Hidden Mickey 5: Chasing New Frontiers

by David Smith

  To the left, the canoe passed an area where prior to 1998, a large waterfall flowed. Blain remembered the waterfall from when he was a kid playing on the island. The lower, larger falls, used to be called “Cascade Falls” and was part of the “Mine Train Thru Nature’s Wonderland” ride that existed decades before the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was built. The short section of the old Nature’s Wonderland mine train track could still be seen along the bank of the river and used to pass behind the falls. Cascade Peak and subsequent falls were demolished because the structure had become unstable. However, before it was removed, Cascade Peak also had two smaller falls which used to feed into the large falls. The three falls collectively were called the Three Sisters Falls. Typical of Disneyland, the purpose of the falls was more than just scenic effect: the falls—and subsequent pumps used to move the water—were an elaborate filtering system used to keep the Rivers of America relatively clean. Now, beyond the foliage that curtained the river, screams of riders on the run-away mine train Big Thunder, could be heard, a sound Blain could remember hearing even as a little kid when he and his friends would play “Ditch-em” on the island.

  Just beyond where Cascade Falls used to fall, the river turned to the right and emerged from the tranquil setting behind Tom Sawyer Island and into the broad expanse of Frontierland. Up ahead, the majestic Mark Twain Steamship sat moored at her dock and passengers could be seen boarding the white Disneyland icon, climbing steps to the second and third decks or grabbing front-row seats on the bow. To the right, as Blain straightened out the line the canoe was taking, its bow now directly in line with New Orleans Square, a small dock extended out from the island. It was here that a nice view point was located with benches that looked out over the bend of the river and the broad vista of Frontierland. A small snack bar used to be located at the end of the small dock, the same one that, ten years earlier, Blain and his friends would purchase lemonades from after a round of Ditch ‘em. Now, only benches existed on the end of the dock.

  Blain glanced over to the dock and caught sight of a family sitting on the benches. Two young boys, no more than ten years old were hanging over the railing, watching intently a family of ducks that were wading in the water under the wood planks of the pier. Looking up at the sight of the canoe, their attention now diverted from the ducks, the boys waved enthusiastically to the people in the canoe passing by not more than twenty feet away.

  Blain smiled and gave a short wave to the boys. As the bend turned a little to the right, Blain lifted his paddle from his left side over his head with an effortless and smooth swing. Without thinking, he spun the paddle in his hand before bringing it down onto the river to his right.

  “Smack!” The flat part of his paddle hit the water and shot a stream of water to his right. The fountain of water ran from the contact point of his paddle right out to the base of the pier where the family was sitting. The boys watched in awe as the fan of water touched down right at the edge of the pier where they were hanging on the rails.

  “Wow! Did you see that, Dad?” The one boy said, looking back at his father then pointing in the direction of the canoe.

  “Hey, that was cool,” answered the man, nodding his head. He and his wife were looking over a guide book and not paying a lot of attention at the moment to what the boys had seen.

  Blain glanced back and smiled, tipping his coonskin cap in the direction of the young boys who waved earnestly back. Suddenly, Blain had a moment of Déjà vu and felt goose bumps stretch across his skin as he remembered a day many years back of his own experience, of seeing a canoe pass by.

  Blain smiled; for the first time since he started working the canoes, he recalled the declaration he had made to Jimmy and Mark that day so many years ago, sitting on a similar pier he had just passed, and seeing a canoe ride operator do exactly what he had just done.

  “Someday,” Blain remembered saying to his friends. Someday he was going to work on the Canoes.

  Blain realized that his declaration of “Someday” was no longer the case. Someday was today.

  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs debuted in 1937. The film brought in a total domestic gross of $66,596,803. The film brought Walt Disney out of debt and opened the door to more animated feature films and ultimately Disneyland.

  Statistics from “Research About.com”

  CHAPTER 7

  Dreams and Visions

  Friday, September 23rd, 1966

  5:15am

  It had been almost three months since Nathan Duncan had held Walt Disney’s pendant in his palm and seen the visions in his mind. Almost every night since, Nathan would fall asleep and dream of what it had meant. What made his dreams—and the previous vision he had when he had touched the pendant—so peculiar was that they were all in full color. Every detail about the vision and his subsequent night dreams were vivid and clearly in “Technicolor.” Nathan had never dreamed in color. He doubted anyone else did either. He also could feel the other senses he experienced in the dreams; the weight of the bags he held, the texture of the concrete on his hands climbing the narrow bridge. These were not apparitions or phantoms, he felt. These were telling visions.

  And if he could determine their meaning, Nathan knew the visions were telling him something of great importance.

  He also wanted to see more.

  He wondered more than once if this was how Walt Disney dreamed. Maybe the pendant offered something magical, powerful; something supernatural. After months of considering all that he had seen, Nathan felt that he understood how Walt knew so many things before they happened. He had read newspaper and magazine articles about how everyone told Walt Disney that his ideas would be foolish, that his theme park and his movies would never be successful. Disney never argued his ideas, Nathan read; Walt would only say that, “People just don’t see things the way I do.”

  Now, perhaps, Nathan knew the source of that inspiration and confidence…and maybe that unique foresight.

