Disneylandia

Sunday, July 17, 2022

“To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.” Walt Disney, July 17, 1955, 4:43 PM.

As in my post entry yesterday (July 16, 2014), the fort must be defended at all costs.  My memory of my one-time visit to Disneyland as a child was a feeling of anticipation, nervousness, and fear.  And that is before I even step into the entrance to the Disney kingdom.  For most people, an amusement park is a place of great joy, but it was a landscape of horror for me.  Throughout my life, I feared heights, and I didn’t take to the idea of a giant mouse and duck wearing a sailor’s outfit approaching me as I entered the playground of dread.   My memory of the place is more about the heat (it was hot that day), the food I ate (the hot dog that had some Disney packaging around it), and the only toy my mom and grandmother bought me that day - a tiny glass statue of Tinkerbell and Peter Pan.  I kept these two small glass figures for many years until I lost my house in Beverly Glen in a mudslide.  Nevertheless, I often reflect on those objects because they represent something I can’t explain but can significantly feel for.

Walt Disney got the idea of having an amusement park because they were getting tourists who were going to his studio in Burbank, and at first, he was going to build up a park near the studio, but alas, the property was too small for such a project.   Walt hired Harrison Price, a research economist specializing in how people spend their leisure time and resources.   Disney had a genius touch in hiring employees who were good at their jobs, and Price was the man who made practical sense to Disney’s vision for Disneylandia, better known as Disneyland.   With Price’s analysis, Disney purchased land in Orange County, and it took one year and one day to build Disneyland.

On July 17, 1955, it opened, referred to for Disney and his 1955 executives as “Black Sunday.” Primarily due to that, rides were not fully operating at their peak, and there was no water on the property due to a plumber’s strike that was taking place at the time.  Also, Disney arranged with the ABC network to have live coverage of the opening, a technical disaster.   The TV hosts were Bob Cummings (“Love That Bob”), Art Linkletter, and Ronald Reagan, and there was one cringeworthy incident where a live TV camera caught Cummings making out with a dancer - alas, as one plans everything to the specific inch, that inch refuses to stand still.  Nevertheless, the next day went more smoothly.

Although it wasn’t precisely accurate, Christine Vess (age 5) and Michael Schwartner (7) were the first paying customers to get into the park. Disney did a series of publicity photos with the children. Both of them were rewarded with lifetime passes to Disneyland.  Fifty thousand people showed up that Monday, which was unusually hot. Around 101 F. Luckily, they had running water, and the toilets also worked.  So yes, there were some down moments, but in the end, as Disney planned, the low became high, and to this day, it’s a unique location.

It must be bizarre to people, but I have never actually seen a full-animated Walt Disney film.  Only cartoons from “The Mickey Mouse Club” and “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.” Besides visiting Disneyland (only once), my primary introduction to Disney World is their merchandise.  I had toys and comic books associated with Disney’s “Zorro, ” “The Mickey Mouse Club, ” and Mickey and that duck.  I even had a Mickey Mouse portable record player that played my petite collection of Disney recordings.  So I was very much raised in a household full of Disney images, but at the same time, I naturally distrusted the figures and the empire they came from.  Due to that, the Disney world, specifically Disneyland, was a fortress, and I felt confined in such a controlled landscape, even for a kid.  I didn’t feel safe; I felt locked up in that world.  I often think that Disney occupied my world to a certain degree, where even looking at nature was somewhat controlled by Walt and his fellow visionaries.   On my many walks through the neighborhood, I go by the original Disney home on Lyric Avenue, where he reportedly made Mickey Mouse.  The charming French Normandy-style architecture he lived in was beautiful in scope and size, but his visions kicked in. Now we have an empire based on one man’s imagination and ability to entrap the masses into his world.  I think what I find the most disappointing is that my world is so different from Disneyland that I find the separation between Disney life and mine is a total distance from each other.   I often feel depressed regarding the gap, but as they say on London tube platforms, “mind the gap. ”