The Best Possible Job

King Arthur

2012-01-15T10:26:00.000-08:00

If you were part of Disneyland in the days when it had a parking lot, you probably knew Arthur.

Those of us in the Cast knew him well. He was there nearly every day. We talked with him as he made his regular rounds around the Park, always asking how we were and "How's business?" He spoke in words formed around his few remaining teeth. There weren't many left, but they were almost constantly smiling. And we drove him home after work when we found him waiting at Harbor House for somebody to give him a lift.

Arthur was the closest thing that I can think of to having Walt strolling around the Magic Kingdom. Just his presence renewed any sparkle that might have gotten a little bit dulled by the often extremely hard work of creating happiness for others.

This old Orange County Register article is a great way to meet him and I hope to start a happy new year. Cheers!

2011 heads to Denny's

2011-12-31T22:36:00.000-08:00

We'll put another year to bed in about an hour. When you're part of the Disneyland Show, though, time is relative. In the 24/7 world onstage and backstage, landmarks like "midnight" or "morning" don't really apply. Saturday and Sunday might be your Monday and Tuesday, and your "lunch" might be at 6 a.m.

Still, some of the hours that I spent as a Cast Member stand out more than others. The times when being in the Park was better than being just about anywhere else.

Say early enough so that the pavement still has puddles from being washed down as darkness just starts turning to dawn.

Or walking across a hub long emptied of guests and hearing Adriana Caselotti from the wishing well clearly.

Clicking the switch to turn off the lamps on a popcorn wagon as the Main Street Electrical Parade appears.

Posing for snapshots with guests while holding a fresh bunch of Mickey Mouse balloons. Stepping into the Character Shop to use the phone to call the balloon room for more. (The number was "5580." You remember it because you know that you're supposed to drive 55, but you wanna do 80).

Shuffling into X lot at 1:00 a.m. exhausted, then heading over to Denny's or Acapulco's or HoJo's because the people that you work with are all doing the same thing.

Driving the little white Outdoor Vending pickup around behind It's a Small World to stock lemonade at the ice cream train next to the Motor Boat Cruise on a summer afternoon.

Even getting stuck on that train as the sole vendor left on a private party night shift when the Small World clock and the (very) occasional couple of guests are your only company seems not so bad.

Of course, this blog wasn't around back then. And the occasional guests stopping by make now not such a bad time either. Thanks to all of you who enjoy hearing about the Best Possible Job. I hope to spend much more time with you in 2012.

Happy New Year!

Being in the present

2011-12-25T23:30:00.000-08:00

With the low seniority that I had after becoming a permanent part-time Cast Member in 1983, my Disneyland working hours that year included eight on Christmas day. I lived with a roommate in Anaheim, but home was a couple of hours drive west in Ventura county. I stayed there on Christmas eve before rushing back after a compressed morning with my family to make it to Harbor House in time to clock in.

Heading to work along the nearly empty freeway that early morning probably felt a little bitter. After all, I didn't get to spend the day relaxing or enjoying all my new gifts. I barely had time to open them before I had to run out the door so I could work while others played. That's part of life as a Disneylander, but sheesh, this was Christmas.

After picking up a clean costume, I changed, hefted the canvas bag of rolled coin that my Outdoor Vending supervisor handed me, and headed toward the Plaza, where I worked the popcorn wagon at the far end of Main Street. And the longer that I stood at the hub of a Park that was part of a Christmas tradition for the many who made it a point to visit Disneyland on that particular day—the warmer any cold feelings of losing out on my holiday became.

It wasn't just that I was at Disneyland on December 25. That's always extra special, but by then I'd worked both a summer and nearly a whole holiday season. I'd been to the Park more times than I had as a guest in my life, including on Christmases past.

It was that for the first time I was part of Disneyland on Christmas, a permanent part of the experience that everyone who had paid to be there on that day had wanted to buy. Guests thanked me just for helping the Park to be open. One pair passed out candy canes to me and every host and hostess that they greeted. They said that they considered it their job to cheer us on. Along with the peppermint, we seemed to share a kind of identity; we were somewhat different from everyone who wasn't then working at Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom, and we were somehow better for it.

I started to feel like I should have volunteered for the shift, and I get the same feeling now thinking back on it. It's even making this Christmas warmer.

Quite a present, really. Quite a present.

December 15, 1966

2011-12-15T23:45:00.000-08:00

Eric Sevareid said it best on the CBS Evening News on this day. Just forty-five years ago, but doesn't it seem like so much longer?

It would take more time than anybody has around the daily news shops to think of the right thing to say about Walt Disney.

He was an original; not just an American original, but an original, period. He was a happy accident; one of the happiest this century has experienced; and judging by the way it's been behaving in spite of all Disney tried to tell it about laughter, love, children, puppies, and sunrises, the century hardly deserved him.

He probably did more to heal or at least to soothe troubled human spirits than all the psychiatrists in the world. There can't be many adults in the allegedly civilized parts of the globe who did not inhabit Disney's mind and imagination at least for a few hours and feel better for the visitation.

It may be true, as somebody said, that while there is no highbrow in a lowbrow, there is some lowbrow in every highbrow.

But what Walt Disney seemed to know was that while there is very little grown-up in a child, there is a lot of child in every grown-up. To a child this weary world is brand new, gift wrapped; Disney tried to keep it that way for adults.

By the conventional wisdom, mighty mice, flying elephants, Snow White and Happy, Grumpy, Sneezy, and Dopey—all these were fantasy,, escapism from reality. It's a question of whether they are any less real, any more fantastic than intercontinental missiles, poisoned air, defoliated forests, and scraps from the moon. This is the age of fantasy, however you look at it, but Disney's fantasy wasn't lethal. People are saying we'll never see his like again.

Come live it again

2011-11-09T23:59:00.000-08:00

Back when Walt Disney Productions prided itself on delivering "The Finest in Family Entertainment," Disneyland reached out to guests to "come live it again." I've searched for promotions using that slogan for quite a while and thought that they were pretty much lost to time.

This late '70s or early '80s commercial was thus as neat a find as some rare item in the One-of-a-Kind shop. This is the Disneyland that I grew up loving—and enjoyed the great good fortune of presenting as an '80s Cast Member.

There were no fast passes or Ferris wheels. But there was a kind of state of mind. Sure, it didn't stop those who were determined to have a bad time from missing the magic in something as dopey as Dopey. Those who were willing to "leave today" when they passed through the outer lobby onto Town Square, though, really could "live it," the happy feeling that Walt's Magic Kingdom made real.

The old commercial's lyrics express as much:

Disneyland is your land.
It lives because of you.
Each time we say, "Welcome back,"
it always feels brand new.
And every great attraction
is a thrill that never ends.
Yes, Disneyland is your land
when you want to be with friends.
Disneyland is your land.
Come live it again.

"It lives because of you." Welcome back." "Friends." A little bit different from today's emphatic commands to let the memories begin in the place where imagination is the destination, etc., etc. When I look at messages from the "Resort," it just feels like someone doesn't really get "Walt Disney's original theme park."

Thanks to all of you for joining me in living it again.

Inside Outdoor Vending

2011-11-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

If you remember having the lemonade stand that you had as a kid, you'll have a pretty good idea of what it was like to work in Outdoor Vending back in the '80s.

The backstage side of the business was an efficient but decidedly low tech operation. It was, in fact, a "no tech" operation. The walkie-talkies carried by leads and supervisors were the only electronics used. The ODV headquarters is depicted above as it once looked when it was tucked behind America Sings.

If Paul Frees narrated a tour, he might say something like, "We find it delightfully primitive here in this dusty retreat. The only room has wall-to-wall wooden counters for sorting guests' sweaty dollar bills, with cool or cold non-air-conditioned temperatures depending on the season."

Well-used bulletin boards lined the upper walls. Schedules were tacked up on one for the fifty or sixty Cast Members who wore Disneyland's yellows, as well as the various other costumes themed to lands across the Park where ice cream and popcorn carts set up shop. On the other, you would find guest compliments and occasional complaints, announcements about things like canoe races and softball games, and sometimes a postcard from one of our own who had taken some rare vacation time.

Clustered in the center of the room were stacked boxes of popcorn boxes, porch umbrellas that needed cleaning before they could be sent back out with ice cream wagons to protect against the Anaheim sun, and big yellow parkas for spending extended time taking inventory or something in one of the freezers. Tall metal dollies stood around. There were also about four electric coin sorters that might have been there since 1955.

The cramped cubbyhole on the right was where you arrived to find out your daily work location before heading to Wardrobe for the proper attire. The lead on the phone inside looks like he's handling a typical problem. Maybe the dry ice shipment hasn't arrived or extra shifts have to be filled for an after-hours party.

Looking back, I'd have to say that those seem like pretty good problems to have.

Tricks and treats

2011-10-30T22:56:00.001-07:00

Merlin knew how to conjure both, but it didn't stop him from being evicted from his old Fantasyland magic shop. Trick-or-treat day seems like a great time to remember the wizard's little emporium that stood in front of King Arthur's Carousel from day one until 1983.

Merlin's was a dark but delightful shop, with an amazing array of genuine magical mysteries—often demonstrated by a highly skilled group of Cast Members, some of whom were also Hollywood Magic Castle members. Unlike its counterpart on Main Street, Fantasyland's magic shop was much larger. Along with standard tricks, and gags like spring-loaded "snakes" in cans of mixed nuts, foam rocks, and spilt soda cans, it stocked professional stage and close-up magic equipment.

The shop also showcased a playfulness nearly entirely absent from Disneyland today. Nickels glued to countertops or nailed to the floor. Rubber bugs strung up and hidden in the wooden beams of the medieval interior so the comedic Cast could unhook them from behind the counter and dangle them on the shoulders of unsuspecting guests.

As nearly everyone knows, the shop's funny CMs included Steve Martin, who worked at Merlin's as a boy. He recounts the experience in his book, which gives a rare perspective on an atmosphere that modern guests will likely never enjoy:

Merlin's was run by Leo Behnke, a fine card and coin manipulator who was the first person to let me in on the inner secrets of magic, and who endorsed a strict code of practice and discipline that I took to heart. But Leo had another quality that transfixed me. He handled cards with delicacy; there was a rhythm to his movements that was mildly hypnotic. He could shuffle the deck without ever lifting it from the tabletop: After an almost invisible riffle, every card was interlaced exactly with the next, a perfect shuffle. Then, with the elegance of Fred Astaire, he squared the cards by running his fingers smoothly around the edges of the deck.

Merlin's never lost that magic touch. What a treat it would be if it reappeared.

Disneyland family

2011-09-26T00:07:00.000-07:00

The Disneyland Cast was once a family. This fabulous 1979 video clip by a former character focuses on the old Zoo Crew, but these people could have been part of any work location back then. Attractions, Merchandise, Outdoor Vending, Custodial—whatever the department, it was as much group of dear friends as collection of co-workers.

I was part of it all too briefly in the early '80s until things began to change into what they are now. If you were around in those days, you'll recall how special we felt as Disneylanders. We reentered the world outside the berm after our shifts, but we didn't leave the place inside. We worked together, played together, dated, sometimes even married each other.

Our fellow Cast Members were like brothers and sisters, a family presenting family entertainment as if we had invited guests to our own home. It was an era that will never be again. If you never worked for Walt Disney Productions, take a look at the video for a glimpse of how it felt. If you did, watching will feel like a reunion.

Sometimes I miss you, Disneyland—and the friends who were you—so, so much.

Only high-class stuff

2011-09-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

There were a lot of Country Bears, and each one's song has a story. But yesterday's Disneyland had a lot of stories that I want to remember and share. As Henry used to say, "We've got work to do."

So we'll mosey on out of Bear Country in just a spell. First, though, here's one of the best of the bear bunch. Wendell was a smart-alecky character who made a fine foil for Henry, the Jamboree's amiable host. The two wrestled a little, but then settled down to add a couple of short numbers that characterized the wonderful qualities that you used to be able to find in the backwoods corner of the Magic Kingdom. They were folksy, even corny at times—but so was Walt.

Wendell and Henry channelled Homer and Jethro, "the stage names of American country music duo Henry D. Haynes (1920–1971) and Kenneth C. Burns (1920–1989), popular from the 1940s through the 1960s on radio and television for their satirical versions of popular songs. Known as the Thinking Man's Hillbillies, they received a Grammy in 1959 and are members of the Country Music Hall of Fame."

"Mama, don't whup little Buford" was a song on the duo's 1964 LP, "Fractured Folk Songs." So was the title track. Listening to these old recordings will take you right back to setting on one of those long benches as part of the bears' audience. Even the back-and-forth banter between Henry and Wendell ("If ya can't cut it, just lay out") was part of the original song.

I hope you've enjoyed this series on the music behind the bears. The next time you're splashing down Disneyland's version of Magic Mountain's Log Jammer, listen for an echo of the songs that floated through the old Bear Country. And if you step in Pooh Corner, keep your eyes open for the "high-class stuff" that used to be part of the Show.

Old growler

2011-08-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

Walt said that he didn't "like to make sequels to my pictures. I like to take a new thing and develop something." "Disney," however, now turns out sequels on top of sequels, so I'll go ahead and follow up my last post with another look at one of the original artists behind the songs in Disneyland's Country Bear Jamboree.

Terrance had a short solo in Bear Country's flagship attraction, crooning about a night on the town that didn't turn out as expected:

One night I left the wife at home
and went out with the boys.
I was actin' like a Don Juan
and makin' a lotta noise.
A go-go girl called my hand,
I said, "I can't, I'm a married man."
She said, "If you ain't gonna steal,
ya better not prowl."
"Don't do-si-do with a go go,
if ya can't bite, don't growl."

His twangy vocals carried a tune recorded originally by Tommy Collins, who you can see in an old live performance here. Tommy, who was born Leonard Raymond Sipes and died in 2000, recorded "If You Can't Bite, Don't Growl" in 1965. According to his page on the Rockabilly Hall of Fame website, by the early '70s, his "professional and personal lives were on the verge of collapse, due to his increasing dependency on drugs and alcohol." In 1971, his wife filed for a divorce, sending Tommy into a deep depression.

Tommy's hall of fame entry goes on to note that he "began to recover by continuing to write songs, many of which were recorded by Merle Haggard, including the 1972 number one hit single, 'Carolyn.' In 1976, Tommy moved to Nashville, where he was able to secure a contract with Starday Records. Later that year, he released 'Tommy Collins Callin,'' a collection of his own versions of songs he had provided for other artists. Following the album's release, Tommy turned almost entirely to professional songwriting. In 1981, Merle Haggard had a hit single with 'Leonard,' his tribute to Collins. After the release of 'Leonard,' the spotlight again turned to Collins, who was now sober. Tommy signed a songwriting contract with Sawgrass Music, where his most notable success was Mel Tillis' Top 10 1984 hit, 'New Patches.'

Throughout the '80s, Collins kept a low profile, though his songs continued to be recorded. George Strait recorded no less than two of Tommy's compositions during the decade, taking his new version of 'If You Ain't Lovin'' to number one on the country charts. European record companies like Bear Family began reissuing his recordings, which led to an appearance at the 1988 Wembley Country Music Festival in England. In 1993, Collins signed a new publishing contract with Ricky Skaggs Music and continued to write songs professionally throughout the mid-'90s."

I'm glad to learn that Tommy made something of a comeback, and I'm glad to put a little spotlight on him here. As Melvin the moose used to say as guests headed out after the show, "the welcome mat is always out. Seein' you is fine."

Ain't got that swing

2011-08-07T21:08:00.000-07:00

A summer shift working the popcorn wagon in Bear Country used to be a delightful way to spend a late afternoon. The little land was a shady, relatively quiet spot in an otherwise bustling Disneyland. On a scorching August day, it offered cool shelter.

Bear Country's singular attraction, the Country Bear Jamboree, though, could be quite a boisterous affair. Inside its two cavernous theaters, guests stomped their feet and clapped their hands as some of the greatest audio-animatronics ever performed some of the greatest country and folk music. It was a far cry from another outlet for plush and a splashier version of Knott's Timber Mountain Log Ride, an innovative flume that pre-dated Disney's by thirty years.

I think that characters like swingin' Teddi Barra are unequaled by anything added to the modern Magic Kingdom, including the unfortunate "resort." One reason is that Teddi and her peers presented an authentic show, a hoedown rooted in America's musical history. The bears were obviously cartoon characters like the cast of America Sings. Thanks to the inspiration of a genius like Marc Davis, however, they had an innate appeal. Their show drew from the past to create something both immediately entertaining and timeless.

Songs like Teddi's—and the great singers behind them—deserve to be heard again in Walt's own Park:

Well there he goes, he hardly knows
the heart he's breakin.'
I talked to him, but I don't think he understood.
We'll just forget about the plans
that we were makin.'
Heart, we did all that we could.

According to her entry on Wikipedia, "Ollie Imogene Shepard (born November 21, 1933), better known as Jean Shepard, is an American honky tonk singer-songwriter who was a pioneer for women in country music. Shepard released a total of 73 singles to the Hot Country Songs chart, one of which reached the #1 spot. She recorded a total of 24 studio albums between 1956 and 1981, and has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry for more than 50 years. In 1967, Shepard had two top 20 hits with the title track of "Heart, We Did All That We Could" and the single "Your Forevers Don't Last Very Long." Jean is 78 this year and still active in music.

But enough of this chit chat, yak yak, and flim flam. Just refrain from hibernatin.' And we'll all enjoy the show.

Backstage pass

2011-07-31T15:26:00.000-07:00

Fellow blogger Vintage Disneyland Tickets posted this great aerial view of the Happiest Place on Earth as it appeared when I was an Outdoor Vending Cast Member in 1983. I applied some labels to identify various backstage features, which you can see by enlarging the image.

When you punched in and passed through Harbor House every day, it didn't take long for these areas to become very familiar—maybe even more so than the mundane world outside the berm. If you never stepped offstage from the '80s Magic Kingdom show, the world behind the inconspicuous doorways and passages leading behind the scenes was probably a mystery to you.

This photo doesn't capture some backstage things that were regular parts of my days back then—the locker room, Cash Control, and Outdoor Vending's freezers and balloon room, for example, are just out of the frame at the lower right, as are the Zoo Crew's quarters and Cast Cutters, the backstage barber shop. Hopefully, though, you'll enjoy this little "guided tour" and discovering what some of the hidden places were.

It's amazing how much of those places I remember so well, even thirty years later. If I could, I would save this post now, shut down the computer, park in "X" lot, flash my yellow ID to security, punch my timecard, and head down the hill under the railroad tracks into the back of the Park. They say you can't go home again, but can't you go back to work at Disneyland?

Help me if you can, I've got to get

2011-07-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

An afternoon shift as a Disneyland Outdoor Vending Cast Member in 1983. An ice-cream wagon in Fantasyland right outside Casey Jr., near what was very briefly the Village Inn and is now the Village Haus.

The calliope music wafted on the July heat, and the brass rail of my red-and-white-striped wagon gleamed in the sun. Inside, protected by dry ice, were orange juice bars, frozen bananas (at 85 cents, the most expensive thing on the menu), and ice cream bars and sandwiches. Outside, protected by a big red umbrella, were me—and a large friend with floppy arms wearing a red shirt and carrying a honey pot on his head.

Winnie the Pooh paused at my wagon for a brief respite. He leaned in as close as his big head allowed, and I asked how he was doing. "Hot!," my Zoo Crew friend Donny replied from inside.

