by Martin Sklar
On this occasion, as Fritz drove the dirt road, some of the dust the car kicked up fell on the lone man walking along the road in a Western hat and cowboy boots. Fritz had barely stepped out of the parked car when that man was poking his finger into Fritz’s chest. “What are you going with that car here in 1860?” Walt Disney demanded. We had violated a key story principle with our very visible contradiction. The identity of the time period, the foundation of the story of the old West, had been destroyed for our guests. Walt made sure we understood. For me, it was a great lesson, bringing so much that I had read into a real, three-dimensional realm.
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When I returned to Disneyland’s Public Relations department in September 1956, after graduation, I continued to look for ways to best express Disneyland’s magic in publicity and promotion materials. Here are quotes that remain special to me:
Gladwin Hill in The New York Times (February 2, 1958):
What is the secret of Disneyland’s success? Many factors have entered into it. But to pinpoint a single element, it would be imagination—not just imagination on the part of its impresarios, but their evocation of the imagination of the cash customers.
Walt Disney and his associates have managed to generate, in the traditionally raucous and oftimes shoddy amusement park field, the same suspension of disbelief which has been the secret of theatrical success down the corridors of time.… The visitor indulges eagerly in that most ancient of games: “let’s pretend.”
The second was a letter to the editor of Nation magazine on June 28, 1958, by author Ray Bradbury. Responding to a prior critical letter from a guest cited below (Halevy) by describing a day at Disneyland with actor Charles Laughton, whom he called “one of the great theatrical and creative minds of our time,” Bradbury wrote:
I admit I approached Disneyland with many intellectual reservations, myself, but these have been banished in my seven visits. Disney makes many mistakes; what artist doesn’t? But when he flies, he really flies. I shall be indebted to him for a lifetime for his ability to let me fly over midnight London looking down on that fabulous city, in his Peter Pan ride.… I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Halevy truly loved Disneyland but is not man enough, or child enough, to admit it. I feel sorry for him. He will never travel in space; he will never touch the stars.
The third was a special piece we would call op-ed today. It was written by a Disney Studio publicity writer for that very first issue of the Disneyland News. This is what Jack Jungmeyer wrote in his “Under the Gaslight” column:
Yesterday, on the eve of the Disneyland opening, by a kind of Disneyesque Magic, I rediscovered the small town scene of my youth in a park actually 2,000 miles from the place where I was raised.
The name of the town doesn’t matter. But its lively business section and shady residence avenues fit with remarkable accuracy into Walt Disney’s Main Street and its adjacent wonderlands of yesterday, today and tomorrow on the sixty-acre site in this pleasant valley betwixt the mountains and the sea…
I was scarcely inside the entrance, getting my first glimpse down Main Street, before I was swept away in an avalanche of sentimental recollections.
Maybe it was the whistle of the steam engine at the ornate depot that did it all in a moment. Maybe the sight of the shining white paddle wheeler with its high stacks over yonder behind the levee. Or the clang of the horse-drawn streetcar on a trial run down to the plaza. The strangely familiar buildings. The bandstand on the green. The open-faced stores. The whole blessed scene from which I had run away, like hundreds of neighbor boys after the high school years, thinking ourselves cramped by small town restrictions, eager to tackle the big cities off beyond the grain fields, the cotton and tobacco, down the shiny tracks to Kansas City, Memphis, Denver, Chicago, or San Francisco…
I caught sight of a man far down the street. Alone. Quietly regarding the place he had so long envisaged, now complete, ready to bring pleasure and happy satisfactions to the millions who will visit it.
And I was reminded that he, too, was a Main Streeter, never weaned away from the common bond with the great majority of American small town and country folk, their taste and ideals, despite long identification with big cities as an eminent world figure.
