Walt Disney Reveals Just How Disneyland Was Created in Rare Interview
Back in the 1960s, Reader's Digest contributor Ira Wolfert got the chance to tour Disneyland, then just five years old, with Walt Disney himself. This is his first-person account.
“Twenty years ago,” Walt said as we drove toward Disneyland, some 25 miles southeast of central Los Angeles, “I was always trying to think of a place to take my two small daughters on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon—a place where I could have fun, too.
“At an amusement park, the only fun provided for a father, besides having his bottom dropped out from under him on the roller coaster, was the same he enjoyed all week: Buying the tickets.”
Now Walt has created his own park, to satisfy—in parents as in children—the profound human hunger to wonder, be amazed, and make believe. With that incomparable Disney sorcery, he has combined fantasy and history, adventure and learning in a way that sets every tendril of the imagination to tingling. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the first map Walt ever made of Disneyland.
From the beginning, Disney decided to lay out this 31-million-dollar playground like a gigantic theater. You’re in the lobby the moment you hand in your ticket: It’s Main Street, U.S.A., as it looked 50 years ago, when Walt was growing up. To the left and the right and straight ahead are the entrances to four “stages”—Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland. On these stages are set 45 different attractions, irresistible toys more costly than an emperor could buy.
Main Street has gaslights, handcranked telephones, a penny candy store with jelly beans and orange slices, and a bank where bankers (real ones) wear high stiff collars and massive watch chains and work at roll-top desks. An apothecary shop offers herb remedies and real live leeches in bottles of water. At the “Main Str. Cinema,” real (1914) Thomas A. Edison and Pearl White movies play. Only the ceilings and lighting inside the stores are modern. “I’m sorry you noticed that,” said Walt disconsolately. “We had to change the gaslights here—people complained that they made the merchandise look too gloomy.”
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