Foreword

by Bill "Sully" Sullivan

I started working at Disneyland on July 27, 1955, about a week and a half after the park opened.

Watching the opening on television on July 17, just three months after my nineteenth birthday, it looked like a fun place. Living nearby, I thought I would go out there and see if I could get a job. I got one, as a full-time ticket taker on the Jungle Cruise attraction in Adventureland.

I was soon promoted to a Jungle Cruise skipper and eventually a foreman on the ride, spending two and a half years there before going off to other adventures like director of Epcot Center and vice president of the Magic Kingdom. It was never boring, and I would never change a minute of it.

Those early days in 1955 were amazing. The park was brand new and there was a lot of stuff going on. It was fun to walk down Main Street and see all the people already having so much fun. That’s one of the things that made Disneyland so exciting: it entertained so many different guests every day.

One of the biggest differences at that time was that Walt was there. He was there just about every weekend and every Wednesday for the Park Operating Committee meeting. He was very hands-on with the running of Disneyland. We all learned about what Disneyland culture was and how to behave through watching and listening to Walt.

He insisted that the people were not customers but guests, just like guests in your house. Take care of your guests and they will take care of you. They are the ones paying your salary.

Walt was actually a quiet, down-to-earth kind of guy. One foggy night at the Jungle Cruise, he was just walking around checking out his park like he often did and came over and sat down with us. We all sat there, smoked, and just talked. He was always receptive to hearing what we thought about the ride and the park and the changes we suggested.

If he was working, he would usually wear his old gray pinstriped pants, a leather jacket that looked like he got it out of the Goodwill, and a straw hat. I remember him in that outfit when he was building Tom Sawyer Island.

But if he was just out there visiting and meeting guests, he’d wear his blue serge suit and his Smoke Tree tie, and the guests would crowd around him if he wasn’t careful and we would have to help him slip backstage.

He was popular with everyone and just a nice guy. He loved to talk to the guests and hear what they thought about the park. He loved to talk to the employees. That’s one of the things that made Disneyland so different in those early days. The boss was there and you really wanted to please him.

It was a new adventure for all of us. We were the pioneers blazing a new path for something that had never been done before. We learned quickly from our mistakes and went out and made new ones.

Disneyland was out in the middle of nowhere. There were still strawberry patches and orange groves surrounding it. People came to the park dressed up in hats and gloves. Even the kids were dressed up because it was something special, something different than a usual amusement park.

My fondest memory of working at Disneyland in that first year was meeting the most wonderful girl who would become my patient and supportive wife for fifty-seven years. She was the night manager of Waltha Clarke’s Hawaiian Shop, a lessee located right across from the Jungle Cruise. They sold bathing suits and Hawaiian shirts and straw hats.

It is hard for me to believe that it has been sixty years since Disneyland first opened. I can still remember it so vividly and all the many friends I worked with at the park. It was a different place back then, and I am so proud that I was a part of it all.

I am happy that Jim Korkis has decided to write about that first year. Jim wasn’t there, but through his massive research and interviews with those of us who were, he has been able to share with new generations what it was like when Walt walked the park.

I have always been surprised and impressed by the depth of Jim’s knowledge of Disney history and how he can prod so many half-forgotten memories out of me. Diane Disney and others have enjoyed his historical books because they are so accurate and entertaining.

In person, he has always been eager and appreciative to hear my stories. I am glad he wrote all that stuff down.

With so few people still left who were there at Disneyland in 1955, this book is a wonderful trip back in time that preserves the memories, facts, and fun that we all experienced. And, boy, did we have fun!

Introduction

I never intended in my entire life to ever write a book about Disneyland.

I love Disneyland. I grew up in Southern California, so I visited the park frequently as a kid, a teenager, and an adult, and have many fond memories. I eagerly collected information about what the park was like when Walt Disney was alive.

However, there are a ton of books already out there written about Disneyland, and some of them are excellent. Early in 2014, I realized that in another year we would be celebrating the 60th anniversary of Disneyland and knew that over the last three-and-a-half decades I had interviewed many people who had shared with me interesting stories about what the park was like in 1955.

Documentarian Ken Burns once stated that history is actually biography. Not just the biographies of the big famous figures like Walt, but of the average person who was involved in making it all happen on a day-to-day basis.

I figured I could just cull some snippets from those interviews and share them in a book and readers might be entertained. Over two-and-a-half years later, I was still struggling with the manuscript.

As I started to gather the quotes, I realized that I needed to also include some background information so that readers could better understand what these people were discussing.

Nomenclature was much different in the early days of the park. Some things were only there briefly and needed explanation, as did relatively obscure people who had made significant contributions.

What was the parking lot like? Exactly which amusement venues directly inspired Disneyland? What gave Walt the idea for putting live baby alligators at the queue entrance to the Jungle Cruise? Who wrote Walt’s opening day speech? Why did managers all wear gray suits and orange ties?

Dozens of similar questions troubled me and the answers didn’t exist even in the most excellent of books about the earliest days of the park. Six decades had passed since Disneyland first opened and that information was getting lost every day as people died or their memories became clouded with age.

Documentation was not as easy to confirm as I had first hoped. Early publicity material produced by Disney was often a mixture of fact and wishful thinking. There was disagreement over dates, spelling of names and locations, and more.

People were so busy getting Disneyland built, opened, and maintained that much of the information and changes were never recorded and only some of it could be recovered through the memories of the people who were actually there. Some of those memories were faulty.