The fourth was unsigned, but as I was to learn over the years, the handwriting was unmistakable. It was a clear illustration of just how personal Disneyland was to Walt Disney, and how “hands-on” he was about every detail. These are Walt’s notes on the copy for the brass plaques all guests see as they pass through the tunnels under the railroad trellis, and emerge in Disneyland’s Town Square—the start of their adventure in the Magic Kingdom:
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The city of Anaheim was a most unlikely bride for a marriage to Walt Disney’s “new concept in family entertainment.” I learned much of Anaheim’s history from my wife, whose family moved to Anaheim in 1948. Leah Gerber graduated from Anaheim High School in 1952, when Anaheim’s total population was around 14,000. Today, that attendance number would be seen as a “bad day” at Disneyland Park.
Anaheim was already nationally known in the 1940s and 1950s before Walt selected his site for Disneyland, but it was not the kind of publicity that city fathers rejoice over. Fans of the Jack Benny radio show had long laughed at Mel Blanc’s character’s famous train station call that most listeners outside California probably thought were fantasy names: “Train leaving on track number nine for Ana-heim, A-zus-a, and Cu-ca-monga!”
A list of California cities today will show that Anaheim, as of 2010, was the tenth largest city in the state, with a population of 353,643. Anaheim is the second most populous city in Orange County (after Santa Ana) and also the second largest in land area.
The city’s name is a composition of “Ana,” derived from the Santa Ana River that flows through what was once the eastern edge of the city, and “heim,” German for “home”; thus, when it began in 1857 as a colony of German farmers and vintners, its pioneers thought of it as their “home by the river.” The city was incorporated in 1876.
Disney’s relationship with Anaheim began soon after Walt and Roy O. Disney engaged the Stanford Research Institute “to determine the economic feasibility of the best location for a new project—Disneyland.” Buzz Price was given the assignment.
“I asked Walt if he had a bias about the location for his Magic Kingdom,” recalled Buzz many years later. “Absolutely not,” Walt responded. “You tell me where the best location is.”
Price analyzed potential sites in the Southern California area, ultimately focusing on Orange County after considering population trends, accessibility, and climate factors. He selected, and recommended to Walt and Roy Disney, 160 acres of orange groves in Anaheim, just off the still-under-construction Santa Ana Freeway at Harbor Boulevard.
“We hit it right on the nose…dead center,” Buzz enthused to me shortly before his death at age eighty-nine in 2010. “That was the perfect place for it.”
Although enough land was available (the noted 160 acres were purchased initially for an average of $4,500 per acre from seventeen property owners; today the Disneyland Resort, including two parks and three hotels, encompasses 456 acres), there were hidden issues never reported in any media. Keith Murdoch, the highly respected city manager of Anaheim from 1950 to 1976, told me about the biggest concern: “You have to remember that we were still less than 15,000 population in 1954. Several of our city council members were worried about what they perceived to be a ‘carny’ environment; in those days, we only had the old amusement parks like The Pike in Long Beach to go by.”
Murdoch and the farsighted Anaheim mayor, Charles Pearson, found the solution for assuring Disney the city’s cooperation if they purchased the land: a trip to the Disney Studio in Burbank and a storyboard presentation of the concept for Disneyland by Walt Disney himself. As I have told many people through the years, Walt could sell anything, anytime. He was a great salesman because he totally believed in his produc
t. Walt made the sale to the Anaheim councilmen that day, and ground was broken for Disneyland a year before its Grand Opening on July 17, 1955.
That opening day will forever live in infamy in Disney lore. It’s known as “Black Sunday,” with many events that time has memorialized as urban legends:
Ladies wearing high heels sank in wet asphalt: true. Fresh ground cover, mostly asphalt, was poured during the previous day; when the temperature soared to a hundred degrees, the asphalt softened and became perfect for entrapping heels. It would be surprising to see today, but 1955 was a time when women did wear dressy shoes to amusement parks—and always to grand openings.
There were not enough drinking fountains because Walt “forced” thirsty guests to buy Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, both sold in the park at that time: true, and also definitely false. There were not enough drinking fountains because an Orange County plumbers’ strike had halted all work on water elements. The strike was settled several days before the opening, forcing Walt to make the executive decision to finish the bathrooms and toilets, and “let them drink Coke.”