  Today, he would see the meaning of one of those visions—not in the void of light as in sleeping dreams, but in broad daylight.

  Nathan had come into work during his normal, early morning shift. Later that morning, after taking an early lunch at the Inn Between, the newly finished cast member cafeteria near the Administration Offices and just inside the “Cast Member’s Only” door that lead back stage from the end of Main Street near the entrance to Tomorrowland, Nathan realized he forgot his wallet in his street clothes back in his locker.

  Jogging to the Cast Member’s lockers about three hundred yards around the backstage area, Nathan pulled up to a stop at the corner of the two-story locker room. Up ahead of him, he watched as two armed men behind the open back door of an armored truck took bags of money that were loaded on a wheeled cart similar to one that looked to Nathan like a bellhop’s cart. The large bags were being transferred from the cart into the heavily armored box-like truck.

  Below the second floor men’s locker room was what was called, “Cash Control,” the main terminal for all the cash that came through the Park. Really no bigger than a typical single-room office, from what Nathan could see when he would glance in the open “In” or “Out” one-way traffic doors, the interior of the Cash Control room looked more like a small bank with barred teller-like openings along the length of the counter that stretched across most of the room. A single ‘Authorized Personnel Only” door was set in the wall next to the last teller slot; Nathan had seen that the door and subsequent locks that ran up the side of the door along its frame, were formidably constructed.

  From the various merchandise shops to the restaurants, from the small vendors who sold the ice cream sandwiches and balloons, popcorn and drinks, to the main gate ticket sellers, all the cash was walked in by the managers, supervisors, or closing leads from each location, to this building. It was right here, in front of the Cash Control building, that the transfer of accounted funds were then moved from the Park, to the armored vehicle, and eventually to the Bank of America main branch
in Anaheim, a bank that was set up initially for all the banking needs of Disneyland when the Park first opened in 1955. Since there were no banks in the area set up to handle the kind of currency that Disneyland was projected generate, “B of A” was the institution that Walt and the WED Corporation had decided on to handle not just the sizable income but payroll would also be an enormous issue that no bank in the area had handled to that degree.

  As Nathan slowly ascended the stairs to the second floor, he watched the procession of bags being handed from one man next to the cart to the man inside the back of the armored truck. He could tell that the bags were heavy by the way the men grunted a little as they moved the bags from the cart to the truck.

  In Nathan’s vision months back, while holding the pendant in Walt Disney’s apartment, one of the instantaneous images was of bags being passed from someone to him. He pictured the vision again, as he did almost every night for the past three months: The bags were large and made of white, substantial canvas. And along the top and bottom of each bag was leather. Silver rivets, like those that Nathan had on his work jeans at home, attached the leather sections to the canvas. And each bag had a thick, leather handle.

  In front of him, the two men handling the bags from the cart, overseen by two additional men on the sidewalk in suits and ties and Disneyland name tags, handed a third man inside the vehicle one bag after another. One of the men wearing the suit had a clipboard in his hands and he was checking off items on sheets attached to it as each bag passed from the cart into the back of the truck.

  And, as Nathan watched in a slight daze, he saw that each bag being transferred was white with leather trim, silver rivets, and thick leather handles.

  Exactly as the ones he had seen in the vision.

  Nathan reached the top of the stairs to the men’s locker room thinking about the scene he just witnessed below and of the correlating image that had been burned into his memory within the pendant’s vision when he had seen white canvas bags being passed to him. He was sure the bags below were identical to the bags of this particular vision. And because he was sure, he felt compelled to make sure that the vision he had seen would come to fruition. He realized he would need help to carry out what he seemed destined to do.

  He knew exactly whom to call.

  “I wanted something alive, something that could grow, something I could keep plussing with ideas; the Park is that.”

  Walt Disney

  CHAPTER 8

  The Look

  Saturday, June 24th, 2010

  9:12 am

  The thrill of seeing Disneyland for the first time was not lost on Malaysia or her sister. Taking the Marriott hotel shuttle to the Park, the two sisters, wearing baseball caps, sunglasses and freshly colored hair, were incognito, at least in their minds. Laura and Malaysia blended in with the thousands of other Disney visitors, all who were as excited about going to Disneyland as they were. In reality, they didn’t need to do much to hide their appearance. Among the multitude of guests, they were just two more among the tens of thousands of people. The fact was that almost everyone there was more interested in the Park the few paid even scant attention to fellow guests wandering about.

  Their enjoyment, however, was impossible to hide as they first walked down Main Street U.S.A., seeing the delightful window displays in front of the Emporium; they got ice cream cups at the Carnation Ice Cream shop and some taffy in the candy shop. They took pictures of themselves entering the Park, in front of the iconic image of Mickey Mouse done in flowers at the Main Gate. They had other people take pictures of them together with the Rag-Time piano player at Coke Corner, and with “Mary Poppins” in front of the Opera House.