I opened the lid of the wagon. Donny peered in through Pooh's eyes. I pulled out a juice bar, and he quickly reached a hand out of the costume and took the frozen confection back with him. I said that the orange pop would probably melt by the time he got backstage, but he just chuckled. A whisper from inside Pooh's head said, "I'm eating it!"

Unlike the modern Pooh character, which I find quite unappealing, the '70s and '80s version that Donny wore had "arms" that weren't operational. They were on movable sticks, but they couldn't hold anything. The arms usually just flopped around as the character walked and turned, but the way that they worked meant that guests could "shake hands" with Winnie the Pooh while Donny kept both of his own hands free inside. He enjoyed the juice bar right in the middle of the crowd that soon swarmed around him like honeybees at the hive. None of them had any idea that he was cooling off as they hugged him and snapped photos.

Characters work hard, wearing heavy padding and fiberglass heads to create happiness, especially in the heat of Disneyland summer afternoons. On that July afternoon twenty-eight years ago, a frozen juice bar was just the thing to help a "silly old bear" get back to the hundred-acre-wood.

Or at least backstage to the break area.

Ten and now

2011-07-17T21:59:00.001-07:00

The last birthday that Walt and his greatest dream shared. Disneyland's tencennial celebration was quite a feat back then.

The Magic Kingdom had not only survived, it had succeeded beyond almost anyone's dreams. It had defied the pundits who dubbed Walt's creation "Disney's folly" and stumped the nation's amusement-park owners and operators, who were convinced that without Ferris wheels, baseball throws, and "shoot-the-chutes," the Happiest Place on Earth would never make it.

The "resort," of course, now has all three of those carny mainstays, and more. Even so, "occupancy rates look to be getting incrementally worse, which may prompt DIS to increase promotional activity to sustain attendance momentum," according to Forbes.com. Is the economy to blame for all of that? Or is "franchise" pixie dust somehow less magical than the real thing?

Certainly the ten-year birthday celebration would have a tough time competing for attention with today's lavish entertainment offerings. Here's a look back at it through the lens of an apparently out-of-print DVD. It's a time capsule of what probably seems like terribly primitive stuff by modern standards. But it's got a simple charm that I think comes from working hard at entertainment without trying so hard to create spectacle that you end up with nothing but noise.

Look at how proud Walt was to celebrate the accomplishment and how confident he was that he could make things even better without losing what made those things great. He knew that the first ten years would be a tough act to follow, but he was inspired by the challenge. I think that he would have found the right way to do it. I'd rather be at this Disneyland today. Happy birthday to the genuine magic that's still there.

Red, white, and blue at times

2011-07-04T22:16:00.000-07:00

Happy Independence Day!

Daddy's day

2011-06-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

Every Disneylander knows the special place that pops occupy in the Magic Kingdom. As Walt said long ago,

Disneyland really began when my two daughters were very young. Saturday was always Daddy's day, and I would take them to the merry-go-round and sit on a bench eating peanuts, while they rode. And sitting there alone, I felt there should be something built, some kind of family park where parents and children could have fun together.

Happy Father's Day to the men who served as regiment commanders while we explored Fort Wilderness, took us soaring in Rocket Jets and down icy slopes of snow-capped mountains, and showed us that the Happiest Place on Earth was wherever we happened to be. They taught us things about Disneyland and life that we couldn't learn as well anywhere else.

Henry might have said it best when he hosted the Country Bear Jamboree and sang about big Fred, mouth harp player of the Five Bear Rugs, who "never took a lesson,

he just picked it up from dad."

Youth may savor

2011-06-12T14:11:00.001-07:00

The challenge and promise of the future aren't what are on the minds of most of the young adults who attend Grad Nites. The dress code helps some, but it's probably safe to say that most Cast Members are only too happy to get over the mid-June hump and into the routine of Summer. A Disneyland Line from my era tells the real story about working the infamous all-nighters:

Grad Nights are . . .

when you tell your family you're leaving the house at 10:30 PM to go to work . . . and nobody believes you.

when you walk in from the parking lot and pass all the "A's" and "B's" going the other way. (A's and B's were permanent full-time and permanent part-time Cast Members. Everyone else was a "Casual/Seasonal," without the seniority to avoid Grad Nite shifts. They were definitely a rite of passage. It was good to work at Disneyland back then, but even better to work at Disneyland for a long time!)

when the person next to you in the dressing room (probably an "A" or "B"!) babbles on about the 12,000 half-crazed seniors from 50 local high schools who are waiting out there for you.

when they let the grads in at 11 PM and you and the other six members of your food facility kneel for a moment of silent prayer at 10:59 PM.

when the sophisticated, well-mannered "youths of tomorrow" start throwing packets of catsup at each other.

when some kid, showing off to his date, orders 14 hamburgers (all cut in half), and then cancels the order.

when you and the rest of your crew count the minutes as 5 AM approaches.

When you punch out at 5:15 AM and fall asleep while putting your time card back in the rack.

when you and three friends decide to go out to Denny's for a nice, quiet breakfast . . . and find 87 other casual/seasonals eating there too.

when you drive slowly home as the sun comes up, mumbling over and over to yourself, "never again . . . never again."

Spring into summer

2011-05-15T22:00:00.000-07:00

You could feel the Park begin to change around this time every year.

I don't mean in the ways that it has since those wonderful days when the Cast was a family, when the company was still close enough to Walt to carry his full name. Subtle things began to happen, signaling a gradual shift into our busiest season.

You didn't need a Summer wallet fact card to know what was ahead. It came after the brief upsurge of Easter activity that followed in Thumper's big footsteps. Things went back into a content lull for about a month or so.

Then the time card racks in Harbor House began to be populated with names you hadn't seen before, and you began to pass groups of wide-eyed former strangers to the backstage side of Disneyland as you headed to Wardrobe. New locks swung on formerly empty lockers, and your schedule began to include shifts training these new casual/seasonal Cast Members.

Onstage, things were almost the same as they were in the off-season. With most kids still in school, guests were still mostly international tourists and older folks. But you started to hear new music, as the All-American College Band began to appear on weekends. Attendance went up gradually. Grad Nites loomed large on the horizon. Once they hit, Spring became Summer.

In late May, Outdoor Vending CMs like me could still chat easily with passing sweepers, even take the time to get out from behind the wagon with a pan and broom of our own to flick stray popcorn off the pavement. The Park was always alive, but it still closed fairly early unless it was a weekend or private party night. The place wasn't yet pumped with the adrenaline that 85,000 people brought in through turnstiles that stayed unlocked until midnight or 1 a.m.

If you look at the drawbridge of Sleeping Beauty's castle in the cover photo of this 1979 souvenir guide, you might get the impression that things weren't all that different from today. Looks like a large crowd pushing its way into Fantasyland. But I remember standing there vending balloons for long stretches when only handfuls of people passed by. It would change just a few weeks later, when guests would start doing a lot more shuffling as they rushed from land to land.

In late Spring, they strolled.

A mother's day in the Park

2011-05-09T00:12:00.000-07:00

1983. She and her two little boys. Snippets of a beautiful Disneyland day, including a trip through the Matterhorn on a long-ago Skyway to a long-ago Tomorrowland.

It's an amateur's collection of shaky shots, lightning-fast pans, and excessive use of the camcorder's zoom lens. It's also the pure joy of a mother and family enjoying the Magic Kingdom as some of us knew and loved her. Like so much of what's been added to the Park over the last two decades, any further commentary on this video treasure would lessen the wonder of what's there.

Nothing else is needed to make it a fitting tribute to moms everywhere. Here's to yours and mine.

Stop-motion animation

2011-04-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

In the old days before annual passes, leaving Disneyland at the end of an exhausting but wonderful trip was like carrying an anvil all the way down the middle of Main Street, U.S.A.

Once Jack Wagner intoned that the Magic Kingdom had ended its normal operating day, a slow tide of humanity began sweeping you along toward Town Square and the parking lot beyond. No more time to scramble around Tom Sawyer's Island, explore liquid space, or sail with the wildest crew that ever sacked the Spanish main. Step by step, you moved along, the distance between you and the family car decreased, and the time until the next visit seemed too vast to comprehend.

As a balloon vender in the 80's on Main Street while the current of guests flowed slowly around me, I was one stopping point before the portals leading back into the "real world." Like drifting leaves against a rock, guests would collect, asking for a red one, blue, two yellows and a pink—whatever colors of helium-filled Mickey Mouse magic appealed most. With the transaction completed, the current swept them away, outside the berm and into the Anaheim night.

The other stopping points were called Guides I and II, the souvenir stands at either side of Town Square. These little places were less than shops, but they were stocked with all kinds of Disneyland items. If balloon venders were rocks in the river of humanity draining out of the Park, the stands were more like fallen logs. Eventually the drifting flotsam swept by, but it took longer to get around the obstacle.

Postcards (five cents each) spun in racks out front. Stuffed characters lined the back walls. The counters held pinback buttons, charm bracelets, pencil cases, suckers, push puppets, key chains, spoons, ash trays, salt and pepper shakers, thimbles, playing cards, bumper stickers, those liquid-filled pens that had the monorail, or a Skyway bucket, or the Mark Twain gliding along on a piece of clear plastic, pennants...

and flip books like the one above, in which Pluto chases his tail as the pages fall. I think that it cost about a dollar. A classic little handful of Disney animation. It stopped me on the way home, nearly forty years ago, then drifted out of the main gate turnstile with me.

I probably fell asleep watching it in the back of the car on the long freeway ride home. I'm about to do almost the same thing now—with the same happy feeling as I watch the drawings start to come alive.

Full circle

2011-02-13T17:37:00.000-08:00

I remember my favorite part of the "grand circle tour of Tomorrowland" that you used to be able to take as coming toward the end, as the PeopleMover—"the first system of its kind in the world"—emerged into the sunlight after passing through CircleVision and looped back toward the Rocket Jets:

As we pass above Tomorrowland's entrance, you can see the heart of Disneyland. It's the Plaza. Gateway to the themed lands in the Magic Kingdom.

Such vistas are largely absent from Disneyland today. Even if the PeopleMover were still go-go-going Goodyear along its track, you couldn't see the same panorama because of the blockage separating Tomorrowland from the Hub. There's no real way to get an overview of the Park, to take in the whole of the Magic Kingdom like you once could. The best vehicles for presenting that experience, as well as for the achieving the practical detail of moving large numbers of guests relatively large distances, were the Skyway and the PeopleMover.

It's been a long time since anyone called Disneyland “probably the best example of an urban environment where people are treated in a humane way." We had that with the PeopleMover—a transportation system that suggested possibilities that locations outside the berm seemingly couldn't imagine. It delivered more than entertainment—but it's been decades since WED innovation powered anything like a working system for moving people cleanly and efficiently through cities.

If Hyperion days are in full Silly Symphony swing across the way, why can't we look forward to one of the best parts of our yesterdays in Tomorrowland? I mean, come on. Why not take all of that Jules Verne stuff and put it where it belonged in the first place—Discovery Bay? Can you imagine how excited you'd be to see a proper new land and Tomorrowland restored to present an even brighter vision of the future?

One of the days, of course, the old track will probably vanish like the cables did. Until then, I'll still hope to hear the PeopleMover's jazzy little soundtrack bouncing along again.

Royal Street revisited

2011-01-09T21:24:00.000-08:00

Working as an Outdoor Vending Cast Member on Disneyland's west side during the 1980s meant that you had to move fast on breaks and lunches. The only cafeteria on the Frontierland side of the Park is the Pit, located in the somewhat dank underground beneath Pirates of the Caribbean (hence the name). Getting there in time to order, eat, and make it back to an ice cream wagon near, say, Big Thunder wasn't easy.

There's a lot of onstage to traverse. All the while, you're visible to guests and subject to time-consuming questions. Even silent guests are still obstacles when the clock is ticking. You develop a Disney way of walking through a large group of people toward your objective. Even so, time passed all too quickly on those periods of temporary relief.

That's why the classic Royal Street Bachelors were so amazing.

Their music never failed to slow the pace. Even though I knew that if I didn't move it, I'd be limited to whatever daily special the Pit had ready to go, I always walked a little slower past those three players. Jack McVea, Herb Gordy, and Harold Grant graced New Orleans Square for around 25 years. This early video dates from 1985.

Watching these guys play and hearing their sounds again makes me feel like I know I've got to get back to my work location--but also that I'm risking being a couple of minutes late. Maybe you've got to get back to work, too. Right now, though, you're a guest of this blog.

So "set awhile" at the Royal Street Veranda. Let the Bachelors carry you back. And enjoy the rest of your revisit to Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom.

Running out of 2010

2010-12-31T21:01:00.000-08:00

One of my 80's friends is hustling into Outdoor Vending's old office behind America Sings. If you've got someplace to be tonight, you'd better hurry, too. Time to get ready for the new year! Be safe!

Here's to a 2011 filled with happiness and more fond memories of Disneyland past. See you then!

Just a little bit of pixie dust

2010-12-19T22:23:00.000-08:00

Toys for children of all ages, a complete doll shop, and "children's Disney character clothing." All wrapped up for Christmas every day in a pastel-painted box in the courtyard behind Sleeping Beauty Castle. Was there ever a better place to be a child?

As hard as it may be to believe, there was a time when "Disney character clothing" wasn't found all over the Park. Tinkerbell's sold other unique things— a full line of Madame Alexander dolls, a menagerie of stuffed animals (not just Disney plush), and a toy box full of Matchbox cars, toy soldiers, and other things that Geppetto might have made.

It was no "Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique," but I don't feel as if I missed out on anything for not having that "experience" be part of my Disneyland. Even as an adult, the little toy shop was always one of the most fun parts of Fantasyland. I'm not sure if it was there on opening day, but it stood opposite the King Arthur Carrousel since at least the sixties. It's identity seems to be a little inconsistent over the years. In 1966, for example, its sign read "Toy Shop," while my 1979 souvenir guide calls it a "Toy Store." In neither is it a "Toy Shoppe," as the photo atop this post shows.

Whatever it might have looked like outside, Tinkerbell's always packed a huge amount of childhood wonder between its compact walls. I was there once when I was about fifteen, just starting to think about how much I wanted to work at the Magic Kingdom. A hostess pushed on one side of a mirror in the clothing section, and it swung open to reveal a small hidden stockroom. I remember thinking about how amazing it was the way the Park operated, concealing things like inventory right under guests' noses. When I discovered as a Cast Member that merchandise stocking was an entire department working behind the scenes, I was that much more impressed.

Here's to the kind of unplugged, old-world childhood magic that the Tinkerbell Toy Store used to provide for families visiting Fantasyland. May everyone, old or young, have such joy this season.

Winter wardrobe

2010-11-28T20:33:00.000-08:00

Contrary to popular belief, there were times when it was not much fun to be a Disneyland Cast Member in the 80s.

Say around 22:30 (the Park runs on military time) during a private party in the winter season. Mostly alone at a popcorn wagon on the hub (which could have done with an extra heat lamp). Or running a relief shift giving breaks to vendors up by Small World. Or maybe clutching a balloon bunch in a frozen fist under the PeopleMover track.

During the off-season months, Anaheim got downright cold at night. If I had the good luck to be near the Inn Between behind Plaza Inn, I would scoot in as soon as I could, happy to step off the nighttime stage for fifteen much-needed minutes. If not, spending a break huddling somewhere backstage under a space heater with a paper cup of machine-made hot chocolate offered little comfort.

Fortunately, Disneyland's once-legendary wardrobe department was there with all the help that it could provide in the form of these bright red jackets. Zip-up and lined with white fleece, they were a formidable shield against late November nights. You could still see the imprint of your fingers when you pressed them against the back of your hand, but you could stand up to an eight-hour shift wearing one of these. Add a white scarf, and you could keep your smile genuine till past midnight.

Here's a toast to those toasty coats, and warm winter wishes to all of my Disneyland friends, old and new.

Halloween treat

2010-10-31T22:23:00.001-07:00

Crypt doors creaked and tombstones quaked around our house tonight as goblins, and ghoulies ascended for a swinging wake. We always turn our yard into a miniature Haunted Mansion, and I'm now exhausted! Tomorrow we start packing it all up for next year.

Our homemade haunt is too big to fit into this wonderful old Disneyland souvenir, but that doesn't make the Secret Panel Chest anything less fun. Inside its sliding pieces lurked an early spirit from a New Orleans Square that had yet to hear of Jack Skellington and company. The little wooden puzzle box comes from a time when things "could only happen at Disneyland." The era may have been Imagineering's pinnacle.

The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean were both still relatively new when I got my Secret Panel Chest sometime in the mid-seventies. The thought of a "secret panel" evoked memories of walking fearfully into the portrait gallery with "no windows and no doors." Finding a way into the hidden compartment wasn't quite as thrilling as having "to find—a way out" of the gallery. But the chest is still a treasure.

If you haven't explored it, you can get a detailed look at the Secret Panel Chest here. Happy Halloween!

Classic cars

2010-10-12T23:56:00.000-07:00

"Enter The Grand Stand where cars on a big screen discuss life as they know it. They cover big topics like street smarts, the birds and the bees ("There comes a time in your life when bees will fly right into your grill!"), and the challenges of waiting for green lights."

"When the checkered flag is waved, step on the accelerator to start the race in one of the sleek hotrods. Each car has its own personality. The cast of car characters includes Suzy the cute coupe, Dusty the off-road vehicle and Sparky the stylish sports car."

Stop.

Look both ways.

Didn't you have as much or more fun back then?

Didn't you feel just as much excitement and anticipation listening to Jack Wagner, "the Voice of Disneyland," tell you how to drive a real car as you ever have listening to cars discussing life as they know it? Wasn't Autopia enough of an experience for a kid that it didn't need "enhancing" with such features? Why is it that I can type out those instructions word for word, probably close to forty years later:

Attention, Autopia drivers:

To make your car go, press your foot down on the pedal.

To stop, take your foot off the pedal.

For your own safety, and the safety of other drivers, please do not bump the car ahead of you

or stop your car in the middle of the track.

Thank you.

Maybe kids today wouldn't enjoy the attraction without talking cars and funny billboards. Or maybe Disney is just playing down. Some of Walt's pictures had cartoon cars, but he must have sensed that kids would get more excited about real ones. And those little racers were really something. Their Kamm tails and clean lines made them seem a lot faster than they actually were. Hopping into one and pulling out onto the quiet track was one of the most thrilling adventures I could have imagined as a kid.

Unfortunately, today's Autopia cars still lack the one feature that the attraction now sorely needs.

Reverse gear.

Sentimental journey

2010-09-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

The sun didn't set on Disneyland's summer season in the good old pre-Resort days until the last notes had faded from the Plaza Gardens stage. What a world-class venue that red-and-white-striped setting was for Big Band sounds!

That stage was all about entertainment from another time. A free trip back to the Big Band era with some of the most legendary performers ever seen. Since the beginning, Disneyland had used the space just off the Central Plaza to spotlight jazz greats like Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Artie Shaw. The tradition continued through the 80s, when groups like the Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band, Harry James and his Orchestra, and Les Brown and his Band of Renown made Plaza Gardens their summer home.

I remember looking forward to a fine day at work when I flashed my yellow ID card at Harbor House and noticed a bunch of names signed in as being with "Aki/Tab" or one of the other bands. It happened just about every night during the summer back then. You don't hear that music jazzing up the hub any longer, but we can pretend we're there (and we'll have to since I couldn't find any video from the actual stage).