The official invitations would have brought 10,000 to 15,000 guests to a park whose actual capacity no one knew, but twice as many people showed up: true. Counterfeit tickets were everywhere, and no one respected the various times indicated on their tickets, designed to spread the crowd throughout the day.
The result of all this was huge queues for the attractions, and many pinch points—areas where openings in passageways narrowed, resulting in jams very much like rush hour on the California freeways. One of the worst was the entrance to Fantasyland. Crossing the drawbridge was nearly impossible—there were stories about the choice language some celebrities used in trying to reach the Peter Pan or Dumbo attractions while parked with their children on the castle’s drawbridge.
The black-and-white kinescope recording of the Disneyland Grand Opening is quite a sight to see. It was the most ambitious live television show ever attempted at that time, with ABC Television positioning seventeen cameras to catch the action—and the bloopers. Walt had asked television and radio star Art Linkletter to be one of the hosts, and he in turn enticed two of his friends into being cohosts: actors Bob Cummings and Ronald Reagan. Walt was everywhere, dedicating the whole park in Town Square with California governor Goodwin Knight, and introducing each of the various lands at their entrances. The frequent “Am I on?”—and seeming surprise on the hosts’ faces when the red light must have signaled “Yes!”—made the show look like amateur hour. But the audience was huge for its day, and by the end of that very first summer, Disneyland had welcomed its one-millionth guest.
I have vivid memories of Black Sunday. As the junior member of the Public Relations team, I had started the workday exactly where I ended the previous one: in the PR office, located in the old homestead that had been purchased with the land, and converted to the park’s Administration Building. However, our offices had been totally transformed for the occasion, taken over for a local television segment that took place during the last five minutes of each hour, anchored by Los Angeles television personality Hank Weaver. I was a runner for anything they needed—coffee, water, and, of course, paper and carbon paper for their typewriters.
My assignment for the second half of the day was simple: wander the park and offer support to any reporter or photographer who saw my badge and sought my help. No matter where I roamed, it was a “people zoo,” summed up for me when Davy Crockett himself rode up to me on his horse, noted my I.D., and pleaded: “Marty, help me get out of here before this horse kills somebody!” I did manage to help Fess Parker (and his horse) reach a backstage area.
The rest of the day was a blur. By nighttime, I was headed back to Long Beach, where I was still living with my parents. I believe I stopped at every one of the friendly bars along that seventeen-mile stretch!
Media reaction to Black Sunday immediately influenced everything all of us at Disneyland in Anaheim and at WED Enterprises in Glendale did that first summer.
H. W. Mooring in the Los Angeles Tidings (circulation: 59,777): “Walt’s Dream is a nightmare—a fiasco the like of which I cannot recall in thirty years of show life.”
Los Angeles Mirror News (circulation: 232,176):
“CROWDS GRIPE OVER LONG WAITING LINES EVERYWHERE—DISNEYLAND, ORANGE COUNTY’S NEW $17 MILLION PLAYGROUND, WAS A LAND OF GRIPES AND COMPLAINTS AGAIN TODAY, AS A HUGE, MILLING THRONG OF 48,000 [SIC] PEOPLE HAD THE PLACE BULGING AT THE SEAMS.”
United Press dispatch in Alameda, California’s Times-Star (circulation: 8,139): “The opening was a confused mess. The first headache was the bumper-to-bumper traffic for seven miles before reaching the park, dubbed ‘the worst traffic mess we’ve ever seen’ by police.”
Cora Ulrich in the Santa Ana Register (circulation: 32,557): “Many citizens of Anaheim are beginning to regard the opening of Disneyland with dismay and ‘mixed emotions’—the kind the man had when he pushed his mother-in-law over the cliff in his new Cadillac.”
Syndicated columnist Sheila Graham: “To sum up, Disneyland was a disappointment…but don’t be discouraged, boys and girls—Walt Disney has always been a smart trader, and I’m sure there’ll be some changes made.”
Sheila Graham was correct. In fact, Walt was focused on fixing the challenges that caused many of these negative media reviews even before he left the park on Black Sunday.
