"The thing will get more beautiful year after year. And it will get better as I find out what the public likes; I can't do that with a picture it's finished and unchangeable before I find out whether the public likes it or not." Walt Disney on Disneyland. Walt Disney found different reasons to build his seventeen million dollar Magic Kingdom in Anaheim in 1955. The idea had originally stemmed ...

It's no secret that Walt Disney had a special place in his heart for railroads. Years before Disneyland opened, he built a model railroad in his backyard which he dubbed the Carolwood Pacific Railroad and spent countless hours riding it, tinkering with it and giving his family and friends much-coveted rides. When Disneyland opened in 1955, the narrow-gauge Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad circled ...

Going to a theme park is supposed to be fun. But listening to some fans, you've got to wonder if the thing they find most fun about Disneyland is complaining about it. I get it - theme parks are a passion for many of us. We have been going to Disneyland for years, and those visits have grown into a long-time love affair. We adore the rides, the food, the entertainment and the atmosphere. There are ...

"I know it's here somewhere" I'm not sure if that's exactly what was said upon first sight of where the Rivers of America used to be, but I'm sure it was something similar. Maybe with a little more salt. A lot of the excavation for the layout of the park revolved around removing existing trees and vegetation, digging out what would be the basin for the riverbed that would become the Rivers of America. ...

The youngest grandchildren made their first trip to Disney World over the Christmas holidays. They loved it. My fairest daughter, who hadn't been there since she was small, came back raving about the quality of the entertainers in Magic Kingdom, impressed at how they managed to be so consistently nice to children day after day. She took the occasion to tell the kids that their grandfather, the author of ...

There's Got to be a Morning After When we last left off, Walt Disney had made it through Opening Day. It wasn't all that he had hoped it would be, but he made it. "Black Sunday" was supposed to be a relatively tame press preview. Instead it resembled more of an all out free-for-all -- the park being besieged by triple attendance that was more than expected. From a certain point of view, this was ...

1955 Hours: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week in summer; closed Mondays the rest of the year. Size: 60 acres, plus 100 acres for parking. Zones: Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Main Street USA 18 attarctions Admission: $1 (including tax) for adults. 50 cents for children. Ride tickets, sold separately, priced from 10 to 35 cents. Employees: About 1,000 ...

Summer 1948: Walt Disney visits the Chicago Railroad Fair, a spectacle that spurs his dream for a "Mickey Mouse Park." June 1953: Stanford Research Institute is tapped to conduct a survey for a site within metropolitan Los Angeles and accessible by freeway. Search ends with purchase of 160 acres of orange groves in Anaheim. July 21, 1954: Construction of Disneyland begins. July 17, 1955: ...

Once upon a time, in the magic realm of California, there was a grown-up heady boy named Walt Disney who set out to create the happiest place on earth. So he went into his counting houses and to his moneylenders, and he collected millions of dollars. Then he ordered his royal artists and carpenters to build a whimsical wonderland of spaceships to the moon and Mark Twain river boats, of mechanical monkeys ...

It was a normal Sunday afternoon at Disneyland. The Gay Nineties show had just broken at the Golden Horseshoe, a make-believe salon located in the Frontierland area. The tourist-packed Mark Twain, a scaled-down reproduction of a nineteenth-century Mississippi river boat, was sailing around Tom Sawyer's Island. Stagecoach passengers were jolting through the Painted Desert, which, until recently, had been an ...

Disneyland was built on a dream. And it was Walt Disney's dream that has made millions of wishes come true during the past 50 years. Hundreds of millions of wishes, really. And also special moments - first dates and honeymoons, birthdays and anniversaries, and fun days spent with kids and later with grandkids. Several weeks ago, we asked readers to recall their favorite Disneyland memories. ...

Disneyland is a place where a grown man looks perfectly normal wearing Mickey Mouse ears and where a little girl can feel like a princess. The first true theme park also is a melting pot where an Indian woman in traditional dress poses for a photo in front of the Small World ride featuring children from around the world and where instructions to ride the Winnie the Pooh attraction are given in ...

The summer of 1955 was magical for two children living in Southern California. Like thousands of others, they visited Disneyland. But, unlike their peers, the visit by cousins Bill Krauch and Sybil Stanton was part of a revealing peak at the Magic Kingdom weeks before the park opened to the public. Walt Disney personally served as their host and tour guide. "It was all arranged by our uncle, ...

The saga of the aging cinema star is a part of American folklore-the heady upward trajectory, the few brief seasons on the summit, and the swift descent to "B" pictures, guest appearances, and, of late, odd jobs on television. Next October the saga will be re-enacted again, but with one big difference. The old friend taking a job as TV master of ceremonies will have all his joints in top working order, and ...

Disneyland is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a bang. A lot of them, actually. A pyrotechnic extravaganza is being unleashed nightly as the latest manifestation of the park's fireworks show, and it's an impressive one. As Disneyland pays homage to some of its most popular attractions down through the years, fireworks are not aimed straight into the sky but at angles, so as to resemble shooting ...

Craftsmen must use their hands, heads and hearts to create the rides and inventions that make the park distinctly Disney. Walt Disney dreamed the idea for Disneyland, but it took an army of innovators to build a place where people could step inside a story. Disney tapped the best artists and risk-takers in his film studio to transform their two-dimensional fantasy worlds into a real place. When ...

Well hello to all you Disney fans. I want to tell you about some of the exciting times when working on the river. One of the memorable times I recall quite a bit is working the mid-night shift on the rafts. This was a scheduled shift that started at 1am 9am. I know that seems a bit odd but yes the rafts ran at this time. My job was to assist the technicians who worked on the Fantasmic equipment by ...

Disneyland was Walt Disney's baby, a dream he nurtured for years which eventually turned into a flat-out obsession ... an obsession that had as many skeptics as it had bank creditors demanding that Disney make good on all the loans he needed to make his pie-in-the-sky come true. Tomorrow, The Happiest Place on Earth celebrates its 55th anniversary. Five and a half decades after the world's first ...

Disneyland was dedicated during a special preview opening day on July 17, 1955. The public opening was July 18. The dedication aired on ABC at 4:30 p.m. July 17. Some details of the opening: Park attendance: 6,000 guests were invited for the special preview opening, but an additional 22,000 showed up with counterfeit tickets, making for a total of 28,000 guests that day. Temperature: 101 ...

Glimpses of the old and historic Western movement of American history are provided to visitors of Disneyland in Frontierland. The period of Frontierland is approximately from 1810 to 1860, but flags flying over Frontierland encompass the period from the establishment of our union of states under the Constitution through the post-Civil War era. The 13-star entrance flag ...