Disneyland Then

Sunday evenings during my pre-school years there was one thing worth watching on television: Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. The music would strike up and there would be the dazzling color of the kaleidoscope. Kindly Walt Disney would welcome us to the show and talk about something creative and inspiring and then there would be cartoons and animals and wholesome family movies. There were even rumors of a magical realm, the happiest place on earth, called Disneyland. For a kid growing up in New Jersey it had the same mythic resonance as Camelot or Shangri-la.

One summer we took our Dodge Caravan motorhome out to California to visit the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins on both sides of the family. I’m sitting up front next to my father who is driving through Los Angeles traffic when he says to me, “Now isn’t that strange. Here it is summer and hot enough for shorts and there’s a mountain covered with snow. See it over there, a snow-capped peak? I wonder why it doesn’t melt. Do you think we should go check it out, Sandy?” I was intrigued and agreed to investigate. I practically came unglued when we drove through an archway that had letters that I could pick out and put together as Disneyland. What I had spied from the freeway was the Matterhorn ride and it was an E-ticket ride!

My memories of that first trip to Disneyland are from the perspective of someone who was at eye level with everyone’s knees. I remember how friendly Dumbo looked and how exciting it was to fly on his ride. The Matterhorn was cold and scary but I was propped up against my burly father and felt perfectly safe. I loved the train (it had dinosaurs!) and the characters, and my little felt Mickey Mouse ears with my name embroidered on the back.

My mother loved “It’s a small World” and bought me a Tinkerbell doll for my collection. She also went nuts over the Tiki Room. I think we sat through that show repeatedly because Mom liked it so much. She came back to New Jersey and completely redecorated our basement to resemble the Tiki room. She covered the bar with fake grass skirts, put up fake parrots in fake palm trees, and arrayed coconut monkeys against the bamboo wall treatments. My brothers would go through it singing, “In the tacky, tacky, tacky, tacky, tacky room . . . “

Since that first trip to Disneyland was in our motorhome, we could get our hand stamped and leave the park and have lunch and naptime in the motorhome parked under some patron saint of Disneyland such as Goofy or Dopey. We stayed overnight in the parking lot that first trip, in the days when that was encouraged. It was an utterly wonderful experience to my big, brown Anime eyes and one of the few things we did as a family that had something that everybody could enjoy.

We moved to California in the summer of 1967 and visited Disneyland on our way to our new home. I was old enough to ride everything, and get the jokes on the Jungle Cruise, and adore Pirates of the Caribbean. I don’t know which trip I saw “The World of Tomorrow” in Tomorrowland but I was confident that if Walt Disney said this was what the future was going to be like, then it would be so. I’m still miffed that there are no flying cars or monorail in my town, now that tomorrow has become today. As I grew, I came to appreciate that Walt was a visionary, a man of drive and genius, but not always the nicest guy you’d want to deal with. Then I learned how his brother Roy was the balm to Walt’s burn, the businessman to the dreamer, the peacemaker to the one who poked until he got what he wanted. I like Walt’s statue with Mickey at Disneyland but even more, I like that Roy has a statue tucked away with Minnie at Disney World.

Once I lived in the same state as Disneyland, I visited it with each new season of life. My parents and I took in Disneyland on a trip during my early teens in which we also saw Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studios. My parents were past the spinning tea cups stage and more inclined to sit and people watch in New Orleans Square. My college friends and I met up at Disneyland one summer between semesters. That’s when my boyfriend John learned the bitter truth about my low blood sugar issues when I nearly passed out against the wishing well by the castle. When John and I married in the summer of 1983, our honeymoon consisted of driving from theme park to theme park. We slept overnight in our pickup truck in the Disneyland parking lot in the days when that sort of thing was frowned upon. We came back with friends in the summer of 1989, staying in the cheapest motel possible. One of our friends loved to stand in line for the rides but would take the chicken exit at the last minute. We were trying to get pregnant and I was afraid to go on any of the really jarring rides in case I had conceived and didn’t know it yet. Disneyland was getting ready to undergo some dramatic transformations, as were John and I before our next visit to the Magic Kingdom.