For the PR staff, the plan was simple: get every one of the media outlets to come back to Disneyland without the mobs of people, so they could actually see the park—and experience the attractions that were so unique in the amusement world: Adventureland’s Jungle Cruise, Tomorrowland’s Flight to the Moon, Fantasyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight, etc. To accomplish this, Public Relations Director Ed Ettinger and Publicity Manager Eddie Meck devised a strategy to invite each news organization to an early dinner at the Red Wagon Inn on Main Street, or the Plantation House restaurant on Frontierland’s Rivers of America—followed by a sampling of the park’s adventures and entertainment. After working all day, those evenings made for a full summer for all of us. We hosted four Los Angeles newspapers (Times, Mirror News, Examiner, Herald-Express); the wire services (Associated Press and United Press); the Hollywood trades (Variety and The Hollywood Reporter); the local staffs of key national newspapers, like The New York Times; and even international media. Radio and television also received attention, although the local influence of television news was not significant in 1955.
The plan started working almost immediately. Witness this column by Dick Williams, entertainment editor of the Mirror News:
If you’re planning a trip to Disneyland, go out in the late afternoon, arriving anytime between 5 and 6 P.M.… I paid the amusement park another visit… We had dinner at Swift’s Red Wagon Inn… Lines everywhere moved swiftly, with only brief waits… In my opinion, the entire park looks much more captivating by night than day.
These evenings proved to be a heady experience for a twenty-one-year-old neophyte. It brought me introductions and contacts with the top news media personalities and staffs of the day: editors, city editors, and reporters local and national, including Bob Thomas of the AP and Vernon Scott of UPI. What an on-the-job education!
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In September, I returned to my formal education as a senior at UCLA. The following year before I graduated and resumed working at the company in September 1956 was a true learning experience for everyone associated with Disneyland. The park was a huge success overall, with 3.6 million in attendance in its first year—but there were many ups and downs. The gates were closed Mondays and Tuesdays (until going to a seven-day operation on February 6, 1985), and weekday attendance was sparse, because the vital national and international tourism that would reach a steady 40 percent of total attendance in future years had not yet materialized.
The guests taught Walt and his staff many key lessons. For instance, the live Mickey Mouse Club Circus, so popular on the television show, was a flop the f
irst Christmas season; visitors came to ride Dumbo the Flying Elephant—but not to see elephants in a live circus.
Walt Disney also was quick to correct the few mistakes he did make. Noting the popularity of Autopia, where young drivers, usually accompanied by a parent, steered real gasoline-powered, scaled-down sports cars along ribbons of highway, Walt added a Midget Autopia in Fantasyland. But it actually violated his own intent that Disneyland would be a place “where parents and children could have fun—together!” Midget Autopia was accessible to only young children, and after a year it was gone.
The failure of the Mickey Mouse Club Circus did not in any way slow Walt and his entertainment and marketing teams from launching a whole array of special events: Date Night at Disneyland on Saturday summer nights; Big Band Nights featuring the great names of the day (Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, and more); New Year’s Eve parties; and themed parades by the bushel, topped in the early years by the 1959 celebration featuring Meredith Willson leading seventy-six trombones—all playing in unison that famous tune from The Music Man.
Two of the most popular were Grad Nite and Dixieland at Disneyland. Grad Nite began as a request from local parent groups for a safe and sane way for their high school graduates to spend the most important night in their young lives. The event was launched in 1961, with 8,000 attending from twenty-eight Los Angeles area schools. The rules were very strict: obviously, no alcohol, tobacco, or drugs; no attendee could drive (only group transportation was allowed, in order to prevent attendees from getting behind the wheel of a car after too much celebrating); a strict dress code (no “revealing” clothes or school-related jackets); and one chaperone for every twenty students from each school. The program has been so popular that the number of graduates attending passed the five million mark in 2009. When Grad Nite celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2011, there were seven separate nights from May 12 through June 16, with 1,052 schools participating, and an attendance of 133,000 graduates!