The SS Showboat Mayflower Nantasket

From 2012

A fleet of side wheel steamers plied the waters of Boston harbor in the early part of the 20th Century. The flotilla was reduced to one by a fire in 1919. The Mayflower remained in service until 1948. After its decommission its new owner had the white-hulled ship hauled close to shore several yards from Paragon Park and opened the Showboat for business as a nightclub. Sighting the old paddle-wheeler announced our family's arrival at Nantasket Beach for a day of surf, sun, and fun. My father gave a quarter to the first person to spot the grounded ship.

My father was a Mayflower descendant and we joked that the Pilgrims came over in the Showboat.

We never stopped there.

Nightclubs were for adults.

As a teenager the Surf Nantasket superseded the attractions of Paragon Park and we drove down in out VW every Saturday night to dance at the Surf Nantasket to assorted cover bands like the Techniques, Mods, Chosen Few, and the house band the Rockin' Ramrods, who had a regional hits with BRIGHT LIGHTS BLUE SKIES and SHE LIED. Sometimes bigger groups like Steppenwolf and the Doors played special concerts for teenagers on the South Shore.

In the fall of 1969 I drove to the ballroom in a VW Beetle that I shared with my brother. He was in college and got first shot at the car. He chose Friday nights, which worked out for both of us.

One evening I loaded the car with my sister, her friend, Chuckie Manzi, and a friend of us just back from Marine boot camp. We drank beers on the way down, since the Surf only served soft drinks. We danced to the top hits spun by the DJ from WBZ and then watched the band. After the Surf closed, the five of us got back in the car for the ride home.

It was 11:30 and traffic was light on Route 228. I sped up to 50 around the curve by Paragon Park. The Mayflower was on the right. The parking lot was empty. Passing the darkened ship I spotted oncoming headlights. Without any turn signal the big Olds crossed the four-lane state highway. I stamped on the brakes and then time was accelerated by the force of the head-on collision whipping our car into a spin.

Glass shattered in my face. The impact buckled my door and flung me onto the pavement. Car wheels rolled by my head and then the speed of the present returned to normal.

I sat up.

The steering wheel was in my hand.

The front of the VW had been crumpled by the accident. I ran to the door and peered inside. My sister, her friend, Chuckie, and the marine were cut by glass, but no one was injured badly. I turned to the Olds. A woman sat behind the wheel. She was trying to start the engine. I walked over to the car and rapped on her window. She shouted at me to go away. Her voice sounded drunk in a manly way.

Several cars stopped and their drivers helped us.

A young man pulled open the door of the Olds and took away the woman's keys. Rubberneckers stared out the window. Sirens neared the scene of the crash.

"You're going nowhere."

"But I'm late."

"There's no one in the Showboat. It's closed."

"Oh."

"So you almost killed us to meet someone who wasn't there." I had a temper.

"You're all alive." The young man pushed me away from the Olds. "That's the important thing."

"You're right." I looked back at my sister. She gave me a smile. We were alive. The ambulance took my sister and her friend to the hospital. The police drove us to the station. They wanted our statement.

"The woman drove into us head-on. No lights or nothing."

"She said that you drove into her." The officer was a veteran to teenage crashes on 228. Not a year passed without a fatality on the road.

"She's lying."

"That's what another man said."

The police escorted the woman to a cruiser. She was taller than either officer and had stubble.

"Can we go to hospital now?" I wasn't saying anything more without a lawyer.

Everyone was okay, but later I told my father that there had been something strange about the woman.

“Strange how?”

“Like she was strange.”

“How?”

“Like she could have been a man.”

“A woman that could have been a man.” My older brother laughed. “She must have been some kind of ugly.”

“I guess she was.”

Without a car the Surf was too far away from my hometown. That spring I graduated from high school and in the fall attended Boston College. THe following May my long-haired college friends and I visited Paragon Park for the seasonal opening. We rode the rides and saw the Techniques at the Surf. Both were fun on reefer. None of us went inside the SS Showboat and it burned down in 1979.

This year I searched for any information about the club on Google. There was just a few photos like the rest of my past, but I later learned that the Showboat had been a tranny bar, which explained the Olds driver’s strangeness, but she might have just been a mannish woman. Boston was a Navy town back in those days and those Marine nurses were very masculine.

I have searched for more information about the Mayflower on Google.

The Mayflower had provided passenger service between Boston and Nantasket Beach from the 1890s through the 1930s. In the 1940s she was taken out of service, grounded at Nantasket Beach, and converted into a nightclub called the the Showboat. The Showboat operated for many years, but by the 1970s, it had become a derelict and abandoned structure. In the autumn of 1979, it caught fire under unknown circumstances and burned to the ground.

There was just a few photos like the rest of my past.

“Strange, but the truth is always strange, when we revived the old memories of things gone by."

BRIGHT LIGHTS BLUE SKIES by the ROCKIN' RAMRODS