Come back to those Anaheim summer nights when the Magic Kingdom was all that jazz and imagine we're sending Summer 2010 off in classic Disneyland style. Here's our lineup:

Count Basie Orchestra

Les Brown and His Band of Renown

Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band

Harry James and his Orchestra

Lionel Hampton

Glenn Miller Orchestra

Now bop on down Main Street, because Disneyland has now ended its normal operating day. Please drive carefully on your way home—even as you tap your feet.

A magical little park

2010-09-06T22:05:00.000-07:00

As an Outdoor Vending Cast Member back in the 80s, I could tell when summer was over at Disneyland without looking at a Park operating calendar.

The signs were unmistakeable. You usually worked open to close. If you were on ice cream, you pushed the wagon back in at dusk after bringing it out in the morning. If you were on ice cream and it was your second summer, you knew enough to check out a jacket at Wardrobe when you picked up your costume after clocking in.

Fortunately, wagons were loaded lighter then. Ice cream sales started to come at longer and longer intervals. When guests approached my location, it was as often to ask for a good restaurant recommendation as it was to buy a frozen banana. Try the Plaza Pavilion or Blue Bayou.

A post-Labor Day popcorn shift was still moderately busy. When breaks came, though, the relief was more likely to be a lead than another vendor. With less to do in the ODV office behind America Sings, leads often covered breaks and lunches. If you ever saw a walkie-talkie sitting on the silver counter of a popcorn wagon back then, it was a lead handing you your carton of Orville Redenbacher's finest. The Cast Member who came out to give you a chance to grab a soda or lunch just a week earlier might be back at Cal State Fullerton or Biola. I didn't go to college until I returned my costume for the last time, so I spent a couple of summers at a Magic Kingdom that seemed almost deserted backstage.

As kids went back to school and families finished up their summer vacations, guest numbers lightened. Operating hours too were reduced. An occasional weekend event or private party offered an increasingly rare return to something that felt like Disneyland's busiest season. In the lull between Labor Day and the holidays, the Park took on a mellow, introspective quality.

It was a wonderful time to be at Disneyland and an especially nice time to work there. One of Walt's quotes that I've always liked described that period well. "In the winter time, you can go out there during the week and you won't see any children. You'll see the oldsters out there riding all these rides and having fun." Jimmy Buffett has a nice take on the feeling that was easy to find standing at a spot on Main Street watching guests stroll—not race—around. That's when the place was most like the Tivoli Gardens that inspired Walt or the "magical little park" he once envisioned across from the Studio.

Now that I'm closer to being one of the oldsters than one of the children, I really want to go for a spin on Dumbo or the Mad Tea Party. Maybe find a prancing steed on King Arthur's Carousel or squeeze into a seat on a Storybookland or Jungle Cruise boat. I'd love to climb aboard a Skyway bucket as it swings out onto its course through the Matterhorn and look out over it all. Oh, well.

At least we can look back on it together.

Disneyland taboos are still important

2010-08-31T22:36:00.001-07:00

Over at Jungle is 101, the terrific blog written by friend and fellow former Cast Member Mike, is a report of a recent Disneyland guest experience. Unfortunately, as he tells it, what should have been the simple purchase of a Dole Whip during a visit to the Enchanted Tiki Room turned into a complicated ordeal and a visit to City Hall after employees displayed anything but Disney courtesy. A number of comments to Mike's post reported disturbingly similar employee behavior on other trips.

It seems like it might be past time to dust off the original handbook given to Walt's new hires back in 1955. I received a reprint of this manual for creating happiness when I joined the Cast in 1983, and I still use the lessons that it taught today. Here's the text of one of the most important sections, which seems particularly appropriate in light of Mike's Adventureland incident:

Just as every land has certain taboos, we have ours at Disneyland. A taboo is something that is never done under any circumstances. Our taboos are few, but we must all abide by them at all times.

One taboo prohibits drinking by hosts and hostesses within Disneyland, or having the odor of liquor on your breath while at work.

Smoking, drinking of coffee or other beverages, or eating while at our work station is also taboo at any time.

Loud or profane language used within the hearing of guests is prohibited.

Gambling, fighting, or arguing in loud tones also ruin the magic of a Magic Kingdom and are taboo at all times.

Remember...these taboos apply to all of us, at all times. A taboo means there is no second chance.

I know that the stress of working with high numbers of sometimes rude people in Anaheim's August heat can make anyone feel irritable. I've done it, and I've felt it. A Disneyland Cast Member, however, isn't just anyone. He or she is—or should be—a people professional. It is highly disciplined work that is all service to others.

It's not a job that everyone can do, and Walt knew that. Once, for example, he noticed a Disneyland railroad conductor treating guests curtly and told an assistant, "See if your can't give that fellow a better understanding of the business we're in. Try to cheer him up. If you can't, then he shouldn't be working here. We're selling happiness."

Sadly, it sounds like all the people working the tiki juice bar were selling on Mike's recent trip was Dole Whips. If that.

Tangaroa not happy.

Around the bend

2010-08-22T21:53:00.000-07:00

Summer heat was somehow hotter when you worked in Frontierland. Maybe it was the rugged old West setting that seemed to make temperatures feel like they exceeded those in other parts of Disneyland. It might also have been the fact that Frontierland's location was almost exactly centered between the two Cast Member cafeterias. Other than those two refreshment spots, that side of the Park was pretty short of break areas for those of us in Outdoor Vending.

The Inn Between is the backstage half of the Plaza Inn. A great place to go on break, but you had to be close enough to get there, get served, and get back before your fifteen minutes were up. If you were starting from Frontierland, that could be a challenge on a busy summer day. The Pit was your west-side cafeteria alternative. Buried in the corridors beneath Pirates of the Caribbean, it was a cool respite and a bit closer than crossing the Hub. Even so, it took up time when all you really wanted was just to sit down out of the sun for about ten.

Fortunately, there was one spot that you could count on during those summer months back in the Eighties. The Wheelhouse was a small window located between the Stage Door Cafe and the River Belle Terrace. It was meant for guests, but it's small size often left it unnoticed. You could step quickly up to the window and be on your way with a enormous swirl of soft-serve cone in moments. I remember that it cost about a buck.

I enjoyed quite a few of those cones back behind the buildings facing the Rivers of America. You could usually find a packing crate or pallet to serve as an impromptu bench. Once I took my cone up to an unused conference room in what I think was the Frontierland office. There was nothing better.

Unless you happened to be my good friend "Captain" Mike Schwartz in the photo above. Mike had maybe the only job in Disneyland where it was possible to walk an ice-cream cone back to your work location and have it right there onstage. He spent over ten years as an attractions host and used to take a tall vanilla soft-serve with him back to his own wheelhouse on the top deck of the Mark Twain. As he "steered" the gleaming sternwheeler, he'd wave to guests with one hand while holding a sugar cone in the other. He kept it out of sight to preserve the Show. In an amazing combination of ingenuity, respect, and defiance of authority, however, he figured out a unique way to create happiness for others and enjoy himself a little bit more at the same time.

Once the ship had churned safely past Fowler's Harbor, Mike would sit back and dig in—usually listening to an Angels game on the transistor radio in his pocket. As Vista Advertising's marketing for the Magic Kingdom used to say, "It could only happen at Disneyland!"

I'm glad that I was there when it did.

Trip report — Summer 1978

2010-08-08T22:48:00.000-07:00

It's August 1978. I'll become a Cast Member in five years. Today, I'm a guest, staying with my mom in the Disneyland Hotel. The Mark III monorail has just glided us into the Tomorrowland station. A great day in the Magic Kingdom is ahead!

The entertainment calendar in our guide tells us that we can look forward to two parades: one for Mickey's 50th and the Main Street Electrical Parade plus Fantasy in the Sky tonight. Maybe we'll even hit the Space Stage and dance to "The Magnificent Music & Motion Machine." As we wander through the Park, we'll hear the Dapper Dans, Main Street Maniacs, Royal Street Bachelors, Pearly Band, All-American College Marching Band, and Bowdie Mountain Express, "a quartet of down-to-earth Blue Grass performers in Bear Country."

Of course, we've also got a long list of adventures and attractions, including still-new Space Mountain! Since we're already in Tomorrowland, let's go! There's the speedramp, just past the gantry elevator up to the Rocket Jets!

Wow! We conquered Space Mountain! Let's come back down to earth and start the rest of our day the traditional way with a walk up Main Street. We can hop aboard the Disneyland Railroad for a quick trip through the Grand Canyon and Primeval World.

Fantasyland next! Let's visit the Matterhorn, our old favorite mountain.

We'll catch our breath walking over to the Frontierland side of the Park. No Big Thunder to take the "wildest ride in the wilderness" yet, but we were still having the best time. I was having so much fun that I forgot to take more photos! A cruise on the Mark Twain around the Rivers of America gave me a chance to snap a shot of the burning settler's cabin, but my Kodak Instamatic X-15 didn't get much use after that.

We were there until Jack Wagner told us that Disneyland had ended its normal operating day. Exhausted, we had one more experience ahead that made this visit the best we'd had. As a sea of guests funneled toward Town Square, our monorail pulled out. Laden with our paper bags filled with things from the Character Shop, Main Street Magic, Tropical Imports, and Tinkerbell's Toy Store, it zipped us through the darkness across the parking lot. Kids in back seats looked up as we glided overhead, part of one last moment of a perfect Disneyland day.

We checked out the next morning and wandered through the hotel shops, adding a few more souvenirs here and there. I don't know where nearly any of it is today, but I've still got that August 1978 trip. Thanks for coming along to relive it. And thanks, mom, for everything.

Monorail 78 on hotel dispatch

2010-08-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

We checked out August 2, 1978, thirty-two years ago today. I had waited all year for the trip. The first time that my mom and I stayed in the Disneyland Hotel. We never made it back, but the two days we were there couldn't be improved.

We were the first aboard the Mark III monorail as it emerged across Katella Avenue on that morning's run across Disneyland's 115-acre parking lot ("or 'Freeway Retreat,' as many of you have called it.")

Like travelers striding up to a Pan Am China Clipper, we stepped into the cabin, then dashed straight to the bubble—completely bursting any air of sophistication we had. We're talking about the bubble, after all! We skimmed across West Street (not Disneyland Drive) and played in the early morning Park (not Resort). We conquered Space Mountain, then just about a year old, and made it to all of our favorites until we had to come back and check into our Bonita tower room. It cost about $185.00 adjusted for inflation. Parking would have been around $6.50 in today's dollars.

In this modern world of mega-hotels and second gates, it might be hard to understand what an overnight stay in the old official hotel of the Magic Kingdom meant to a kid who came to Anaheim maybe once a year, maybe more if someone else's parents were taking them. Quite simply, it was the best possible trip I could imagine, an almost incomprehensible luxury—actually staying overnight at Disneyland!

Once the overnight bags were dropped off, we skipped back up the stairs to the old hotel station platform—remember those hexagon cut-outs in the steel beams? We were back in the Magic Kingdom in minutes and there long into the night. Unlike all our past trips to Disneyland, there was no sleeping in the back seat on the way home to the San Fernando Valley.

I don't have many of the photos that I snapped with my Kodak Instamatic X-15 on that visit, but I'll post what I've got in a special vintage trip report from 1978 this weekend. We'll ride the beam as it bends right and we accelerate toward Tomorrowland and back to a summer memory that I cherish. Thanks for coming along.

Disney on ice

2010-07-26T00:02:00.001-07:00

Dry ice, and lots of it, kept Outdoor Vending's ice cream bars, ice cream sandwiches, frozen juice bars, and frozen bananas cool back in the '80s. Although the stuff can inflict a sharp burn if you touch it without gloves, it created a refreshingly cold respite during the summer heat. Reaching into an ice cream wagon definitely beat dealing with hot popcorn oil in July and August!

But the "coolest" job an ODV host or hostess could have was working a relief shift. You'd be assigned about ten wagons, coordinating breaks, lunches, and restocking. Wagons were pushed in and out every day back then. None of the locations had telephones, so stocking involved keeping a rough running tally of each vendor's inventory. You'd finish a block of fifteen-minute breaks, then hustle back to the freezers behind America Sings to fill up the wagons before a block of half-hour lunches tied you down.

As a Relief, the responsibility of being one step below Lead was great—but the perk of being able spend some time in an ice box as heat shimmered off the Anaheim asphalt backstage was awesome.

The two walk-ins were each about as big as a small studio apartment. Dimly lit by incandescent overhead bulbs. Filled with stacks almost ceiling height of aluminum Carnation baskets and cardboard banana boxes. The smell of vanilla tinged with banana drifted around the metal rooms, helped by slow-moving propeller fans attached to the back walls.

Inside, you'd pull your little scrap of inventory notes out of your yellow polo shirt pocket, take out as much as you could carry, and load up a yellow dolly with ice cream crates. You could grab a red windbreaker, but most of us went in without one on really hot days. As you set the frozen novelties outside the big door, a wave of heat rolled over you and you ducked back inside quickly. You usually finished with a load of around eight crates. You might also have a tub or two of popcorn oil. All hoisted up and balanced—somewhat precariously—on the lip of a two-wheeled transport dolly. The pleasant chill dissipated quickly.

You moved this load by yourself though 65,000 to 85,000 guests, creeping through crowds, shouting "Excuse me!" as courteously as you could, and surging forward through any opening in the masses. If you were lucky, most of your wagons were in Tomorrowland and on the hub. If you were heading out to Bear Country, you faced a nearly impenetrable wall of folks looking anywhere but at the rolling, semi-unstable hulk that could take out a rented stroller with ease.

Nothing more than a few near misses ever happened to me, but those Park-wide treks made the temperature seem to climb even higher. There's nothing quite like looking out from near the entrance to Frontierland and seeing a surging river of humanity as wide as the Mark Twain's waterway— knowing that if you don't get to the wagon across from the Haunted Mansion's exit ASAP, you'll be delivering nothing but boxes of floating popsicle sticks.

That's one of my Disneyland memories that sure won't be melting anytime soon.

Day 20,090

2010-07-17T22:53:00.000-07:00

Day 1. July 17, 1955. Fifty-five years ago today.

It was no walk in the Park. The mishaps, miscues, and mistakes of Disneyland's first day are legendary. Ladies got their high heels caught in still-soft pavement. Walt had to choose between restrooms and drinking fountains. But by the end of that day, there was a real live Magic Kingdom, and it really did go on to become "a source of joy and inspiration to all the world."

This is how Disneyland's long-lasting magic was created. Not with pixie dust, forced perspective, or audio-animatronics. But with hard work, dedication, a genuine desire to make others happy. Qualities inherent in people with the ability to make the dream a reality, polished by traditions and training that began all those "normal operating days" ago.

The principles taught to the very first Disneyland Cast made possible everything that came afterward. The more July 17ths that come between Day 1 and the present, however, the easier it is to lose sight of those principles. This video focuses on Walt Disney World, but the lessons aren't different. It doesn't take many slips—a rude employee, peeling paint, lack of value—for the "Finest in Family Entertainment" to fall painfully short of its well-deserved high expectations.

Today's a great day to review these important lessons. After all, when it's your job to create happiness, you can't take your birthday off.

Uplifting

2010-07-12T23:08:00.000-07:00

Stepping out onstage with a fresh, colorful bunch of Mickey Mouse balloons is definitely up there with my favorite experiences.

I remember pulling those fifty red strings connected to mouse-eared, helium-filled childish delights through one of the doorways separating backstage from the visible parts of Disneyland. Maybe between Mission to Mars and America Sings. If you went among guests through that Tomorrowland gate, you were headed for the balloon vendor under the PeopleMover's straightaway or near the (pre-Nemo) Submarine Voyage. You and your bunch might even walk out to the courtyard of Sleeping Beauty Castle. Main Street vendors were resupplied through the doors by Bank of America.

No matter where you arrived onstage, you would be met by guests wanting balloons. Without any means to handle cash, though, you couldn't sell them. All you could do was lead a little parade to the Cast Member whose balloon bunch had dwindled to single digits. With one arm raised overhead, your red, pink, blue, and yellow cloud was a latex version of a Tour Guide's riding crop.

When you reached the vendor waiting for you, he or she took hold of the bunch, trying to keep the strings from getting hopelessly snarled. There was a surprising amount of pull, especially in anything above a slight breeze. Keeping the strings straight was a constant chore. Once the handoff was made, the balloons settled overhead, and the vendor—usually now surrounded by moms, dads, and kids trying to be patient—could turn to the task at hand.

Then, one by one, fifty Mickeys were introduced to new friends. I remember feeling like it must have felt to be Bert selling kites.

Bright summer days

2010-06-27T16:14:00.001-07:00

Back in the '80s, a Disneyland ice cream wagon's day started outside the outdoor vending office behind America Sings in Tomorrowland. It's in the middle left of this photo.

Vending was a pretty simple operation then. We had just a few items—ice cream bars, ice cream sandwiches, frozen juice bars (first only orange, then strawberry), and frozen bananas. There were no inventory controllers, no post-mix beverage stockers. You stocked the wagons by putting on work gloves, going into walk-in freezers next to the balloon room, and carrying out metal cartons filled with cardboard ice cream novelties. These once-inexpensive treats went into each wagon, and you stacked dry ice cakes on top to keep things cool under Anaheim's summer heat.

Each wagon was then equipped with a napkin dispenser, umbrella, and wooden cash box. If you were on time for your shift, you picked it up at that point for your push out to Bear Country, Frontierland, Fantasyland, or wherever you were assigned—you had to love the positions next to Adventure thru Inner Space or by where Tomorrowland's Rolly Crump ticket booth once stood!

If you strolled over from the locker room a few minutes early for your day shift, you usually found yourself joining in brass polishing. All of the wagons had brass handles and corner trim, and all of that brightwork had to gleam before rolling out in front of guests. That's what's happening in the photo here.

Wagon polishing wasn't exactly an enjoyable task, but I recall it being a fun time. In Outdoor Vending, you work alone for the most part. Vendors got to work all over the Park, but being dispersed so widely meant that we took our breaks by ourselves. You usually didn't see anyone in the department other than your Relief until the changeover at the end of your shift. So the last few minutes dressing the wagons before stepping on stage were lots of fun, usually full of jokes and making after-work plans with friends.

Then you swung open the big wooden doors around the corner from the old Tomorrowland skyway station and put a shoulder to your wagon wheel. On with the Show and another bright summer day.

Every show has its reviews

2010-05-23T16:50:00.001-07:00

One of the first things I learned as a new Cast Member was that Disneyland is a Show, not just a job. Producing the Happiest Place on Earth's unique entertainment experience took much more than just the highest levels of skills found in other hospitality industry positions.

In spelling out performance expectations, the annual performance appraisal (this is mine from August 1983) gives a terrific insight into exactly what was required to deliver the finest in family entertainment. The organization that Walt built invested heavily in its employees back then. Training, development, increasing levels of responsibility—casual/seasonal, permanent part time, hostess, relief, trainer, lead—and Cast activities were all focused on building a team of performers expert at Disney showmanship. The annual review was a chance to compare the reality with the dream and praise, adjust, or correct accordingly.

The appraisal appears kind of strict, and it was. It largely determined whether a casual become a permanent Cast Member. Behind the ratings, though, was a genuine consideration of employees as valuable partners. Until the union troubles and management changes in the mid-to-late Eighties, working at the Park was still as it was explained in Showmanship: Disneyland Style, which I've often quoted:

It is because we work together at being a "show" and not just a business that the special Disneyland magic is not lost. When we say, "Look to the name Walt Disney for the finest in Family Entertainment," we feel that this is a fact...not a boast. We feel we have the greatest pool of creative talent anyplace in the world. We are proud of that.