Many familiar tales are not repeated in this book, like the building of the railroad or women’s high heels sinking into newly laid asphalt on Main Street or horses being spooked by the whistle on the Mark Twain riverboat. These stories are readily available in so many other places that it made little sense to include them here when the space could instead be used for previously unrecorded stories.

Even just concentrating on the early months, there was still not enough room to include everything from my files. There is enough left for another book. This is not a definitive narrative, but an entertaining, and informative glimpse into that special time that focuses on the people who were there.

A 1950s Disneyland employee handbook states:

Disneyland is people. Our assets may show up in financial reports in terms of buildings…land…equipment and facilities…but the most important asset is our people. Disneyland begins with people…the guests who come to find happiness and pay for the continuance of the dream. It continues with people…the individual human beings who create happiness and preserve the dream.

In the movie Back to the Future (1985), Marty McFly goes back to Saturday, November 5, 1955, in his time-traveling DeLorean. Disneyland opened at 10am to guests on that day and the temperature in Anaheim was 83 degrees after a summer of record highs. The park had already significantly changed since its opening nearly four months earlier, and was preparing for even greater changes over the next few months.

This book shares what Marty might have seen if he had made a detour from Hill Valley to Anaheim on that fateful day. It is a grab bag of nuggets of information, memories, quotes, fun facts, anecdotes, and strange stories. It is meant to be a companion to other histories of the park, filling in some gaps, correcting some myths, and concentrating on the people.

Walt’s Disneyland really was, and still remains, the Happiest Place on Earth. Most people, including those who worked for Walt, felt it would be lucky if the place lasted through its first year or two. It not only survived but thrived and became not just a part of American culture but international culture. This is the story of how it all began, often told by those who were there.

Afterword

by Bob Gurr

I was only twenty-three years old and working full-time at Channing Wallace Gilson Industrial Design in Hollywood when in mid-1954 I was asked if I was interested in doing some work on the side at night and on Saturdays for a project Walt Disney was building.

I got caught up in the excitement of the Disneyland project and found that my temporary project soon became my new full-time job. Many others from those days have a similar story.

It still seems like yesterday to me, but it has been over sixty years and many of those people I knew and worked with are long gone and forgotten, so I am grateful that some of their stories are being preserved in this book.

It was different six decades ago. You were expected to go beyond your comfort zone, learn quickly how to do new things and solve problems. There were no committees, just Walt, and he was everywhere and checked everything and gave you the support you needed to make his dream come true.

I was trained as a car stylist and came up with the design for the Autopia cars and the parking lot trams in 1955. Walt didn’t want to buy things “off the shelf”. He wanted things that were better and uniquely Disneyland.

I was not an engineer, but I had to learn quickly because the parts had to be custom-machined and I was the one that had to draw all of those designs.

I made mistakes. Kaiser Aluminum was one of the sponsors at Disneyland, but aluminum makes terrible bumpers for Autopia cars. They deform and do not return to their original position as a steel spring would. They dragged on the curbs, leaving streaks of scrapings. We discovered all of this on opening day because there had been no time to do sufficient testing at the studio as we were rushed to make the deadline.

There were faulty speed governors, unpadded steering wheels that knocked out children’s teeth when they smashed into them when the car was bumped, and axle and brake damage, among other things. The cars were breaking faster than I could fix them.

It wasn’t just the Autopia that was facing problems of things not working as they should. Nobody had ever done a place like Disneyland before and many things were being attempted for the first time. It was often chaos, but Walt kept the show going with a smile and a calmness that it would all work out somehow. That was reassuring.

It is amazing to me that all these things were fixed within the first six months, some by the end of that first summer. It never occurred to us that it was impossible and it never occurred to us to just give up. By the start of January 1956, we were introducing new things into the park that had new problems and we fixed those as well.

I have always enjoyed the writing of Jim Korkis. In his articles and books, he has done his research to capture the accuracy and spirit of Disney history. One of the things that he focuses on is that history was not just names, events, and dates, but people. Disney history in 1955 was about the hundreds of people and their stories that made magic for Disneyland guests.

Inside these pages, he talks about Thomas “Mitch” Mitchell, the first fire chief of Disneyland and his 1954 Willys Jeep with a front-mounted pump and fire apparatus kept near the white administration building backstage; and Trinidad Ruiz, with his distinctive white mustache, who was attired as a White Wing on Main Street and swept up after the horses; and swaggering, cigar-smoking Nat Lewis who handled the balloon sellers throughout the park; and Emmert Brooks who ran the Candy Palace on Main Street and set such high standards in service and product that Walt preserved their relationship for a decade after other lessees were phased out.

These names are probably unfamiliar to the casual Disney fan, and thank heaven that Jim interviewed some of the members of Club 55 over the decades to obtain that type of information and later share it so that they will be remembered.

There are many books and articles about early Disneyland. I wrote my memories in the now out-of-print Design: Just for Fun (2012 APP-Gurr). As always, Jim found stories and information that haven’t appeared in print elsewhere so that people can understand that those first few months of Disneyland were like a constant fire-drill and that some of what we accept today as treasured “traditions” were just us making it up as we went along.

Former president of Imagineering Marty Sklar once said that he liked Jim’s articles on Disney history in the quarterly Disney Files magazine produced for Disney Vacation Club members because “they bring back memories for me”.

I am grateful that Jim took the time to compile all this information to bring back memories of one of the happiest times of my life. You will be informed and entertained that the birth of Disneyland was like a three-ring circus. It was Walt’s dream and he was the one who guided us all in the same direction and to the same destination, but it took a lot of talented, wonderful people to make it happen.