  Within the first forty minutes, the pair only made it as far as the hub of Main Street in front of the Castle. They took in so many other sights and sounds: the horse-drawn trolley with the distinctive sound of the horse’s horseshoe-clad hoofs clop-clopping upon the street, the red fire truck, the driver tooting the old-fashioned balloon-horn, and the double-decker bus that had passengers sitting along the top rows looking out over the street, many taking pictures. They had yet to go on a single ride and they were already laughing and enjoying themselves, feeling like little kids.

  The two grabbed an empty bench, one of many which lined the planters that surrounded the hub at the north end of Main Street. The benches around the hub encircled a beautiful bronze statue of Walt Disney holding hands with Mickey Mouse; the life-sized sculpture was on a raised circular platform in the center of the large, centralized planter, making it the focus of everyone that walked near and around the hub. Perhaps second only to Sleeping Beauty’s Castle just to the north of the hub or the flowered planter of Mickey Mouse at the Park entrance, the symbolic monument of Walt and Mickey was one of the most photographed objects in Disneyland. The sisters realized, perhaps more subconsciously, what Walt Disney must have had in mind when he built this wonderful Park: It wasn’t about rides or shows…it was about impressions, perceptions… It was about creating a unique frame of mind.

  After Malaysia and Laura sat down on the bench in front of the castle, Laura pulled out the Park map they had been given when they first entered the Park. The two were still trying to catch their breath after having their picture taken with the piano player at Coke Corner, which prompted uncontrolled laughter from the two when the piano player immediately started serenading the girls in an obviously exaggerated rendition of the song, “A Whole New World” from the Disney animated movie Aladdin.

  Finally, after calming down, Laura pointed to something on the map in the upper right corner.

  “Let’s see what ‘Space Mountain’ is, Mal,” Laura said, reading the information about the white-spired futuristic ‘mountain’ that rose up in Tomorrowland.

  Malaysia, still breathing hard from laughing, was gazing at Sleeping Beauty’s Castle directly in front of her. As a child, Malaysia dreamed of being a princess, living in a castle of her own…like those she had visited in various European countries. Yet, here at Disneyland, for the first time since she was little, she truly did feel like she was living inside a fairytale.

  “I’m sorry, Laura. What did you say?”

  Laura rolled her eyes. “I said let’s go on Space Mountain…it sounds fun. It says here, ‘Experience a winding, soaring race through space in this roller-coaster-type ride,” Laura read from the Park map which had short descriptions of each attraction.

  “Hey, I’m up for that! Let’s go. Which way?” Malaysia asked enthusiastically, looking around. As if suddenly getting a second wind, Malaysia pulled her sister up from the bench by the arm. “Come on Laura! Where are we going?”

  “According to the map, it’s that way,” Laura said standing, pointing to her right toward the entrance to Tomorrowland.

  Hooking her arm in Laura’s, Malaysia smiled broadly. “I’m so excited we are doing this! This place is amazing.”

  Looking up as they walked towards Tomorrowland, they admired Matterhorn Mountain that rose majestically on their left near the entrance to Fantasyland. Scaled back at exactly one-one hundredth the size of the real mountain in Switzerland, they could see bobsleds speeding through caverns within the one hundred forty-seven foot tall peak. “I can’t believe they have a Matterhorn here,” Malaysia said, her arm still linked to Laura’s.

  “Guess they knew we were coming!” Laura said with a grin.

  The two sisters almost skipped into Tomorrowland, heading to the right of the castle and passing under the swirling “Astrojets,” the symbolic centerpiece attraction at the entrance to Walt Disney’s Land of the Future. Passing Star Tours on their right and Buzz Lightyear’s Astro-Blasters on the opposite side, the girls took in the constantly moving world of Tomorrowland with eyes that danced about, looking at all the sights and hearing the cacophony of sounds that surrounded them.

  As they came to the entrance to Space Mountain, they looked up at the spired-topped mountain ahead of them.

  “Looks interesting,” Laura sa
id as they walked under the entrance sign to the ride. The wait time said, “25 minutes.” Joining the line to Space Mountain, the girls passed the time in line reading about other lands and rides in the park on their Park map.

  “There is Frontierland and New Orleans Square…ooh, that’s where the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is located. I’ve heard about that ride. Oh, and there is one called the Haunted Mansion. Doesn’t that sound interesting?” Laura asked as they moved with others into the Space Mountain queue area.

  “Haunted Mansion?” Malaysia repeated. “What is it, a house you walk through or is it a ride?” Malaysia was picturing one of those houses where each room has scary depictions of decapitated people or a person holding a chainsaw, and people in masks jumping out and scaring the heck out of you.

  “I think it is a ride,” Laura said with uncertainty. “Don’t know how that would work, but I would like to see it.”

  The girls continued to plan out their day, deciding what rides to go on, what shows to see. The line they were in entered the actual “mountain” part of the queue area up on large, second-floor patio tiled in bright orange rectangles. Once inside the structure, the narrow corridor then descended down in a zigzag path; the deeper they went, the more foreboding the interior became with a dark, almost alien feel. While in line, even though they couldn’t see what the ride was going to be like, they could feel the ride; vibrations and muted sounds beyond the walls gave the girls the impression of something moving very fast, just as the guide book had described that Laura read earlier. Both girls could feel their anticipation grow, each wordlessly conceiving their own mental impressions of what they were about to go on.