We realize we are not the "biggest," or "richest," or "oldest" in the field of show business or American industry. We do feel however, that we are the "friendliest" group you'll find anywhere. Creating fun is our work; and our work creates fun—for us and our guests. One needs happy people to produce a happy show. We take our work seriously, but we don't take ourselves too seriously.

It's difficult—if not impossible—to create fun for our guests if you can't find some fun in playing your own role.

I found both an enormous amount of fun and an immense feeling of satisfaction in working at Disneyland. Judging by my review, I'd say that I put on a pretty good performance. Sometimes I sure wish that the curtains hadn't closed.

The center of Disneyland

2010-05-16T22:09:00.000-07:00

It's Spring 1983, and you've just clocked in at Disneyland for the first time.

As a brand new Cast Member, you completed "Traditions I" at the University of Disneyland yesterday. Now it's time for your first shift.

As you show your ID at Harbor House, you're waved inside. No passport or annual pass. And not only are you in, there's a time card with your name on it. At Wardrobe, there's a nametag to match.

You'll train under someone experienced in performing your role in the Show. You'll learn that what might seem simple—operating a popcorn wagon, taking tickets, sweeping up—is anything but. Once you're stepped onstage behind your engraved nametag, you're no longer just at Disneyland. You are Disneyland.

Whatever the job, you'll train the entire shift, perhaps longer. Learning the keys to the Disney experience: Safety, Courtesy, Show, Efficiency. These keys unlock the center of the Magic Kingdom. You've never known exactly where that was. Even if you were like me back then and could have pointed immediately to the hub or even to the nearest restroom after being led blindfolded to any part of the Park and turned around three times, you never really put your finger on the center of Disneyland.

Now, standing there in your spotless costume for the first time, with guests coming up to you for answers, ice cream, or a bobsled with space for three, you're applying Walt's formula. You're watching as people are having one of the most wonderful times of their lives. You're treating those having less wonderful times with kindness, which is like a smile and a song that makes things a little bit better.

And it hits you.

The center of Disneyland is exactly wherever you're standing.

In the abstract, it's kind of a hard thing to explain. Because you're no longer a guest, you're suddenly the least important person there. Without you at your best, however, there's no magic. Sure, there's a fairy castle. But forced smiles and uncaring attitudes can turn it into a fake carnival facade for whatever guest is on the other end of them. You've got the power to make dreams real or make them evaporate. In that sense, you're the most important person of all. You're at the heart of what makes Disneyland the Happiest Place on Earth.

It's something that you simply can't experience unless you're a Cast Member, no matter how many times you pass through the main gate. I hope it's still feels that way for those working at the resort. Back then, the feeling of being part of the extraordinary family that was Walt Disney Productions was like nothing else.

After what seems like five minutes, your shift is up. You've spent a day getting paid to create happiness for others. Creating the kind of rare quality and value that Disneyland offered before things changed. There's only thing that makes it possible to step off stage from a job like that.

Knowing when you're scheduled to step back on.

Your mother and mine

2010-05-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

Take your mom to Disneyland today.

If you really want to treat her right, start early. Don't skimp at the Main Gate. Go for the Deluxe 15 ticket book. Then head into Town Square. Catch Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln at the Opera House. Lincoln remembered his mom:

My mother, who died in my eighth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.

On your way down Main Street, stop off at the Flower Mart and pick up a few blossoms. They'll last forever. Stroll on down to the hub. Stop by and look at the menu outside the Plaza Inn, where you can take your mom to lunch later.

Spend the rest of the day exploring the Magic Kingdom that you knew as a kid with the mother who gave it to you. In New Orleans Square, have Mlle. Antoinette's Parfumerie blend a custom fragrance, find something lovely at Lafitte's Silver Shop or La Boutique d'Or, or maybe set her up with a new hat from Marche Aux Fleurs, Sacs et Modes. Head back this way to the Blue Bayou for dinner.

Cross the drawbridge into Sleeping Beauty castle. Fly over London with your mom, Peter, and Wendy, but try not to cry, will ya? If you held back your tears, hop aboard Dumbo. By the time you land, you're sure to be at least sniffling.

Dry your eyes while you glide over the Skyway to Tomorrowland. You won't want to miss the many musical salutes to moms of the past at America Sings. Yours is sure to remember these:

She may be somebody's mother
Come let her go her way.

Learning new vices all the night long
Tempted to all that's sinful and wrong
Listening to the siren's old song
Down in the licensed saloon.

After dinner, it's time for big band sounds and dancing at Plaza Gardens. Harry James and his Orchestra might be up tonight, or maybe Les Brown and his Band of Renown. Whoever's playing, it's sure to be the perfect end to a perfect day.

That's what your mom deserves. Find some way to give it to her.

All a-bored

2010-05-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

Here's the "C.P. Huntington," pulling out of Main Street station for a grand circle tour of the Mag--

Not so much.

It's apparently the C. P. Huntingdon, with a nameplate apparently intended to invoke comparisons to the railroad circling its distant neighbor in Anaheim. but this is most definitely not the Magic Kingdom. This is Oaks Park, a "historic amusement park" in Portland. I wandered around there yesterday and took this postcard shot. The little train is a (very) narrow-guide attraction of the typical carny design. Love the truck mirrors topping the locomotive cab.

Oaks Park covers 44 acres of grounds, mostly lawn used for company picnics and birthday parties. There's a midway and collection of rides: Tilt-a-Whirl, Scrambler, and versions of some that I rode often at old Magic Mountain, like the Himalaya, Electric Rainbow, and Jolly Monster. There's a dark ride based on the adventures of Lewis and Clark, which is about as close to a theme tied to its Pacific Northwest location that Oaks Park gets. It does have some history, most notably in the form of a vintage roller skating rink and dance pavilion.

According to Wikipedia, the park was built by the Oregon Water Power and Railway Company and opened on May 30, 1905, during a period when trolley parks were often constructed along streetcar lines. By 1985, the park was donated to a not-for-profit corporation. It celebrated 100 years of continuous operation in 2005, making it among the oldest in the US.

If you accept it for what it is, it's a OK way to spend an hour or so. Its most impressive feature, however, might be one that was never planned: A demonstration of the true genius displayed by Walt when he looked at similar parks and thought that there must be a way to make something better. "A family park, where parents and children could have fun together."

I find little difference between Oaks and California Adventure, but a world between the Disneyland that I knew and this typical, albeit historically charming, permanent carnival. Take the "C.P. Huntington." You might need more imagination than most people have to pretend that you're riding back to the turn of the century in these little cars. Walt thought families might enjoy and learn something on such a trip—so he gave them a genuine railroad, a genuine station, genuine engineers.

Disneyland is at its best when it retains that "genuine" quality. Whether it's rooted in the worlds of yesterday, tomorrow, or fantasy, it's an authenticity that can't be duplicated without tremendous effort. Oaks Park and its peers are nice, but they fall so far short that comparison is really impossible. And that's the way that "Disney" should keep it.

Disneyland family

2010-02-21T17:31:00.000-08:00

I read a review of the experience of working at Disneyland posted by someone who had been part of the Magic Kingdom during the "Resort" era. The former attractions host had what sounds like an quite an unpleasant time on Davy Crockett's Explorer Canoes,

His experience contrasts sharply with mine. I was a Cast Member in Outdoor Vending, not Attractions, but only part of what seems to have made the Disneyland show a failure for the reviewer apparently stemmed from his role.

Paddling canoes full of guests around the Rivers of America must be at least as strenuous as pushing dollies fully weighted down with popcorn oil and frozen bananas through 65,000 guests spread from Tomorrowland to Bear Country, which was a major part of working a vending relief shift when I was there back in the 80s. It wasn't just strenuous labor for pay barely above minimum wage, however, that disappointed this guy.

He wrote that maybe the most frustrating aspect of Disneyland employment was what he perceived as elitism:

"Despite the fact that most of us were earning just above minimum wage, I felt very unwelcomed, as if because I had not been there long enough, I was not a valuable member of the Disneyland team. There was a sense while I was there that you had to earn yourself a place in the upper strata of Disneyland employment’s social sphere. I didn’t enjoy having to compete like this for such a menial job."

I hope that this former Disneylander's experience is not at all typical of those working at the "Disneyland Resort." When Disneyland was still a family, this sort of thing didn't happen. We were all in it together then, whether we wore fifteen-year pins, ten-, five-, or one-year pins, or just our own names. My Area Stage Supervisor, responsible for Foods throughout Tomorrowland, started as a fry cook. Leads loaded wagons alongside new Casual/Seasonals.

Disneyland made distinctions then because of pay grades, but nothing else separated permanent full-time, part-time, and "red card" Cast Members hired in at the start of busy seasons. Perhaps the only "strata" was the one between those of us who had traded our laminated red IDs for the yellow cards identifying permanent employees. The only folks I recall caring about seeing any of our cards, however, were those working security at Harbor House. And they didn't care which was which as long as you had one.

Once we were inside the berm, we were part of the Disneyland family. There was certainly a competition between us, and it most definitely involved the canoes. Fortunately, it usually ended over pancakes before we went back to clock in.

We were the luckiest people in the world

2010-02-13T23:03:00.000-08:00

We worked together in a Disneyland that will never be again.

We created smiles and shared laughs, usually at some guest's unwitting expense. We worked while others played, but we also played together before and after work, in canoe races, softball games, late-night Denny's sessions, Magic Mountain trips. Looking back on it now, it seems like we were always together.

Some of us thought that we would be "lifers", but few are still with the Disney company. Even so, as Cast Members when the Park was a family, not a resort, we share a common heritage that can be recalled with a fondness few other jobs can match. Most of us can probably remember even trivia like our old department numbers, our spiels—even whether we preferred the Inn Between or the Pit. If we've lost touch in the thirty years since I last clocked out, I'm certain we would pick up right where we left off if we happened to meet again. The experience of being part of that Park just stays with you.

We were there at the best possible time, and we had a ball. The Magic Kingdom was still a sparkling jewel, a national treasure. We were its ambassadors, guides, hosts, and hostesses. We offered guests both peerless show and real value. As part of Walt Disney Productions, we got the kind of proud feeling that you get when you are part of a world-class institution. It was an extraordinary time, and we were fortunate enough to spend it together.

A happy valentine's day to every Disneylander. I love you all.

We were people on a mission

2010-02-06T22:48:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, news reports said that Americans hated their jobs more than ever before in the past 20 years, with fewer than half saying they were satisfied.

If whatever survey produced those statistics had been taken at 1313 Harbor Blvd. in the early 1980s, the figures would have been strikingly different. When I worked as a Cast Member then, I loved being at Disneyland, and most of the people that I knew felt pretty much the same way.

I'm not saying that things were fun all the time. When attendance hit around 80,000 on a hot August afternoon, for example, the Park could be feel like far less than the Happiest Place on Earth. But those times couldn't last. The Disneyland show back then just wasn't like a typical job, where days are consumed by quotas, meetings, ongoing projects, and often constant stress. When Jack Wagner announced that the Magic Kingdom had ended its normal operating day, whatever tensions might have built up evaporated along with the guests headed down Main Street. If our job involved money, we dumped it into mechanical sorters, tallied up our bills, and dumped it at a Cash Control window. It wasn't our reason for being there. In the pre-Eisner and Wells days, Walt Disney Productions didn't need to stress over it. Had corporate raiders not launched a takeover attempt, those days might well have continued.

Our mission then was creating happiness. Whether we pursued it by taking guests to Mars or just pointing them to the nearest restroom, we worked hard to get our visitors to the place they had come to visit. I think that even on the hard days, most of us really did believe in the values—and the value—that Walt believed in bringing to people. That's what made us who we were then, and who we have become thirty years later.

It took people to make the dream a reality

2010-01-30T16:09:00.000-08:00

If you clocked into a role in the Disneyland show during the 1980s, you were a part of something extraordinarily special. Something that exists now only in memories and old photos, images of a time when a job at Disneyland meant being part of a huge extended family, all working together in a showplace of beauty and magic. The next few posts will salute some of those family members.

All of us knew that the work we made look easy was anything but. It could be awfully hard to create happiness for others, especially when something in your life wasn't going right. Once you passed through Harbor House, though, you could start leaving whatever the problem was behind, at least for an eight-hour shift. As you headed to Wardrobe to sign out your costume and back to the locker room to change, getting ready to go onstage took over. And as you stepped through one of the many doors or passages connecting the backstage world to the Magic Kingdom, Disneyland transformed negative thing might have been taking up space in your mind.

As a Cast Member then, you were as much icon as employee. You were Disneyland. Sure, you faced irate guests, rude teenagers, people who resisted giving in to the happy feelings that permeated our beautiful Park. But they were in the minority. Most people sought Disneyland magic eagerly, and they expected it to emanate from you as soon as you emerged, in the form of smiles, laughter, and uncommon courtesy.

You had to make that happen regardless of personal circumstances. There's nowhere to hide unhappiness onstage, so you were forced to leave it outside the berm. And that was when the magic really occurred. As you worked to create happiness for others, you created it in yourself. If you went to work happy, you ended up feeling even better.

As guests looked "to the name Walt Disney for the finest in family entertainment," they were looking at us. Whether we stood on the PeopleMover's loading platform like these two, worked in Outdoor Vending like I did, or performed any of the myriad other roles in the Show, we looked back from behind smiles, vented behind the scenes, and finished off at Acapulco's, Denny's, or HoJo's. Then did it again on the next day or night shift.

Maybe the real proof that those days at the Park were something else is that writing about them now has almost the same effect on me as working during them did. As I recall those memories and look back at those old photos, I feel almost as happy as I did standing in Town Square holding a bright new bunch of Mickey Mouse balloons.

If this blog creates a similar feeling for you, I feel even better.

Tune out, turn on, get with it

2010-01-01T23:15:00.001-08:00

The Best Possible Job's very first post featured the University of Disneyland's Showmanship...Disneyland Style. When I was a Cast Member in 1983, I learned the principles that Walt, Van, and the rest set out as they were explained in that booklet. Disney training enhanced both my Park performance and my life outside the berm, making those years a wonderful time to recall.

The Disney way as it was then is still valuable today. In some ways, it's even more so. So as we all step onstage into a fresh 2010, here are some good old words from Showmanship. I hope that they help my fifteen(!) loyal readers and everyone else have a happy new year:

Take a look at this morning's paper...at least six stories of bad news. This...and other personal and world troubles are what we want to tune out when we get ready to play our roles in the show. This is why our "stage" is surrounded by an earthen berm...to tune out the outside world.

And then, we have to turn on to the atmosphere...the fun...the magic of the show. It's a fresh show every day for our guests...and this requires fresh attitudes on our parts. We're not saying it won't be hard work...it will also be exciting and challenging work. After all, that's what show biz is all about.

To "get with it" is a show business term. It means getting in the mood of the show...the feeling of the play...or the "theme" of the play...or the "theme" of the area. This is no place for a Grouchy Gus...a Sad Sam or a Harried Harriet. We don't want these type people in our cast. Disneyland is a fun show...not a sad story.

If you tune out the outside world...turn on to Disneyland and get with it, you'll find that you'll be helping to create a very important thing in life.

I'm looking forward to this year, and to sharing more Cast memories with you all. Cheers.

Purpose

2009-12-05T22:53:00.000-08:00

Many of us reflect on the purpose of life when Decembers come around. Walt was born today, and one of his quotes about his most famous creation seems like both a good tribute to the man and a fine thought to inspire those resolving things for the next year and beyond:

All we ever intended for him or expected of him was that he should continue to make people everywhere chuckle with him and at him. We didn't burden him with any social symbolism, we made him no mouth piece for frustrations or harsh satire. Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter.

The simple purpose of bringing joy to others. Happy birthday, Walt. And thank you from all of us for the gift.

Holidayland

2009-11-28T20:26:00.000-08:00

Now that we're past the official "busiest shopping day of the year," it's time to make your list and check it twice. Here are ten of my Disneyland holiday wishes. Feel free to add your own!

A new Tomorrowland inspired by science and filled with silver and blue optimism;

A PeopleMover or similar advanced transportation system for a leisurely tour of said new Tomorrowland;

A Skyway over Fantasyland to the new Tomorrowland wished for previously;

A magic shop in Fantasyland;

A One-Of-A-Kind antiques shop in New Orleans Square;

A Keel Boat trip around the Rivers of America;

A Plaza Gardens stage with big bands;

A new Circle-Vision 360 theater with a film on something that could make particularly good use of the format, like global climate change;

A return to the Disneyland look; and

A special "classic" month at the Magic Kingdom, with the old characters, costumes, merchandise, music, parades, etc. If the National Hockey League can play outdoor games in historic uniforms every season, Disneyland could pull this off for sure.

Build me up Buttercup

2009-11-22T10:08:00.000-08:00

The Best Possible Job has been off the clock for a while due to family matters. We all have to face certain issues, but that doesn't make them any easier. Sometimes you need something to build yourself back up before things look all right again.

At times like that, nothing's cheerier than flowers. Even artificial ones like the blooms and blossoms that one spilled out onto West Center Street off Disneyland's Main Street. The flower market made it through the first half of the eighties when I was a Cast Member, and I remember vividly the pleasant feeling of stepping onstage through the door tucked in the back. Evicted by the unstoppable force that squeezes commerce into every once-quiet spot in the "Resort," the "small plants and unusual artificial flowers" are gone now. Most modern guests probably don't even notice.

Those who grow up with today's Disneyland are steeped in a Park where period graphics on stores selling everyday plush have taken over the themed experience that Main Street was once. Then, it wasn't just printed signs with nostalgic type and curlicues. Walt's Main Street had a flower market, a bank, a general store, a Carefree Corner because they helped create the state of mind that we imagine existed in bygone days. How many kids with their own iPhones pick up the receivers in the Market House and listen in to 1890 party line conversations?

Probably not many. Fortunately, the Market House still stands. I haven't been to Anaheim since nearly as long ago as 1890, and I hope the old phones are still there, too. Things like the phones and places like the flower market provided a foundation for suspending belief that created the theme experience once so easy to find in the Magic Kingdom. Foundations like that help build you up when you'd rather be in another time.

Thanks to the Best Possible Job's (four) loyal readers and new friends whose kind words helped get this show back on the road. A smile and a song to you all.

Know the answers

2009-09-12T22:39:00.000-07:00

Lesson three. Walt's innovation in guest relations wasn't the result of some hotel management program. It was basically an extended version of the Golden Rule. Simple, but never done better . . . as long as the effort was put in at every level, every day, every interaction with guests:

A question from a guest is never an interruption in our Disneyland VIP Plan. You're a walking, talking information booth . . . with a smile. It's no easy task to answer the same question 68 times . . . in the same patient and friendly way. You must remind yourself that most of our guests are strangers to our stage and as a rule they don't read directional signs. In fact, many of our foreign guests can't read English.

When people travel, they enjoy many things, but the most important factor is the human one . . . it's the PEOPLE THEY MEET that make the difference. It's you . . . our walking, talking information booth with a smile . . . who makes the difference.

Next: Accept people as they are

Disciplines of the Show

2009-09-04T23:04:00.000-07:00

Lesson two in this series of principles taught to me as a Disneyland Cast Member back in the 1980s. It's a particularly good one for Labor Day weekend. Disneylanders work while others play, and that takes discipline.

