toyota, picked up his son from prep school and headed north to rescue the orphaned statuary. Back in Tacoma, he deposited the figures in the basement of his office, where they remain today.

Planned by museum designer Jean jacques Andre and fashioned by sculptor Ekek Imredy, Hewitt's orphans lack the bright festiveness Disney and others have taught us to associate with cartoons. In their dungeon-like confines at Hewitt's place, the characters seem tragic, not comic...more Brothers Grimm than Mother Goose. The wolf looks depraved, the witch very wicked indeed; the children are lonely and frightened to death.

Elek Imredy's Witch

“The talent of Imredy really shows through, even today,” says Hewitt. “They’re really wistful figures.”

Huddling in the shadows, the figures look like refugees, a trait they share with their maker. Born in Budapest in 1912, Imredy fled Hungary’s bloody 1956 anti-Communist revolution and settled in Vancouver, BC. Well known for his public bronzes, including the iconic Girl in Wetsuit in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, he might seem an odd candidate for a Humpty Dumpty job. Indeed, had fate not intervened (as it seems inclined to do where Pettersen is concerned), Imredy likely would never have known about the gig.

Pettersen hit a snag when building Victoria his first park, Wooded Wonderland. The friend he hired to sculpt the characters took weeks to make just one, and then quit. But the friend promised to help find a replacement. By chance, Pettersen’s friend encountered a sculptor working in the friend’s old home in Vancouver. The sculptor, Imredy, showed him his new technique for making fiberglass sculptures from clay molds. The method enabled him to efficiently produce and duplicate complex pieces. His prototypes were beautiful. Pettersen had his man.

“He was really a hell of a sculptor,” says Hewitt.

Hewitt laments that some Never Never Land visitors may have missed Imredy’s artistry. In the waning days of the attraction, Hewitt complains, when Metro Parks was maintaining it, little attempt was made to adhere to the visions of Imredy and André. Primary colors were used in place of muted tones, he says. The characters’ expressive eyes, the source of their pathos, were repainted by park workers not trained in fine arts.

“There were a lot of subtleties associated with the exhibit that were lost on the city,” Hewitt contends.

Elek Imredy's Baker

But the Hill Island figures languishing in Hewitt’s basement escaped that misfortune. Some may not have been built by Imredy’s hands, but even the ones reproduced from his molds honor the artist’s intentions. And while Pettersen seems content to see the figures in the eternal glow of 1964, they clearly have more than just sentimental value.

Hewitt’s son, John Stanton, would like to see Elek Imredy’s creations in a museum. Hewitt at first seems more pragmatic. “I’d sell them if anyone wanted them,” Hewitt says, standing in his office. Then, smiling, he reconsidered. “What would interest me is if someone wanted to put Humpty Dumpty together again.”

Article Credit to Mark Thomas Deming