Some years back, I was riding in a car on a country road outside the small Ohio town where my mother was raised. I noticed something back in the trees. It was a decaying wooden structure that had once been a smallish roller coaster, the featured ride in what had once been a local amusement park that probably had gone out of business in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

The land hadn't been needed for anything, so nature just sort of reclaimed it, growing in an around what was left of the park until it was almost invisible to the eye.

When I visit Virginia and see the town where I grew up, I usually see two things -- I see Fairfax as it is now, and maybe in the background I see it as it was when we moved there in 1963. Ball fields, restaurants, movie theaters and stores that I frequented during my high school years have been gone for a long time, but to me, it would take just a couple of steps sideways -- not even back -- at the right time and I'd be there, looking at them again.

There are 11 different major league baseball stadiums where I saw games as far back as the '50s and as recently as the '90s that no longer exist. Things change, and it's easy to lose track if you don't keep up.

I wonder how many people remember that for five years in the 1960s, there was a theme park in New York City that was bigger than Disneyland.

That's right, from 1960-64, in the northeastern part of the Bronx, the 85-acre park known as <a title="Freedomland USA" href="http://www.benros.com/images/Freedomland%20Images/freedomland.htm">Freedomland USA</a> operated as a U.S.-history themed amusement park. Disneyland, which had opened five years earlier, was only 65 acres, and it was way out west in Southern California. The chances that I would ever see it as a kid living in Virginia were pretty bleak, but we went to New York every year to visit our relatives on my dad's side of the family.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/freedomland3.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1512" title="freedomland3" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/freedomland3-300x127.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="127" /></a>For some reason, I have it in my mind that we didn't actually go to Freedomland in 1960 or 1961, but the next two years -- when I was 12 and 13 -- we went once each summer.

We didn't go in 1964, which was the first year of the New York World's Fair, and Freedomland closed at the end of that season. I figured it had been killed by the Fair, but what I read now says that it was never really doing that well financially and it had operated for five seasons without making a profit.

The park was actually shaped sort of like the United States, and its seven different themed areas each represented a part of the U.S. We saw the Chicago Fire re-enacted in one part and the San Francisco Earthquake in another. Ironically, the part devoted to the future was the Southeast, mostly because of Cape Canaveral.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/MapOfFreedomland.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1513" title="MapOfFreedomland" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/MapOfFreedomland-300x184.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="184" /></a>Amusement parks weren't a big park of my childhood. I didn't see Disneyland until I was 28 years old, and I was 30 when I finally made it to Disney World in Florida.

I may be leaving some out, but I think Freedomland was pretty much the only theme park of my childhood. In the 1970s, Kings Dominion and Busch Gardens came to Virginia and I saw them both.

I've been to some pretty good parks -- the thrill rides at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Southern California are pretty great -- but I'm not sure I ever saw a park that thrilled me as much at the time as Freedomland.

Five years was all it lasted.

I wonder how many people even remember it.

I know I'll never forget it.

&nbsp;

&nbsp;