Show business is a fun way to make a living . . . most of the time. But, with fun as a way of life, and the creation of happiness as a goal, it is still the most highly disciplined thing. Here are some of the rules of the game . . .

*We work while others play.
*Presenteeism a must.
*Never any eating or smoking on duty, or within view of a guest.
*You were highly selected, so we assume we don't have to dwell on such things as drinking . . . or going to pot.
*No horseplay . . . which is dangerous and bad show.
*Never . . . never . . . argue with a guest.

Someone once said, "the highest form of discipline is self discipline." We prefer to discipline ourselves.

Next: "Know the answers"

Class of 1983

2009-08-30T23:47:00.000-07:00

We're heading into the end of summer. Casual/Seasonal Cast Members are wrapping up their shifts, maybe hoping for a spot among Disneyland's permanent part-timers. Grad nites are long past, canoe racers have lapped the Rivers of America, and the last softballs have been thrown. The All-American College Marching Band has packed up and headed back to school.

Seems like an ideal time to reflect on the lessons learned in the Best Possible Job. That was what working at Disneyland was for me back in the 80s. Like all Disneyland alumni, I still carry the valuable things that I picked up while training to follow Walt's unique approach to creating the finest in family entertainment.

I hope that the University of Disneyland is still teaching Cast Members what it really meant to be part of the magic of the Magic Kingdom. Not just an outdoor vendor, attractions, custodial, culinary, merchandise, or security host or hostess, or even one of the many talented folks working entirely backstage. But someone given a rare privilege — finding personal happiness by creating happiness for others.

Just in case some in the Resort weren't taught as thoroughly as we were back then, I am dedicating the next few posts to presenting a lesson plan for living through the viewpoint of a Disneyland Cast Member as it once looked. Here's our first lecture, from Showmanship . . . Disneyland Style:

Working together

One of the "key" words in the successful production of any film is TEAMWORK. THis means the actors . . . sound men . . . camera men . . . light men . . . producer . . . and director all work together to product the ultimate goal, a "smash" hit.

Here at Disneyland, TEAMWORK is also a "key" word because we are, in effect, producing a living experience for our guests. This means our "onstage" crew myst not only work together, they have to work in unison with our "backstage" crew for a successful production.

Disneyland is no place for hermits . . . and your role is not a "do-it-yourself" operation. Your every effort lies in your ability to work with others in our cast in order to properly produce a happy show for our guests. Always try to practice what we preach about guest relations . . . on your fellow hosts and hostesses.

Next: "Disciplines of the show"

Paper's ghost

2009-08-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is forty today. It's an attraction that both preceded and survived the years in which I grew up in the Magic Kingdom. I'm thrilled that it remains today in almost the same condition as it did when I first stepped into the portrait gallery.

When the "paintings of some of our guests as they appeared in their corruptible mortal state" begin "actually stretching," I'm still willing to believe it. I think such simple illusions—transformed by Imagineering into thematically perfect spectacles—are still the greatest magic shows ever presented. For me, Disneyland is always at its best in the uncomplicated form that stretching portraits, singing busts, and endless hallways illustrate. It doesn't matter if you realize that the gallery is really an elevator. It makes no difference that the banquet scene is not a hologram.

In some ways, it's kind of more fun when the illusions aren't complex. Long before Pixar and CGI, special effects like those in the Mansion were just as special. I think that somehow they're more fun than a perfectly rendered scene, even if it's an amazing work in its own right. They create the sense that maybe you, too, can do magic.

When I was a kid, Disneyland sold this little instruction book on how you might get started. During the era when Disneyland merchandise included "your personal tombstone," you could transform a dollar into this delight at Merlin's or Main Street Magic. Written by one "Phinneas J. Pock," the venerable tome presented simple tabletop tricks and gave instructions on how to throw your voice. It was all done in a sort of "poor man's Marc Davis" style with illustrations inspired by the Mansion's various effects. I remember well practicing all of the little sleights of hand. The book sat on my shelf right beside my Secret Panel Chest for years.

But there's a little matter I forgot to mention. You can still enjoy Magic from the Haunted Mansion today! Blogger The Haunted Closet has made images of it reappear. The secrets have properly been concealed. Head over and have a look, and a ghost from Disneyland's past will follow you home.

Facts of life

2009-08-02T10:00:00.001-07:00

If you'd joined the Disneyland Cast when the summer of 1984 started, you'd know your way around guest questions well by now. By August, when the temperatures and guest counts had reached their highest points, answers to "Where's the nearest restroom?" and "Do you sell film?" came easy.

Still, it was nice to know that there was a summer wallet fact card tucked into your costume. The little folding card had all you needed to know about Disneyland and all that Disneyland ever needed to be.

Want to pick up a unique gift? Try the One-of-a-Kind Shop in Mlle. Antionette's Parfumerie, or the Wilderness Outpost in Bear Country. Short of cash? Visit the Bank of America branch in Town Square.

Need a break from waiting in lines in the August heat? Grab a bite to eat at the Space Place, then catch Show Biz Is! at the Space Stage. Or the polynesian show at the Tahitian Terrace. Or the Golden Horseshoe Revue. Or Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln at the Opera House.

Tired of walking? Hop aboard the PeopleMover for a grand circle tour of Tomorrowland or take the Skyway.

You've got plenty of time. Disneyland is open until midnight (1:00 a.m. on Saturdays). But if you somehow run out of things to see and do, you can find information on other California adventures at Carefree Corner.

I'd been to Disneyland so many times before joining the Cast that I never really needed the Fact Card. But now that so much of the old Magic Kingdom is just a memory, I'm sure glad I've still got it.

Forever twenty-nine

2009-07-17T23:30:00.000-07:00

Disneyland's twenty-fifth anniversary came twenty-nine years ago today. In my mind, it was the Park's greatest year. A time when Disneyland truly understood why it had been created and what it offered the world.

The Magic Kingdom then had what Walt called "that thing—the imagination, and the feeling of happy excitement—I knew when I was a kid." Whatever that thing was, Walt found it in Marceline, Missouri. He said that more things of importance had happened to him in Marceline than he imagined ever could. What kinds of things could have happened in that small town to make such an impression on him? Even today, the population is only around 2,500.

Walt put that feeling into words at Disneyland's dedication. Age and youth. Fond memories. Challenge and promise. Those simple, timeless things became the hub around which Disneyland grew.

Now that it's grown into what it is today, of course, simple, timeless things are a lot harder to find anywhere, not just in Anaheim. That's why birthdays are so important. They're times to reflect and refocus on those timeless things, and Disneyland's birthdays are no exception. I think that's why Disneyland gave buttons or ribbons like this one to the Cast working those days: to celebrate what it was, and to rededicate itself to being the Happiest Place on Earth, the place where whatever that feeling of happy excitement is could always be found.

Finding simplicity and timelessness is easier when you know what you're looking for. Disneyland: The First Quarter Century provided some examples back in 1980:

A child examines the hitching posts that line an 1890 street and asks, "Mommy, what kind of parking meters are these?"

An elderly gentleman on the same street smiles happily and tells a bystander what he likes best about Disneyland—"I can jaywalk here!"

A young man aboard a "Mississippi" sternwheeler on a moonlit night seeks an introduction to a girl by asking, "Is this your first trip aboard?"

Some people today might scoff at those kinds of things as naive longings for a past that never was. But Walt found them in Marceline, and they were at Disneyland when I wore this ribbon. I saw them. If you were that child, that elderly gentleman, or that young couple watching the pin lights twinkling from stem to stern as the Mark Twain pulled away from her landing, I'll bet that you saw them too.

On July 17, we're all entitled to celebrate that feeling of happy excitement we knew as kids who grew up in the Disneyland that used to be. So happy birthday.

And many happy returns.

Show Biz (was)

2009-07-11T22:25:00.000-07:00

Back when the Space Stage sat under the speedramp to Space Mountain, a fantastic song-and-dance revue called Show Biz Is! played during Disneyland's summer season.

Signing back into the Park after a summer day shift, I would often catch the show. The Space Stage was a terrific venue, and Show Biz Is! was one of the Magic Kingdom's last great live entertainment offerings. As I remember, it was at least a half-hour long. A cast of about twenty performers showcased Hollywood, Broadway, and music in a flurry of costume and set changes.

Jack Wagner announced each cast member as the show ended, and each took a bow with some inventive move. Almost thirty years after, I'm sorry to say that I've lost everyone's name except for Kimber Elston. If you've got a kid who thinks he or she can dance, follow this link and look her up for some lessons.

The other performers were fabulous, too. I can remember the numbers (songs from The Fantasticks, The Pajama Game, Singin' in the Rain, and many more), but their names have disappeared from my mind like the Space Stage from Tomorrowland. Somehow, though, I think that sitting on one of those blue benches as the curtain went up on a show like this would bring them all back. I sure wish that Disneyland would.

Neverland

2009-06-25T21:57:00.000-07:00

The King of Pop was just a prince, in a simpler Park that was somehow a more magical Magic Kingdom. That's how I'll always remember them.

Popcorn and circumstance

2009-06-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

After seeing all the great Grad Nite posts by Vintage Disneyland Tickets and Disney on Parole, I had to add this 1984 button. I never attended Grad Nite, but I worked this one. Here's what I recall:

Even at Disneyland, it was cold in the wee hours of the morning. As a vendor, I was glad to be on a popcorn wagon with heat lamps that night.

The coffee in the Inn Between wasn't good, but it might have been that I'd never really had coffee until then. On the last fifteen-minute break with about two hours until Park closing, soda just wasn't strong enough.

I felt much older than the guests, even though I'd graduated high school just two years before. I was a permanent part-time Cast Member, and I thought that I'd never leave. It was an unusual time to be in the Magic Kingdom. There wasn't much to do for long periods between guests. Even though pulling the all-nighter was pretty exhausting, there was a kind of peacefulness about being there in the early morning that was indeed magical. Once you made it past being tired.

As Mickey's image on the button shows, '84 was the summer of the Games of the XXIIIrd Olympiad in Los Angeles. The Olympics would be a disaster for Disneyland attendance, as immense numbers of guests stayed away from what they feared would be even more immense numbers of guests. As a result, hardly anyone came to the Park. Revenues went down, hours were cut, and management changed. After the closing ceremonies and the season finally ended, prices went up and portions went down. The seeds of the Disney Decade were planted that summer, but we didn't know it at the time.

On that Grad Nite, there were only embraces of the opportunities ahead for those on the brink of tomorrows that were the rest of their lives as they looked back fondly and reflected on the achievements of those twelve long years. Were these youth savoring the challenge and promise of the future? I hoped so.

I was just enjoying the moments.

Would you miss them?

2009-06-01T23:37:00.000-07:00

The following adventures and attractions are not operating today:

Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin
Tarzan's Treehouse™
Indiana Jones™ Adventure
Splash Mountain
Star Tours
Innoventions
Pirate's Lair on Tom Sawyer Island
Astro Orbitor
Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters
Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage
Gadget's Go Coaster
"Honey, I Shrunk the Audience"
Chip 'n Dale Treehouse
Donald's Boat
Goofy's Playhouse
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
Golden Zephyr
Orange Stinger
Mickey's Fun Wheel
California Screamin'
Grizzly River Run
Maliboomer
Mulholland Madness
Soarin' Over California
The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror™
It's Tough to Be a Bug!
MuppetVision 3D
Toy Story Mania!
Flik's Flyers
Francis' Ladybug Boogie
Heimlich's Chew Chew Train
Jumpin' Jellyfish
King Triton's Carousel
Monsters, Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!
Princess Dot Puddle Park
Redwood Creek Challenge Trail Featuring "The Magic of Brother Bear" show
S.S. Rustworthy
Tuck and Roll's Drive'Em Buggies

Key to the kingdom

2009-05-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

Even without Merlin's, the night of May 26, 1983, was magical.

It was my first Cast event. My date and I didn't end up in a Cinderella story, but we had a fabulous time in the warm glow of the New Fantasyland. Supervisors manned the attractions as we rode with Toad and flew with Peter and Wendy like we hadn't done in years.

We had seen both incarnations of the world of imagination, hopes, and dreams. The version we experienced that night as adults was fundamentally the same as the one that we had grown up with—same simple attractions, same themes. But because it stayed true to itself even as it evolved, it didn't damage the memory of the earlier version. Instead, the new version let the old keep its dignity, free of the disappointment that comes from seeing something you once saw as incredible become diminished beside what you've seen since. The event was as much a reunion as a premiere.

Fantasyland grew up without growing apart.

Walt once asked why we have to grow up. I'm sure that he didn't mean the question literally. I think that he meant to express the idea that we should grow without losing the things that make life so wonderful before we're grown. That's what happened behind the drawbridge in 1983.

In my view, the "Disneyland Resort" represents expansion, but it's not really about growth. The New Fantasyland shows what happens when an idea grows into being what limitations prevented it from becoming when it was created. You can't see the original Fantasyland anymore, but it's still there.

When we walked over the bridge into the new land for the first time on May 26, 1983, we entered a more sophisticated Fantasyland. We found richer architecture, theming, and artistry. But we didn't have to search for its identity.

Individual decisions could have been better. Merlin's should have remained. Skull Rock should have survived the bulldozers. As a whole, however, the re-creation was superb.

It's not an easy thing to unlock the magic. Disney has tried a lot of keys since 1983. It's almost as if Walt is watching and waiting for the right incantation, one respecting the past while reinvigorating it. Walt gave the keys, but, like Tolkien's doors to Moria, the drawbridge will open only for those who understand the kingdom.

Without understanding, new parks may be built and new marketing may be pushed into old attractions. The doors to Disneyland's brand value will become tarnished with wear from the attempts to force them open, but they'll hardly budge. As in the Lord of the Rings, the key is to "speak, friend, and enter."

It doesn't take never-ending promotions and discounting. Mr. Iger and company should simply restore and re-create the Disneyland that they knew as kids. The Disneyland that showed how on May 26, 1983.

Those were happier times.

Dreams do come true, but sometimes it takes a while

2009-05-10T23:20:00.000-07:00

1983 was a fantastic year to be a new Disneyland Cast Member.

The drawbridge in front of Sleeping Beauty castle was raised for the first time since 1955 while the new Fantasyland was being built. It made working at the Park feel like being part of the original cast.

I remember stepping across the bridge for the first time into the new "world of imagination, hopes, and dreams" at the Cast Premiere. Twenty-six years and a couple of weeks ago, I was looking forward to that wonderful evening.

I look back on the old Fantasyland now as a little bit of a letdown, the most "carnival" part of Disneyland. As a kid, of course, I enjoyed it tremendously. Now that I appreciate why I feel the way I do about the old Magic Kingdom, though, I realize that the area was always far less than what it should have been.

Still, it had a marvelous innocence. While it looked a lot like a fair or amusement part with typical funhouse dark rides, kind of like Pleasure Island, it never felt dark. Plus, it had Welches grape juice, which I can still taste.

If I had a cup of that juice right now, I would raise it to the Imagineers who brought Walt Disney's Fantasyland to the life it was always supposed to have. Their work represents perfectly how Disneyland should evolve without losing any part of its unique identity.

If we wait another twenty-six years, perhaps we'll yet see Tomorrowland recreated in that spirit. Imagine Wendy as a Disney decisionmaker looking at the last two-and-a-half decades. "Let's all try, just once more," she'd say. And we'd fly on a magic Skyway back to a Park that would have come forward to become the Disneyland it could have been, just like it did in the new Fantasyland.

Sharing Walt Disney’s dream

2009-04-19T23:04:00.000-07:00

As a last good wish to the cast of Tokyo Disneyland on their twenty-fifth anniversary, here is the special commemorative coin given out by Disneyland’s Cast Activities Center back in 1983.

The best part of my short look back at the TDL opening was discovering Disney on Parole’s post of the official congratulations photo taken at the floral Mickey at Disneyland’s main gate. It happened just a few days after I began working in Outdoor Vending. Not only did I realize the dream of being part of the magic of Disneyland, I also had the unusual experience of being in one of the most famous picture spots in the Magic Kingdom!

Those of us on the wet grass in front of Main Street Station that morning shared a special moment in Disneyland history. Things were a little less global then. There were no bloggers or websites. Even email was a novelty. But we were sending a greeting to our new Disneyland family in Japan that carried the hope and promise of our own recent silver celebration. For the first time, there really was a Walt Disney World.

I remember heading back into Town Square after the photo was snapped. Passing through the backstage entrance near the old American Egg House, I walked past Wardrobe toward Outdoor Vending’s Tomorrowland offices with an especially happy bounce.

Twenty-five years later, congratulations again, TDL. And thanks.

Tokyo Tomorrowland Then

2009-04-12T20:36:00.000-07:00

More pages from the 1983 Tokyo Disneyland booklet given out to Disneyland Cast Members in celebration of the opening. Tomorrowland was quite similar to “world on the move” ideal. The “Skyway Station Shop” looks like a clone of the wonderful old Character Shop, Tomorrowland’s modernized Emporium.

It seems Tokyo’s Tomorrowland wasn’t far enough from Burbank to escape the effects of bad design decisions entirely, but I hope most of what was presented in 1983 remains.
Leaving Tomorrowland for a look back at Main Street’s vintage Emporium as it appears in Tokyo, here is a look at World Bazaar circa 1983:

This is how Main Street is supposed to look. Try to find a burnt-out lightbulb. By all accounts, TDL is still as sparkling as it was twenty-five years ago. That alone is worth congratulations.

Tokyo Disneyland 25

2009-04-05T11:23:00.000-07:00

My knowledge of Tokyo Disneyland is limited to this pre-opening booklet given to me as a Disneyland Cast Member in 1983. April 15 marks twenty-five years. In celebration, I will post the whole book for fans of the Japanese park. Here is the cover and the first couple pages.

According to its website, Tokyo Disneyland seems to have the right idea:

Walt Disney, the founder of Disneyland and Walt Disney Company, had a unique sense of creativity and imagination, one that went beyond traditional ideas about genres and mediums.

But from comics and cartoons to movies and theme parks, there are some fundamental elements that can be found consistently throughout all his many projects; namely, his desire to foster a love of learning in young people and give them the ability to boldly and openly engage the exotic and unknown.

Today, Tokyo Disney Resort tries to base all our endeavors on those same principles, and we hope that by doing so,
we will be able to create a warm, imaginative and truly magical place for all our Guests.

I didn’t see much evidence of “learning” on the website, unless learning to operate an astro-blaster counts. The “exotic and unknown,” though, seemed well represented by George Lucas’s characters and Cirque du Soleil. Tokyo Disneyland indeed seems to be carrying on the updated Disney traditions. I wonder if there are any former TDL CM bloggers who were there in 1983 and recall the happiest place in Japan as it once was. I would love to compare our experiences watching the Parks change.

I remember many of the guests from Japan I met while working in Anaheim. They were invariably happy, charming, and polite. Many were carrying around big stuffed Mickeys, and they seemed to look upon even something as simple as buying a .75 Disney frozen juice bar as an experience to treasure. I wish them all the best, and Tokyo Disneyland a happy twenty-fifth anniversary.

Part of the magic of Disneyland

2009-03-22T23:26:00.001-07:00

As a Cast Member in the early 80s, I found one of the most magical parts of the magic of Disneyland was the sense of being part of something rare and important in the world.

