OLD AQUARIUM TICKET MAKES SPLASH
Woman admitted with great-aunt’s 38-year-old stub
In November 1983, Catherine Cappiello took a trip from New Jersey with her partner to sightsee around Boston. The pair stopped briefly at the New England Aquarium, but because it was the end of the day, they received a “Late Gate Ticket,” which allowed them to return “at anytime in the future.”
On Thursday — now nearly 38 years later — the 85-year-old’s grand-niece, Rachel Carle, took them up on that offer.
“I didn’t think it would work,” Carle, 26, told the Herald. “I was not ready for a confrontation about this, but I might have, for Aunt Kit’s sake, I might have pushed.”
Aquarium President and CEO Vikki Spruill said the late gate tickets were discontinued about 25 years ago, but the ticket desk still sees about one of them a year.
“We honor each valid admission ticket, and this was one,” Spruill said. “Forty years is a long time to be carrying that ticket around, and we’re so glad she did.”
Carle, who grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, drove to Cambridge last fall to start a master’s in public health at Harvard University, and stopped at Cappiello’s home in Trenton, New Jersey, on the way. There, Cappiello gave Carle the old ticket because she was curious whether it would still be accepted.
“I probably changed it from one wallet to another and just kept it in the new one. It was one of those things, I thought that maybe someday I’d get back there but I wasn’t sure,” Cappiello said. Carle had swung back down to New Jersey this weekend to visit, and the two talked to the Herald on the phone as they reminisced together.
Carle waited until the pandemic subsided to try redeeming the ticket on Thursday. Jenni Coppola, the senior cashier at the aquarium’s box office, was working when Carle handed her the ticket.
“I’ve never seen one of these old late gate tickets before, but I have heard that once in a blue moon they do come up, so I was surprised to see it,” Coppola said. Although she described the ticket as “old-looking” with “very wornout paper,” she also noted it had no expiration date on it, “so I just was perfectly fine with accepting it,” she said.
“Usually, when people come up with things, and they’re like, ‘I don’t know if you accept this,’ sometimes it’s just like, an expired brochure or a coupon or something like that,” she added. “But this was different.”
Coppola then showed the ticket to her coworkers and they decided to hang it up in the ticket booth.
As for Carle, she had a “fantastic” time at the aquarium. “It was nice to see people of all ages just exploring the aquarium.”
Carle then shared her story on Twitter, where it has garnered over 2,200 likes as of Saturday night.
“It became an opportunity for people to talk about how much they love going to the aquarium, and this reminder of what it means for places like the aquarium to be part of our community,” she said.