Sure, that sense was sometimes elusive. On a midsummer day with attendance around 88,000 or so and temperatures above 90, for example, it wasn’t necessarily fun to push a dolly fully loaded with frozen bananas from Outdoor Vending's Tomorrowland freezers over to Bear County. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to leave personal problems outside the berm. And the paycheck deposited in the old Disneyland Employees Federal Credit Union every couple of weeks never seemed like quite enough.

At other times, though, the feeling that came from working to create happiness for others was palpable. That’s what made working at Disneyland the best possible job.

I felt it most often on shifts that ended after closing. When you started in the morning and then changed over your work location to another vendor, the Park kept going without you. Although I admit there were times when I was happy to see the next shift, there were also times when it felt like walking out of a fabulous party.

When you were there for the end of Disneyland’s normal operating day, though, it felt as if you’d hosted the entire affair. The sense that this really was your Disneyland was there when one last couple asked you to take a picture for them and then ran off toward Main Street. An hour or so later, after you'd cleaned the location, counted the drawer, and dropped off the money bags at Cash Control, it stayed with you, all the way up to Harbor House.

Even surrounded by the business realities of Disneyland—rolls of coins, bundles of bills, working hours, paychecks, and all the rest—life as a Disneylander was something special.

Whatever made it special didn’t leave when you walked off the property. You’d clock out and slip your timecard into a slot whose location you hoped you’d remember when you came in for your next shift, but you could carry with you as you headed out into the parking lot the sense of playing a part in the lives of those who’d passed through the main gate turnstiles earlier that day. If Arthur was there, he never failed to help by seeing you off with the amazing pride at being a Cast Member that he instilled.

I miss being part of that magic, but I’m glad to know that it was—and is still—part of me.

Go back to the drawing board

2009-03-15T23:00:00.000-07:00

The New Fantasyland was well off the drawing board when I received this 1983 Cast Member booklet during orientation. It was just about twenty-six years ago this month that the drawbridge would lower for the second time, revealing "the world of imagination, hopes and dreams" that money prevented Walt from making the first time around.

In 1983, the message was that Disneyland had “both the land and the creative spirit” for expansion. As a new Cast Member, you would “fast become a part of an exciting new era as we open the doors to the future."

In my view, it’s a significant understatement to say that something important somehow got left behind. The Magic Kingdom that appeared when the doors to Disneyland's future opened looked and felt more like today's Tomorrowland than yesterday’s New Fantasyland. Should an “exciting new era” really include gutted old attractions left to collect a decade’s dust, painfully clear reminders of all that went wrong?

I think that the booklet above had the right idea:

Now that we have been recognized as a world institution, we must find new ways of developing our guest relations. It is both a challenge and an increased responsibility for us.

We will continue to make a job at Disneyland a professional and respected career.

If the world becomes more troubled, or merely remains as troubled as it now is, we must be dedicated to keeping our national treasure - our Disneyland - the friendly and happy place it is.

Disneyland will never be completed, as we all know. But neither should it ever be compromised.

Once upon a dream

2009-03-04T20:32:00.001-08:00

I pasted this autograph card into my childhood scrapbook back in 1971, so it’s quite worn. Being packed away in an attic trunk for all these years must have preserved Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather’s magic somehow, because I felt lifted back to the simple pleasures of old Disneyland as soon as I saw it again.

“Sleeping Beauty Days” happened over the first weekend in March, 1971. During those days, Disneyland was open five days a week, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Guests got an extra two hours on Saturday and Sunday when the Park was open from 9 to 7. Seven-day operations didn’t start until the early 80s. Still, there were plenty of attractions back then to fill those few hours. Even without Space, Splash, or Big Thunder Mountain, a ticket book didn’t go nearly far enough. When you added all the shops and show, parades and characters, it was always time to go much, much too soon.

I remember spending many nights after those early days falling asleep in the back seat of the family car as we waited to pull out of the parking lot onto West Street. Through half-closed eyes, taillights turned into beams stretching into the darkness.

Those beams faded away more than three decades ago. Looking back on Sleeping Beauty Days again, though, the gleam in my eyes is so familiar a gleam.

Disney Dollars

2009-02-22T18:20:00.000-08:00

The severe economic slowdown obviously hurts a destination like Disneyland. But money troubles were a constant in Walt’s business experience. As most everyone knows, he borrowed against his own life insurance policies to build the Park, and he named money as the single biggest challenge he faced.

Still, he insisted that the cost of delivering a freshly-scrubbed, brightly-polished Disneyland every day was worth it.

Burbank’s sharp pencils have had sharper points for around a quarter of a century now. I think the philosophical shift started in about 1984, when Disneyland endured the painfully slow summer of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. I remember spending long days behind an ice cream or popcorn wagon waiting for guests. After that summer, the popcorn that had been .65 became $1.00. The container’s size was cut in half. And high-profit stuff like churros and glowing necklaces became the stock-in-trade of Outdoor Vending.

Larger changes were made. Tomorrowland stopped trying to represent tomorrow and became a retro-futurist merchandising mall that wouldn’t become outdated because it no longer tried to be ahead of its time. Maintenance was cut back with results that you can still see today. The company pressed ahead to establish multinational outlets for Disney magic, while leaving the secrets of that magic home alone. It didn’t work.

Disney’s strategic decisions couldn’t prevent a global economic meltdown, of course. Still, the prices of everything associated with Disney are greater exponentially than they used to be, and the company can’t seem to make money without turning to discounting. Only a “buy four nights, get three free” promo is bringing folks to Walt Disney World these days. The product isn’t worth it without the promotion.

Disney faces a most “chilling challenge: to find a way out” of degraded financial conditions that don’t favor discretionary consumer spending. According to Argus Research, “at the economically sensitive Parks division, management will need to cut costs without diminishing the visitor experience in order to avoid long-term damage to the brand.” Will consolidation of the functions associated with operating the “Disney Parks” solve the problem? Or will it hasten the evaporation of whatever unique magic remains in the Magic Kingdom?

Those of us who miss the old days often say that Walt didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money. Maybe part of why he didn’t was because he foresaw the times when Disneyland wouldn’t make any money. He nevertheless believed that the Park was worth doing, and worth doing well. Cutting back on the essentials and raising the prices is wishful thinking, as is supposing that you can run Disneyland like any other corporate enterprise. If you could, Walt wouldn’t have prevented his associates from bringing in a bunch of businessmen when the place was just getting off the ground. You can’t fool the public into believing that you’re delivering the same value. Instead, when guests have fewer dollars to spend, you’ve got to give them greater value for those dollars.

Through innovation and dedication, Walt did just that, building an almost unimaginable amount of long-term brand value. But even something that seems infinite can be squandered, as every human-caused extinction and even the country’s own global standing after its response to the September 11 attacks demonstrates. If Disney is smart, it will protect its own global image—the one represented by Disneyland—at all costs.

The child’s approach to life

2009-02-11T23:22:00.001-08:00

Shari Bescos was Disneyland Ambassador when I toddled onto Main Street for the first time.

As I got a little older, an “E” coupon became just about the most valuable currency in the world.

Disneyland was the uncomplicated, practically primitive by today’s standards, Happiest Place on Earth.

The Magic Kingdom was a comforting presence over the years. Things changed, of course. Big Thunder Mountain rose in Frontierland, and the old Fantasyland transformed. Other alterations happened here and there. But the more things changed, the more Disneyland stayed the same.

When I was about sixteen, I realized why.

Night was just falling, and I think my family was trying to figure out where to meet up again before the Park closed. I remember the temperature being a little bit cold, and I was standing off by myself near Town Square, looking towards the Hub.

I wasn’t paying much attention to family plans because I was absorbed in the lights. They were all on. Thousands of bulbs, each one lit up. I don’t remember seeing a single burned-out socket.

It was an electric embodiment of quality.

“That’s how things should be done,” I thought. Main Street that night became for me a visual expression of the unprecedented degree of excellence that Disneyland knew was required to truly accomplish its purpose of creating happiness. I was only a little older than a child then, but I knew that the approach represented by those lights was one I wanted to emulate. And I knew that I had to become part of the company that was Walt Disney Productions, the “wonderful organization” that Walt built, and of which he was most proud.

I think that Walt was right about the right way to approach life, work, relationships, all of it:

Why do we have to grow up?

I know more adults who have the child's approach to life.

They're people who don't give a hang what the Joneses do. You see them at Disneyland every time you go there.

They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures, and they have a degree of contentment with what life has brought - sometimes it isn't much, either.

Rite of Spring

2009-02-05T19:33:00.000-08:00

Spring is almost here. Just thinking about it makes the end of Winter come faster. Especially when your thoughts include those special things that Springtime in Disneyland brings.

It brought such things back in 1983, anyway. I remember one of my first shifts as a new Outdoor Vending Cast Member back then.

It was a 9:45-6:15 assignment behind a red-and-white-striped ice cream wagon just off the Central Plaza between the entrances to Adventureland and Frontierland. Behind me was a planter full of flowers, smiling behind a freshly painted railing and filling the air with fragrance like I'd just stepped into Mlle. Antoinette's Parfumerie in New Orleans Square. As I looked out from my big red umbrella over the top of the wagon, a shining Tomorrowland gleamed.

The day hadn’t heated up yet, and sales of frozen juice bars and ice cream sandwiches were only occasional. I spent much of the morning enjoying the opportunity to act as an unofficial Carefree Corner, dispensing information rather than reaching into the dry-ice-filled wagon for some cold confection. When my Relief to cover the wagon for a break, I almost waved him away.
There was nothing like a new Spring day in the Magic Kingdom to make you feel that everything was right in the world. It was tough to step offstage even for fifteen minutes.

There have been quite a few seasons since then, but you might be able to find a similar feeling when Spring arrives this year.

You won’t see Tomorrowland at its best, of course, and you’ll have to ignore the Ferris Wheel on the skyline as you look down Main Street. There’s no longer perfume in New Orleans Square, and you’ll have to carry your cares around with you without a Carefree Corner to drop them off.

But if you think of Thumper and hunt around the Magic Kingdom this Spring, I hope you find what Walt called “that thing - the imagination, and the feeling of happy excitement- I knew when I was a kid."

I can’t tell you exactly where to find it anymore. If you’d walked up to my wagon in 1983, though, I would have given you directions happily. It would have been easy.

Back then, the thing that Walt was talking about was everywhere you looked.

Gifts that keep on taking

2009-01-31T23:32:00.000-08:00

My fellow Disneyland blogger Vintage Disneyland Tickets had an interesting group of 1985 artifacts up recently, so I thought that I’d throw in this Cast Member information card from the Magic Kingdom’s big 3-0.

It’s interesting, too, to think about how Disneyland has changed in the way it’s promoted since the earlier days. I wasn’t around for the twentieth anniversary, but I wouldn’t guess it was much like the thirtieth’s gift-giving frenzy. In between was Disneyland’s beautiful silver celebration, which, in my mind, still represents the tip of the Matterhorn of excellence. By the time 1985 arrived, a new management team ruled, and what I would call a “Park as promotional item” strategy began its reign.

Under that approach, Disneyland itself seemed no longer reason enough to visit. The slow year following the inaccurate predictions for mammoth attendance spurred by the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics was the entry point for a kind spell of bells and whistles that infiltrated the berm. It couldn’t be broken by something as simple as true love’s first kiss, and it’s effect was to remove confidence in the Park’s ability to be its own magical self.

Instead, guests were cajoled into coming to a Park that hiked its prices and reduced the sizes of its portions to make up the previous year’s disappointing attendance. Prizes, pins, and plush, plus the promise of flashy new GM cars, were supposed to dazzle guests into a kind of shock-and-awe-induced happiness. If 1980 was a family reunion, 1985 was a trinket-laden trade show.

It seems as though nothing Disneyland does anymore is free of artifice and gimmickry. Has the Park just changed with the trends? If it has, why? It’s not the latest trend; it’s yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.

The thirtieth year got the ball rolling away from timelessness toward the transience of short-term gains. This year, it’s essentially “buy one, get one free.” What will you celebrate? How about a Magic Kingdom that acted like it believed in magic more than marketing?

The glitter in Disneyland comes from the things you win even if you’re not a lucky ticket holder or there to celebrate anything more than everyday. Like strolling through a shining Park before the crowds press in. Watching the sparkle come back to the eyes of someone whose car vapor-locked on the Santa Ana freeway on the way to Anaheim. Enjoying the magic hour when the twinkling lights begin to appear around the Central Plaza. You can’t put a price on the feelings that come with those things. Maybe that’s why Walt said he didn’t go into Disneyland with the idea of making money first in his mind. If that’s rose-colored pining for the past, well, the only thing new is the history you don’t know.

I wonder how the Cadillac Sedan De Ville that the “1 in 3,000,000th“-guest drove home is doing today. Did he or she load up the family and come back to the Park over the years?

If the car was won on the guest’s first visit, then the only Disneyland he or she knew was the one that passed out prizes. If the Caddy came to someone who’d loved the Magic Kingdom since way back when it gave guests value rather than gimmicks, however, I wonder whether the feelings that came with the new car were worth its cost. It’s hard to quantify the marketing power of grace and the diminishing return of glamour.

For my money, though, when Disneyland began favoring the latter, it gave away something truly extraordinary.

Return to tomorrow

2009-01-20T20:47:00.001-08:00

It might have been the most popular land in the Magic Kingdom.

Space Mountain was its big draw, of course, but that was hardly the limit of Tomorrowland’s new frontier. Whether you were cruising beneath the polar ice cap, exploring the vast reaches of inner space, or time traveling through America’s musical heritage, you could count on finding something unique when you turned right as you reached the end of Main Street.

There was a special kind of feeling in yesterday’s Tomorrowland. Distinct from the “world’s fair” atmosphere exuded by the “golden ears” version and nothing at all like the misguided offering of today, the 60s-80s Tomorrowland radiated a wonderful sort of accessible modernism. Futuristic but not enough to be intimidating, it offered an optimistic silver and blue welcome that floated out of PeopleMover vehicles as upbeat jazz and moved across the Anaheim sky carried by Rocket Jets, Skyway buckets, and sleek Monorails.

Tomorrowland never failed to represent the best of Disneyland. As the only land not tied to a specific temporal identity, it was somehow more connected with guests than all the others. I think maybe that was the reason for it’s popularity. Its futurism actually presented guests with the opportunity to transform the present into something better.

As guests passed by Mary Blair’s charming murals, they entered a ”Small World” for grown-ups, one filled not only with promises of a better tomorrow, but with possibilities of a better today. If you rode the PeopleMover when it existed, thinking about that fifteen-minute trip might give you a good sense of what I mean. It forced you to slow down, to appreciate the present moment. In that way, it gave you the means to make the future better than it might otherwise have been.

Other parts of Disneyland still do that. The Mark Twain and the Disneyland Railroad, for example, offer similar grand circle tours. But so much of the old Tomorrowland did it, from CircleVision to America Sings to the Space Stage. It really felt like a land of hope and promise.

That was then and this is now, of course.

But isn’t this most historic Inauguration Day an ideal time for a return to tomorrow?

Dopey New Year!

2009-01-09T20:07:00.001-08:00

Like just about everything else in Disneyland, the Disneyana shop on Main Street used to be something different. In my opinion, it’s gotten more reminiscent of the Shops at Caesar's Palace than the shops of turn-of-the-century America. Back in the good old days of 1982, it was a gracious little cubbyhole with a few display cases, an animation cell or two, and some very old Mickey Mouse toys. The shop was more a museum than a merchandise outlet, and it sure was nice to spend time in there.

I was doing just that one afternoon, watching the long-time Disneyana Hostess and fabulously talented Stacia Martin epitomize the legendary Disney courtesy. She spent as much time with the guest who wandered in from the Emporium and hoped to pay for a ceramic figurine without having to go find another cash register as she did with the high roller adding some big-ticket item to a collection. She made each guest feel like Walt himself. As one example, she used to ask guests if whatever they were purchasing was a gift. If it was, Stacia would press a piece of cellophane tape over the price sticker and, with a quick pull, magically lift the top layer, so the recipient wouldn’t know how much the gift had cost. That's why it takes people to make the dream a reality.

Stacia was, and still is, legendary, but the real Legend in the shop that day was animator, director, and imagineer Bill Justice. Stacia introduced us, and we had a wonderful time talking about his experiences in the Hyperion days. (Remember Disneyland’s silly reindeer? Those were Bill’s. Kevin Kidney has a great salute to them over at his fun blog.)

Bill pulled this Bambi letterhead out from somewhere and made this quick sketch of Dopey. Outside, guests strolled up and down Main Street, having a great time, but oblivious to the amazing treat they were passing. There were no crowds in the small shop. Just Stacia and Bill, Dopey and me. I'll take that magic over any marketing. It’s a “collectable” worth keeping forever.

Thanks again, Bill. And special, limited-edition best wishes for an authentic Dopey new year to all.

Getting cable for Christmas

2008-12-25T00:54:00.000-08:00

Remember gliding along on the Skyway at that magic twilight hour?

Pretend it’s a winter night in 1978. The Park is dark on Mondays and Tuesdays, but today is Thursday. Up in the cool air as Disneyland’s lights come on, you’re having a lovely time gracefully cruising the cable. You’ve gotten to all your E-tickets, done most of the Ds, even started your day hours ago with an A on a Main Street vehicle. Now, you can pause to simply look out at the Magic Kingdom and enjoy the view.

If you boarded your bucket in Fantasyland, you might be thinking about grabbing something to eat and then dancing at Tomorrowland Terrace. On the other hand, if you began your Skyway trip in the Tomorrowland station, maybe you’ll slip through Sleeping Beauty Castle and catch the big bands at Plaza Gardens once you swing into the (now weed-choked and abandoned) chalet. The slight chill and the spray from the waterfall is just enough to make the snow seem real as you pass through the Matterhorn and wave at a passing bobsled.

I hope the cover photo on this beautiful souvenir guide from summer 1978 reminds you of what that ride was like. It looks to me like the image could have been taken during a deep, cold winter, but the feeling is nothing but warm.

Just the thing to wish all of you a very merry Christmas.

Continuing the tradition

2008-12-07T20:30:00.000-08:00

Something struck Disneyland in 1984, and I don’t think the Magic Kingdom has ever really recovered.

It wasn't just a third of the Cast, who voted 97% to reject the company’s offer of a two-year wage freeze and 1% increase in the third year of a new three-year contract.

It wasn’t even the twenty-two day period during which nearly 1800 Disneylanders stayed away or picketed the Park.

It was the attitudes that dropped onto 1313 Harbor Blvd. like a kind of genesis device, largely replacing the Disneyland that existed back then with something else. Since Disneyland will never be completed, that shouldn’t have been such a big deal. But the new tried to represent itself as the old, and just about everyone who was around back then could tell it wasn’t going to be anything close.

You could hear it in the hollow echo of times past hanging in the air in the Opera House after Eisner and Wells tried to re-instill “The Spirit of Disneyland” in presentations that did little to convince us that the spirit hadn’t departed to join the 999 happy haunts, forced out by new landlords interested more in raising the rent then keeping the quality at the highest level.

You could feel it backstage when some Cast Members began referring to management as the “dark side.” Sometimes, you could see it onstage in guest relations that were less than they should have been. It’s nearly impossible to create happiness in others if you don’t have it within yourself.

In this holiday season, I wish for the Disneyland that was, the Park that played an important part of helping me become the person I aspire to be. Before the Bass brothers ever heard of Anaheim, before Eisner, Wells, Ovitz, Pressler, and Harris. Before Rocket Rods, Pizza Ports, and Paradise Pier.

Maybe I’ll get my wish this year. A recent new visitor to this blog reported all the Cast Members he encountered during his last visit presented an outstanding Show. If a work force composed of lower-paid, rapid turnover people can still make the dream a reality, then the new management must be doing some things right.

If you’re one of those Cast Members, keep up the good work. And if you’re in management, hop on the Jungle Cruise when Mike is back at the helm. After you ride his boat, catch up with him on break at the Pit, and learn what things were like twenty-plus years ago.

Then help bring that magic back to the Magic Kingdom.

You’ll find that by continuing the tradition, you’ll be helping to create a very important thing in life.

Partners

2008-11-28T22:48:00.000-08:00

The Disneyland I knew didn’t have a bronze monument to Walt in its Central Plaza.

It didn’t need such a thing. The Park itself was a monument.

It represented the ideals and the dreams of Walt Disney, ideals and dreams that turned out to be the same as those of millions of people.

A better tribute to Walk would have been an image of all of those people, not his own likeness. If you wanted to see Walt’s face in Disneyland, you needed only to look around at people like this. A parent and child having fun together.

Walt was never the king of his Magic Kingdom. Disneyland used to believe its most important partnership was the one it shared with its guests. That’s why as Cast Members when working at Disneyland was The Best Possible Job, “our reason for being was not . . . to park cars, sell tickets, serve food, sweep and clean, maintain facilities, count money . . . or do any of the over 400 important tasks required to produce the Disneyland Show.”

We were there to create happiness. That’s why Disneyland was a true reason for being, not merely a job.

It first described that attitude in its 1955 orientation handbook, which I’ve quoted below. The next time you go, see if you think it’s still there:

The most important person in Disneyland is a guest. A guest is a person who enters Disneyland seeking entertainment.

A guest may be white, black, brown or yellow...

Christian, Jew, Buddhist or Hindu...

Republican or Democrat...

Showoff or wallflower, big shot or small...

Rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy...

But, from the moment his car turns into the Disneyland parking lot until he leaves, he is a guest of Disneyland.

How we greet him, how we look, the big and litle things, are all vitally important to the enjoyment of his day at Disneyland.

A Disneyland guest is to us, a King in our Magic Kingdom.

There was a lot more to see on Mars

2008-11-19T22:54:00.001-08:00

There was imagination.

There was education. (“Earth and Mars are anywhere from 35 million to 240 million miles apart at times. Which used to make a trip to Mars pretty tricky. For example, space ships had to follow a curved path for about eight months to intercept Mars when it reached a certain spot. It was like trying to hit a golf ball in California hard enough, and accurately enough, to make it go through one particular window of a train arriving in Florida that much later.”)

There was even a classic bit of Disney slapstick (remember the albatross who tripped the emergency alert every time he came in for a landing?)

That was Mission to Mars.

Now, there’s this. Seems like there was a transporter malfunction when they were trying to beam in a new attraction to update the original Flight to the Moon. They got something from the local mall’s food court crossed with a Johnny Rocket’s outpost, leaving this hideous result.

Perhaps someone told the excited crowd that their object is actually a time capsule, filled with Peoplemovers, Rocket Jets, and America’s music. Or maybe it’s the nucleus of the atom! Do they dare enter the unknown vastness of its inner space?

No.

It is better that they return to the realm of the marketing for a slice of pizza before they are tempted to go on shrinking profits — forever.

Balloon musings

2008-11-16T21:21:00.000-08:00

Disneyland’s modern balloons are quite different from the ones that floated above children’s heads as they toddled around the Magic Kingdom in the ’80s.

When I worked in Outdoor Vending back in ’83 or so, balloons were the simple ones Alice is passing out here. Five colors. Two ears. One dollar. Now, you might as well be at Six Flags. Even the strings were simpler. Plain red cords, not rainbow ribbons. They were just strings, after all.

The balloons those strings held were likewise just balloons. Even so, they were more fun, more innovative, more Disneyland than anyone else’s balloons. Carnival barkers and amusement parks hawk the kinds of balloons Disney now sells. None of them have the simplicity that made the old balloons—and the Park they complemented—such a joyful expression of good design.

Among all the Magic Kingdom’s forced perspectives and thematic facades, you used to be able to find a feeling of honest quality. The old balloons had that, and so did just about everything else. Even though it took tremendous effort and nonstop discipline to keep the Show on the road, Disneyland didn’t try too hard the way it does now. It didn’t layer everything with gimmicks over glam coated with hype.

Now that the Park is a Resort, the balloons are shiny mylar or worse. I don’t know what Mickey’s marketeers thought that trapping him inside a hamster ball added to the Show. Maybe once the new guy from Bolt starts rolling along during parades, somebody will connect the two and decide to let the Mouse out.
In my view, these things represent everything that separates what Disneyland used to be from the place it is now. Just look at this bunch of inflated noise. Cars, Incredibles, Nemo, and mylar Mickey. It’s like a helium multiplex, a collision at the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, or Tomorrowland.

See how the simple silhouette mouse stands apart, even surrounded by its bizarre bubble? That’s a glimpse of the uncomplicated magic upon which Disneyland rose before Disney popped its balloon.

A honey of a place until ’89

2008-11-09T21:43:00.000-08:00

Before the “critters” came, Bear Country was a great place to spend a lazy hour or two of a Disneyland afternoon.

Does anyone spend lazy times at Disneyland anymore? If you’ve never done anything but race from fast pass to fast pass, I wish you could have strolled through Bear Country. You’d have played nickel and dime games in Teddi Barra’s Swingin’ Arcade, maybe sat in Henry’s Vibratin’ Bear Chair (“It’ll shake you up — gently — and wind your watch”), and, if you were lucky, listened to the Big Thunder Breakdown Boys. There was nothing like their rendition of “Pluto Dog,” a Disney variation on “Salty Dog,” an old bluegrass composition:

Standing on the corner with the lowdown blues,
a great big hole in the bottom of my shoes.
Honey, let me be your Pluto dog.

Well, let me be your Pluto dog
or I won't be your man at all.
Honey, let me be your Pluto dog.

Few work locations were more pleasant in the 1980s than Popcorn (“PC”) 8, adjacent to the Country Bear Jamboree. The ice cream wagon next to Bear Country’s entrance sign was opposite the Haunted Mansion’s exit and felt as much part of New Orleans Square as it did of Bear Country. You can just see the edge of the red umbrella standing next to that wagon in this photo at Yesterland. Deeper inside Bear Country at PC 8, it sometimes felt like you weren’t even in Disneyland anymore. You couldn’t hear or see any other part of the Park.

The location was unusual for another reason. Guest traffic in Bear Country didn’t really pick up until about noon, and things thinned out around 1900 hours, or 7 PM. (Disneyland operates on military time). A PC 8 shift took up the whole day and was just about the only wagon that the same Cast Member both opened and closed. Once, on a break, I went wandering around backstage behind the Mile Long Bar to see the sign shop and various other fabrication facilities. Call me crazy, but it was great fun!

There was definitely something about Bear Country worth keeping. Even Magic Mountain tried to install some of the bluegrass flavor of Disneyland’s smallest land. Vintage Disneyland Tickets has this remembrance of Spillikin Corners, an unusual little section of a park famous more for fast rides than slow strolls.

I miss Bear Country’s simple pleasures. Critter Country just doesn’t evoke the same atmosphere. The home-spun musical revue of the Jamboree, the postcards with Marc Davis’s sketches of the Country Bears, even the snoring up in the caves near the entrance. It all came together to create a wonderful part of the Magic Kingdom.

Great moments

2008-11-04T21:26:00.000-08:00

Walt said that he got “red, white, and blue at times.” I think this would be one of those times. Congratulations to our next President from Illinois.

Photo: Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times

Pave Paradise (Pier), put up a parking lot

2008-11-02T23:53:00.000-08:00

In 1984, I started biking to work. Leaving my car (I think it was a ’78 MG midget), meant that I could roll right up to Harbor House without having to cross Disneyland’s hundred-acre asphalt desert. Since I didn’t need my parking pass that summer, I still have it as an artifact from the Disneyland that used to be. These stickers went on the rear view mirrors of Cast Members’ cars, so I think that most are probably as long gone as the lot itself.

I had one friend who worked the pavement as part of his duties as a Main Street/Parking Lot attractions host. It seemed to me that the crew had a lot of fun out there. For the rest of us, it was free and generally convenient work parking.

The only time it wasn’t quite as convenient was during the summer months. Unless you had an opening shift, you usually had to park in “X,” the section out near the Toll Plaza entrance off Harbor Blvd. A pretty good hike just to get in to punch your time card, and you couldn’t hop on the tram. You were fine if you allowed enough time, which you probably made sure to do after a couple of sprints to clock in, get to Wardrobe, change, and make it to your work location. After closing shifts, we shuffled out to our cars together and often decided to head over to the Denny’s across the street. Good times.

For a laugh, you can see another interesting “artifact” of 80s Disneyland at this link to some rare footage of “parking lot man,” a seldom-seen being now probably buried in the rubble beneath California Adventure. Be sure to mark your location so you can find your way back!

Disneyland shops weren’t always Disney Stores

2008-10-21T23:40:00.000-07:00

Disneyland shops once offered all kinds of things.

The incredible selection made Disneyland a fabulous place for holiday gifts. I remember once meeting up with my sister, who worked at Plaza Inn, to undertake a quick search for Christmas presents late in December. We raced from Bear Country’s Wilderness Outpost to Tomorrowland’s Character Shop and got it all done.

You were sure to find something for each person on your list somewhere. Kitchenware, candles, Native American arts and crafts, handbags, flowers, pipes, almost anything. The mall merchandise hadn’t been pushed into every corner, crowding out nearly everything else.

Disneyland shops even carried things that can’t possibly have sold all that well. How many folks left with antiques or custom perfumes, for example? It didn’t really matter. The experience that included such things brought many of those folks back through the main gate time and again. Some people came just to shop, visiting the Park and not getting on a single attraction.

The shops added a lot more than dollars to the deposits turned in at Cash Control at the end of every shift. They added value and interest and helped make Disneyland all that it used to be.

And that’s not something you can buy in any store.

There used to be more magic in the Magic Kingdom

2008-10-16T00:04:00.000-07:00

Disneyland once had twice as much magic. In 1983, when Sleeping Beauty Castle’s drawbridge was raised and lowered for only the second time, half that magic disappeared.

If Merlin's Magic Shop had to go, at least it left with its own sort of magic trick. When the New Fantasyland premiered in 1983, Merlin’s had vanished. The not-quite twin sister of Main Street Magic was replaced by Mickey’s Christmas Chalet, a short-lived tinsel and ornament boutique themed to match Mickey’s Christmas Carol, an equally short-lived animated featurette.

Since the original Fantasyland was closed around the time I joined the Cast in summer 1982, I never got to work a shift in the Castle courtyard opposite Merlin’s. I remember it fondly from my youth as a place I spent a good deal of time and money. I bought my first Tarbell volume there, along with a number of tabletop illusions that amused many a kid's birthday party in my later years.

It’s amazing that Disneyland merchandise once included things like the Tarbell Course in Magic, arguably the best magician’s training program ever produced. Tarbell is a serious course, something you’d expect to find in a professional magician’s supply store. Talk about more interesting retail than never-ending plush and t-shirts!

I’m glad that Main Street Magic remains, but the two shops were really more complements than twins. Fantasyland contributed a “sorcerer” atmosphere to the tricks and monster masks. The interior of the small shop was stone and iron, a fitting background for latex gargoyles and ghouls. Main Street Magic was the Orpheum, the Hippodrome. More Blackstone than Sword-in-the-Stone. Gleaming chrome Chinese linking rings, colorful production screens, and sleek aluminum cups and other apparatus presented a different flavor of magic than Merlin's. White gloves and tuxedos, not pointy purple hats and robes with stars and moons. That’s good. Main Street needs its vaudeville.

But Fantasyland needs its sorcery, too. Disneyland should make Merlin’s reappear.

Why I wanted to work at Disneyland

2008-10-10T23:49:00.000-07:00

We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.

Walt said quite a few good things, but this one really captures something about why a job at Disneyland once meant so much.

Before Disneyland was what it is today, it’s my sense that the Disney characters served a different function in the Park. They were used as transmitters of ideas, as much or more than they were pushed into being vehicles for driving retail sales.

The simple ideas and ideals that Disneyland once stood unabashedly for were embodied in the entertainment Cast Members who helped bring Mickey, Donald, and the rest to life when they walked on stage. The character costumes were three-dimensional depictions of the intangibles that differentiated the Magic Kingdom from amusement parks.

“Physically, Disneyland would be a small world in itself," Walt said. But almost any major amusement park is such a thing. Disneyland also became a state of mind because, as Walt continued, it was designed to encompass “the essence of the things that were good and true in American life. It would reflect the faith and challenge of the future, the entertainment, the interest in intelligently presented facts, the stimulation of the imagination, the standards of health and achievement, and, above all, a sense of strength, contentment, and well-being.”

All of those things were there in Mickey’s white-gloved hands. The amazing thing was that even if you weren’t inside a character costume—maybe you wore, say, a bright yellow shirt/pant combo instead—you likewise embodied those ideals when you pinned on your nametag.

That was why I wanted to work at Disneyland. Not to operate an attraction, guide a tour, sweep up, scoop popcorn, or sell Mickey Mouse figurines in the Character Shop, but to join the characters as a goodwill ambassador to the land outside the berm. The job was a way of helping to create a very important thing in life.

After reading stuff like this, I’m pretty sure that being a Cast Member these days is just a job. That’s a shame. “Our perturbed world” needs characters a lot more than it needs cash cows.

Annuals past

2008-10-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

You can still experience one special aspect of Disneyland as it was before it became a “resort.” You don’t even have to go to Anaheim.

Just go to your local garden center. Wander over to the displays of annuals. All of those bright, colorful flowers that are here today and gone tomorrow. Put yourself right in the middle of the aisle. Close your eyes. Breath in.

It’s 1983, and you’re entering Tomorrowland.

The magnificent aroma you’re inhaling was exactly what once greeted you as you hurried to Space Mountain past a planted pool like this one. A similar smell greeted you on the other side of the Central Plaza as you hustled toward Big Thunder.

It hung in the air with Adriana Caselotti’s soprano tones along the path by Snow White’s Wishing Well as you skipped through on your way to the Matterhorn. I think it even felt like it was in the Flower Mart as I stepped onstage through the entrance on East Center Street, though all the blooms were plastic.

Flowers were in place and at work all over back then, adding a layer of olfactory beauty and their own visual splendor to the carefully designed Park. Waiting for guests to arrive while I was at work on an early morning shift, that scent set the mood for a happy day. Toward the end of a hot Southern California afternoon, it refreshed and revived.

Annuals never fail to trigger memories of the Disneyland of years past. If you remember being there when Tomorrowland looked like this, you know what I’m talking about. You couldn’t miss the contribution of flowers to the Disneyland experience, even as you raced to ride as many things as you could.

If I could live it again, I know one thing. I wouldn’t hurry to Space Mountain, or anything else.

I’d just stroll around with my nose in the air.

Tomorrowland entrance photo used under Creative Commons license.

Dream of a million years

2008-10-04T23:58:00.000-07:00

The object up there in this blog’s masthead is the service pin I received after one year in the Disneyland Cast. It occurred to me that some folks outside the berm might not know what the little bronze Sleeping Beauty Castle represented, so I thought I’d explain how you went about earning one like I did back in the 1980s.

After an interview at Disneyland’s Casting Office, you were hired and assigned a department in the Park. (Outdoor Vending, Dep’t. 937, was mine.) Your status was officially “Casual-Seasonal,” which implies anything but job security, but was still a major step up from the “Casual-Temporary” label once applied to new Cast Members.

As a CS, you were essentially in the same position as the most unfortunate of the guys on the Jungle Cruise’s lost safari. You could count on twenty hours a week at best, fewer in 1984 (attendance really dropped off during the LA Olympics). Fortunately, it was pretty easy to pick up extra hours, provided you didn’t exceed forty.

Once the “seasonal” aspect of your status reached its zenith, however, you were likely on your way until the next peak period. Before Disneyland went to seven-day operations in about 1980 (the Park used to be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays), there wasn’t enough work for you. Unless you made PPT.

Permanent Part-Time Cast Members worked year-round. Maybe not forty-hour weeks, but still enough to call it a living. Even better, you were in the Park in the off-season, when things were comparatively slow. I think the guests during those times were happier because they had Disneyland to themselves. Although it closed at 6:00, there were no lines for anything. As Walt said, “In the winter time you can go out there during the week and you won’t see any children. You’ll see the oldsters out there riding all these rides and having fun.”

Your performance appraisal and the Park’s needs after your CS season determined whether you made Permanent. If you were offered a position, you were sent to a Disneyland doctor for a physical. Then you were on your way to being one of the relatively few who enjoyed presenting the Show to a truly appreciative audience.

It got even better at your one-year mark. You took your nametag to Wardrobe, where they drilled a hole through Mickey. Your one-year pin took his place, setting you a little bit apart, sometimes prompting a guest’s query about what the pin meant . . . and giving you a small sense of life at the next rung up the Disney ladder. Becoming Permanent Full-Time was basically joining the management ranks, probably as a Senior Lead or Supervisor.

My Area Supervisor rose from a fry cook position at Plaza Gardens to managerial authority over Tomorrowland. It took him something like twenty years, but what a career. Imagine twenty years of Disneyland as it was. I often think about what it would have been like to have followed such a path. My time onstage didn’t come close, and, as they say in the Haunted Mansion, “there’s no turning back now.”

That’s one more reason why the year represented by this pin is one I would never trade.

The 21st century began October 1, 1982

2008-10-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

I had hoped to put this up yesterday to herald ”The Dawn of a New Disney Era” circa 1982, but it just didn’t happen. (Maybe that’s somehow appropriate. After all, we’ve certainly seen a new Disney era. It just didn’t happen the way Walt likely hoped.)

I confess that I have never trekked from the left coast to EPCOT and WDW. I’ve held onto this optimistic coin since Cast Activities sent it out shortly after I was hired not from any special fondness for the magical little Park’s younger sister, but simply because I can’t part with any part of my Disneyland experience. I can’t say that what I’ve seen and read online makes me at all eager to visit Walt Disney World, but I could certainly be persuaded otherwise.

In any case, here’s a salute to October 1, 1982. If there are any EPCOT Center fans among the throngs who wander over to this blog, this one’s for you!

A walking, talking information booth with a smile

2008-09-29T23:51:00.000-07:00

Custodial and Outdoor Vending hosts and hostesses are the most accessible Cast Members at Disneyland. It’s tough to converse with a Disneylander while stepping aboard an attraction, but the nearest sweeper or vendor is expected to be all ears all the time.

Fewer guests had complaints in the 1980s, but we were still taught never to send them hoofing off to City Hall. Out there with nothing but a pan and broom or wagon between you and an upset guest, you were City Hall.

Fortunately, most of the guests I met while scooping popcorn, dishing up ice cream bars, or handing out balloons had questions, not complaints. (I admit that sometimes I had complaints about their questions!) And the key point to remember about questions is that no matter how many times you might have answered a particular one, each is a first occasion for the guest asking it. To that guest, that question is the most important one in the world.

That doesn’t mean that some guest questions weren’t really dopey. How about these:

What time is the 2:00 parade?

Are the fireworks outside?

Is Disneyland open till it closes?

Where are the whores? (I am not making that up. Only time a guest ever stumped me. I was at a wagon just outside Plaza Pavilion, and I suppose he hoped that the building might be a house of ill repute!)

And my all-time favorite:

What do you have? (Asked while approaching ice cream wagon, which has large sign on front facing guest stating items and prices.)

Most of the questions I got were ordinary, but extremely important:

Where are the restrooms?

Have you seen my kid?

How do you page somebody? (Guests really want to be able to page each other. At least, they did in the 80s, when a cell phone was about as big as a loaf of bread. I don’t know if you still hear announcements in the Park like this: “Daisy . . . Duck . . . please call . . . the Disneyland . . . operator. Daisy . . . Duck. Please call the Disneyland operator.” They happened every so often way back when. Answer: sorry, but no paging except in medical emergencies.)

Where’s the Lost and Found?

I got few foreign language questions, but one happened while I was working the popcorn wagon in New Orleans Square. A guest who spoke only french bought a popcorn and asked, “où est la maison de pirates?” Luckily, that one was easy.

Sometimes guests didn’t really care about the answers. They just used a question as a good excuse to talk to you.

Fortunately for me, that excuse also works for writing.

Keeping the Show on the road

2008-09-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

Disneyland looked different in the early-to-mid 80s.

Not just because there were only seven themed lands and maybe fifty ice cream and popcorn locations (during the peak seasons). Not just because guests could see unique shops offering unusual wares, a treehouse in which they might have imagined living, or a sustainable and efficient transportation system for moving them and many other people. Not even just because weenies at the end of every street stood as carefully planned compass points to lead guests into and through the Show.

Disneyland looked different back then because it was clean. Shirley Temple could have been talking about the Park when, after unveiling Walt’s special Oscar™ for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (one big and seven little statues), she exclaimed: “Isn’t it bright and shiny?”

Before the last guest was halfway down Main Street after the closing announcement, many of the more than 350 maintenance and custodial personnel were busy cleaning and inspecting. Every pedestrian surface was pressure-washed and dried before the first guest pressed up against the rope line the next day.

The scenes in Frontierland and Adventureland’s shooting galleries were completely repainted every night. Each of the 108 six foot brass pole on the King Arthur Carrousel was hand-polished, a four-hour job.

Walt knew that such maintenance was both expensive and essential. “To keep an operation like Disneyland going,” he said, “you have to pour it in there. It’s what I call ‘keeping the show on the road.’ You have to keep throwing it in; you can’t sit back and let it ride.” And he was prepared for “those sharp-pencil guys” who told him, “Walt, if you cut down on maintenance we’d save a lot of money.”

Now, Tomorrowland is filthy. Paint is peeling all over the place. There are big cracks in the monorail beamway supports. Abandoned keelboats, mine trains, and more than one sustainable and efficient transportation system sit in decay. The list goes on.

Barack Obama has pointed out that the policies that led to the crisis on Wall Street are the same ones that led to the crisis on Main Street. Of course, he didn’t mean that 1890s road in Disneyland, and I am certainly being more than a little tongue-in-cheek in comparing the two.

But since there’s another American institution besides the investment banking industry that’s had serious trouble keeping the show on the road, why not some Mickey Mouse earmarks?

A smile big as the (silver and) blue

2008-09-23T20:18:00.000-07:00

It was 1980, three years before I would step onstage with a part instead of a passport. I was sixteen, and Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom was twenty-five.

Disneyland shimmered in its anniversary attire. Silver and blue. Simple and sophisticated. A family reunion. And, for me, the pinnacle of what the Park was and should be always.

In 1980, there was a connection to Walt’s ideas and ideals, not a statue to his memory. There was no second gate and just one hotel. There were no fast passes or maintenance slowdowns.

Of course, it was just as true then that “Disneyland will never be finished.” For those folks who know only the Disneyland Resort, I’m sure that it’s at least something special to you, if not something wonderful. But I think that when Walt called Disneyland “something we can keep developing and adding to,” he never meant it to become something other than what it was created to be.

“A family park where parents and children could have fun together.”

“A fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic.”

In 1980, it served as all of those things superbly, and that was all Disneyland ever needed to do to succeed. At the 25th-year family reunion, families were welcomed with warmth, not prizes or gimmicks. The Magic Kingdom expressed its gratitude not with gewgaws or garishness, but by graciously being its absolute best, as only it could.

There wasn’t a burnt-out bulb on Main Street.

Nothing needed repainting, because it was repainted every night. Painters worked alongside pressure washers, gum scrapers, and brass polishers.

The focus wasn’t on marketing, but on presenting the Park as it was meant to be, and thereby celebrating all it had become in the quarter-century since its dedication.

The twenty-fifth birthday parade might have been the touchstone for what one youtube poster called “the era where parades at Disneyland were classics.” It featured simple floats, one for each land. Polynesian dancers. Golden Horseshoe girls. A host of characters, including Cinderella in a crystal coach pulled by a team of gleaming white horses in polished harnesses. A choreographed group of upbeat roller skaters. And a train of long, blue platforms, each topped by shining mirrored letters spelling out the name of the Happiest Place on Earth.

The music tracked each land as its float passed, shifting as the letters approached to a tune that defines Disneyland as I recall it most fondly:

Now you’ve seen
our land of dreams.
A kingdom full of magical things,
where love and laughter come to stay,
here and each and every day

Twenty-five is not so long.
With Mickey Mouse, you can’t go wrong.
Come on, my friends, let’s sing along.
Disneyland is your land.

Disneyland.
It’s a magical kingdom.
Where every wish
will come true.
Everything you ever do
brings a smile
big as the blue.
And we’re so glad to see you passing through.

Disneyland.
A family world.
For every boy and every girl.
A happy-ever-after world.
Disneyland is your land.

If you weren’t sixteen, or even six, in 1980, I’m glad to see you passing through now. And if you were part of Disneyland all those years ago, welcome to this family reunion.

Let us re-live Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln

2008-09-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

Some of the most memorable moments I spent at Disneyland were the ones listening to Mr. Lincoln.

As a kid when the original attraction was around, I didn’t pay it too much attention on my family’s all too infrequent (for me!) visits to the Magic Kingdom. “Great Moments” was updated in 1984, a year or so after I joined the Disneyland Cast. Advanced animatronics broadened the Lincoln figure’s range of movement, and a longer opening that included the “Two Brothers” civil war montage from EPCOT’s American Adventure made the original presentation richer without changing its essence. Once I could sign into the Park anytime, I came to really enjoy Mr. Lincoln, and I often spent some time in the Opera House on my days off.

As I sat there as a young adult who hadn’t yet gone to college, I think that some of the seeds that grew into my decision to become a lawyer were planted. Maybe it’s corny to say so, but I’m sure that those recorded words, coupled from several addresses Lincoln gave during his life, created a connection.

If they did, I think it’s because Lincoln represents something that has become much tougher to find in America. It’s not hard to think that we’re having trouble finding our way home. This, of course, is a blog about Disneyland, not politics, so that’s as far as I’ll go on such matters here. As Walt once said, “why be a governor or senator when you can be king of Disneyland?”

It just seems to me that while an attraction about Abraham Lincoln may have consumed valuable real estate on Main Street without returning any marketing value for the latest Pixar production, it presented a unique and invaluable experience that conveyed perfectly “the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America.” You can’t find that experience in Disneyland any more, and I think we need it desperately. After all, as the voice of Paul Frees once intoned, Lincoln’s “prophetic words are as valid for our time as they were for his.”

Lincoln talked about changing course back to the American ideal. Here are some of the words that guests once heard when they stepped into the theater on Main Street:

My countrymen,

if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with those great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence,

if you have listened to suggestions which would take away its grandeur,

if you are inclined to believe that all men are not created equal,

let me entreat you to come back.

Come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence.

Do not destroy that immortal emblem of humanity.

If that Declaration is not the truth, let us get the statute books in which we find it, and tear it out.

Let us stick to it then. And let us stand firmly by it.

As we prepare this week to watch debates as important for our time as those between Lincoln and Douglas were for theirs, it’s a time for all of us, whatever our political leanings, to think seriously about “these immortal words,” and about which candidate will best guide America forward. I’d like to do my thinking about that while wandering around the Walt Disney Story, listening to Walt explain why he gave his tribute to our 16th president a permanent home at Disneyland.

Fortunately, if the skills of the sculptor and the talents of the artist can no longer let us re-live Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, the video cameras of the folks who post on youtube can.

It takes people to make the dream a reality

2008-09-20T00:15:00.000-07:00

Disneyland’s Casting Office was just to the left of Harbor House, the small building where Cast Members entered and left the Park (after finding a slot to slip that all-important time card so you’d remember where it was among the thousands in the racks the next day). Casting put out this lovely little brochure, which describes quite nicely what it was like to work for the Mouse in the 1980s.

Of course, what I like most is that Outdoor Vending is so well represented!

If you always wanted to work at Disneyland but never made it to the Casting Office, I hope you’ve enjoyed this look inside.

Come all ye young (and not so young) sailors

2008-09-18T00:04:00.001-07:00

My roommate when I lived in Anaheim in the early 80s also worked in the Park. He was an Attractions Host who had made Disneyland a career and had enough seniority to ensure a great rotation between the world-famous Jungle Cruise, Big Thunder, the Mark Twain, and the mighty Sailing Ship Columbia.

The Columbia was one of my favorite things about working at Disneyland. She didn’t cruise the Rivers of America everyday, spending much of her time tied up behind the immortal Keel Boats at the dock in Fowler’s Harbor. It was a serendipitous thing to get a day shift at the popcorn wagon near the Haunted Mansion, or an ice cream wagon on the path along the river, on a sunny afternoon when the Columbia was sailing.

I would hum along with her theme, which is called The Boston-Come-All-Ye . You can hear the great Thurl Ravenscroft sing the Disney version here. Here are the lyrics:

Come all ye young sailormen listen to me, I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea.
Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow; we’re bound to the southward, so steady she goes.

Oh, first came the whale, he’s the biggest of all, he clumb up aloft, and let every sail fall.
Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow; we’re bound to the southward, so steady she goes.

Next came the mackerel with his striped back, he hauled aft the sheets and boarded each tack.
Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow; we’re bound to the southward, so steady she goes.

The porpoise came next with his little snout, he grabbed the wheel, calling “Ready? About!”
Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow; we’re bound to the southward, so steady she goes.

Then came the smelt, the smallest of all, he jumped to the poop and sung out, “Topsail, haul!”
Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow; we’re bound to the southward, so steady she goes.

The herring came saying, “I’m king of the seas! If you want any wind, I’ll blow you a breeze.”
Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow; we’re bound to the southward, so steady she goes.

Up jumped the tuna saying, “No, I am the king! Just pull on the line, and let the bell ring.”
Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow; we’re bound to the southward, so steady she goes.

Next came the cod with his chucklehead, he went to the main-chains to heave to the lead.
Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow; we’re bound to the southward, so steady she goes.

Last come the flounder as flat as the ground, saying, Damn (at Disneyland, Thurl sings “blast”) your eyes, chucklehead, mind how you sound!
Then blow ye winds westerly, westerly blow; we’re bound to the southward, so steady she goes.

Thanks to rumolay for the original photo, used under Creative Commons license.

When the Haunted Mansion threw open its doors

2008-09-17T00:06:00.000-07:00

Mike at Jungle is 101 has a terrific post today about an encounter with one of the 999 happy haunts of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. His story got me thinking about my trip behind the scenes of the Mansion back in 1985.

As part of the 30th year celebration, Disneyland Cast Activities threw an “open house” for Cast Members and their families. The festivities included dinner and tours of several attractions. You could get a look at the Big Thunder control room, ride Space Mountain with the lights on, and, best of all, walk through the Haunted Mansion.

I understand that this kind of thing has become much more common in recent years. Reports I’ve read of various private functions/merchandising opportunities strike me as pretty disturbing.

For a few evenings in May of 1985, however, something extraordinary happened. Especially for those whose roles in the Disneyland Show never took them anywhere near the inside of a “ride.” Everyone from Arcade Mechanics to Zebra Taxidermists was allowed to see the Mansion without being confined to a Doom Buggy.

We learned all about Pepper’s Ghost illusions and front projections. We heard about the spiderweb created to hide the hole shot by some guest into the glass panel in front of the dining hall scene. We got up close and personal with Little Leotta and the ghosts who follow you home.

I don’t know how many people were there, but it was by far the most popular tour. Lines stretched out into New Orleans Square so far that you practically had to choose between seeing the Mansion or anything else before the night was over.

It’s amazing that the decades have not reduced the magic in what is, at heart, a carnival dark ride. But when Disneyland and imagination were still close friends, a simple but unexpected light in an upstairs window of the “house that people avoid walking past at night” became heart-stopping.

And a simple but unexpected extended visit to that house became one of the things that made being a Cast Member in the 80s the best possible job.

Showmanship Disneyland style - Act Two

2008-09-15T19:17:00.000-07:00

Two fond memories of the past today present the Disneyland Show as it was during my days onstage. First, another part of the Cast booklet I posted earlier. This is the only full-color spread, but it’s got some nice photos of some of my favorites. The Main Street Electrical Parade and Country Bear Jamboree have been discarded, but at least the Mark Twain and Jungle Cruise are still afloat!

Next, a guide to some of the shows that used to be such a big part of the Magic Kingdom, especially when seen multiple times over a summer! Today at Disneyland, a terrific assortment of talent, capped off by the electrosynthemagnetic musical sound of the Main Street Electrical Parade. This schedule offers “Facts & Features” about what was once a Southern California icon.

Working a popcorn wagon along the parade route during the Electrical Parade meant switching off the lights. The wagons have two can lights on brackets illuminating the underside of the roof over the small counter. With these off, there wasn’t really anything to break up the Anaheim darkness, since the floats lit up only the route, not the surrounding area. On more than a few occasions, I stood watching the crowds watch the Parade when a guest appeared seemingly from nowhere to order a popcorn. It was especially startling when they came up on the wrong side of the wagon!

After all the floats passed and the Park’s many lights came back up, I would hit the switch on the little panel that served as the wagon’s nerve center, controlling the clown, the agitator inside the kettle, and the oil dispenser. My two little lamps would click on, adding to the glow of another warm Disneyland night.

Where to find pixie dust*

2008-09-14T00:08:00.000-07:00

One of the niftiest things about Outdoor Vending in the early 80s was the fun of working all across the park, as I’ve described in earlier posts. Far and away the premier work assignment was the balloon position in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle. If you take a close look at the center of this publicity photo, you can catch a glimpse of a vendor assigned to that location. (It’s not me and I don’t recognize whoever it is. If you do, please let me know!) He or she looks to be wearing the long-sleeved shirt and bow tie of the Main Street costume, which no longer exists. That means whoever it is was assigned to the Castle, as only Lead, Relief, and Tomorrowland positions wore yellows.

Except for Disneyland’s first-rate Custodial Hosts and Hostesses, no other Cast Members had the chance to become part of the Magic Kingdom’s signature spot. Standing out there with a bunch of fifty bright, colorful Mickey balloons, you were truly an integral piece of the Disneyland image. Whether I worked that spot as my assigned position or just stepped in as a Relief to cover a lunch or break, I felt just a bit prouder of my role. How could anyone not? You were in front of one of Walt’s most famous icons, holding a bunch of red strings connected to fifty big copies of another, and everyone in the park passed by you.

The person under one of those clouds of multicolored mice was not only someone guests greeted as they headed into or out of Fantasyland, he or she was someone they often included in their photos. I was never in the character department, but was asked many times to pose with guests for a Castle snapshot. Even handed a balloon to actor John Candy as he strolled by one day.

I don’t know if the company still puts balloons out there. If they don’t, they should. That single spot has more pixie dust than just about anywhere in Disneyland.

*“Pixie dust,” for non-Cast Members, is an elemental mixture of certain qualities like enthusiasm, cheerfulness, and general motivation to create happiness found most often in eager new hires and dedicated old hands. Those for whom a role in the Disneyland Show was better described as a “job” tended to be in short supply of the mysterious and quite magical substance, which has reportedly been detected in only trace quantities at the “Disneyland Resort.”

Summer of ’83

2008-09-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

1983. My first summer as a vendor.

One of the most unique roles in the Disneyland show, we humble purveyors of popcorn, ice cream, and balloons had the best of all possible worlds, or, more accurately, lands. In a single week, you might be assigned to Popcorn 8 in Bear (not Critter) Country, the Train just up the walk from It’s a Small World, Popcorn 1 in Town Square, a balloon position under the Peoplemover (not Rocket Rods, not abandoned) track across from the Character Shop, and an ice cream wagon opposite Pirates looking over the Rivers of America.

As a vendor, you were in one of the most visible, accessible guest contact positions. Unlike my friends in Attractions, who move guests courteously and efficiently through the turnstiles, vendors served guests when and for however long the guests chose to be stand at your wagon. Even the smallest shop, something like the Mod Hatter, has the barrier of counter and cash register. Those of us in ODV were basically in guest relations, except we didn’t do tours or answer phones.

You had time to actually converse with those who came to Disneyland not to ride Space Mountain or share an adventure with their kids. I met a lot of folks who, like me, enjoyed just being there. You answered question and gave directions. Sure, it had its drawbacks. Not always fun to stand behind a hot popcorn wagon in July, or be at the end of a line of what seemed like 84,000 sweating guests looking for something cold.

But I loved it, and I know that I’m not just remembering it as better than it was. Canoe races before work. Signing back in most nights after, maybe to meet friends at Tomorrowland Terrace or sit and listen to Rod Miller at Coke Corner. Just being there.

I don’t think what became California Adventure was even on the drawing board. Pixar didn’t exist. C3PO and Indiana Jones were not Cast Members. If you wanted to find a Walt Disney character, perhaps Mickey, you could look in Town Square or catch Steamboat Willie at the Main St. Cinema.

It seems looking back now that Disneyland was a much simpler magic kingdom then.

But in 1983, I think it was practically perfect in every way.

Showmanship Disneyland style

2008-09-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

Popcorn was sixty-five cents. Balloons came in yellow, red, blue, light blue, and pink. Ice cream wagons served up Carnation ice cream bars, ice cream sandwiches, orange juice bars, and frozen bananas.

It was the spring of 1983, and I was a new Outdoor Vending Cast Member, proudly attired in yellow polo shirt and pants with red and white stripes. One of the best parts of the job was its breadth. Vendors worked throughout the park, heading out from our office behind America Sings all the way to the farthest corner of Bear (not Critter) Country.

It was a time before Eisner, before Disneyland and Walt Disney Productions shifted focus from the finest in family entertainment to whatever it is the company sells now. I know that a great many people still find a special kind of happiness when they visit the various Resorts, Parks, ships, etc., and I haven’t started this blog to criticize Disney. I’ve put it up to celebrate the time and the showmanship I remember. Mike at Jungle is 101 has pointed out a lot of things from around my time period and continues to run a tight ship (as tight as a leaky tiki) on his excellent blog. I hope to add some more good stuff in a similar vein.

Here's the first. This booklet came out a few years before I put on my nametag and is a terrific example of what Disneyland used to be about: creating happiness for each and every guest, one at a time. These are some of my favorite pages, and I’ll likely put the rest up, too.

A very special thanks to the Disneyland Cast of late 1982 through 1986. And to all who come to this happy blog, welcome.