Family fun made by Disney

ANAHEIM, Calif. - Before 1955, Anaheim was covered in orange groves, family vacations usually didn’t have themes, and amusement parks didn’t have the most upstanding of reputations.

Then along came Walt Disney and his imagination. He looked at the orange groves and saw a headquarters for all his dreams. He examined family vacations and detected an opportunity to make them more cohesive, more wondrous and more fun. He saw that the traditional amusement parks around the United States were either boring or dilapidated or both.

With one massive and unprecedented experiment, Disney created Disneyland, which in turn changed the face of the family vacation forever.

Perhaps no better witness to that history exists today than Ron Dominguez. On Disneyland’s Day One, he was a ticket taker at the main gate. When he finally retired 11 years ago, he was executive vice president of Disneyland.

“There was some apprehension in the community,” recalled Dominquez, whose family was one of 17 that sold its land to Disney in the early ‘50s for the Disneyland site. “Amusement parks weren’t known to have the best atmosphere around the country. Some of the employees were a little on the seedy side.

“Walt’s idea was totally different when he started Disneyland. He wanted cast members in costume. He wanted cast members to be friendly. We went through orientation and learned friendly phrases to greet people with. We took a ‘customer is always right’ attitude.

“That skepticism began to change quickly. People realized this was a totally different type of operation.”

AP file Sleeping Beauty's Castle in the center of the original Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. The castle has been the most recognized feature of the famed Southern California theme park.

When you think of the typical American family of the 1950s, you probably don’t picture it embracing any concept that was radically different from the norm. Disneyland was a colossal exception. It altered the American vacation experience, mostly by adorning it with a theme to make folks feel at home.

Walt Disney had a built-in advantage in that effort. He made his fortune with animated films like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Bambi” and “Fantasia,” among many others. When it came time to build Disneyland, he simply enlisted his already popular characters and put them to work in the new park.

The result? Adults and kids who came to Disneyland felt an immediate connection, a familiarity and friendliness. “It was about immersive storytelling,” noted Duncan Wardle, currently vice president for press and publicity at Disneyland. “The heritage of Disneyland comes from the movies, and it’s still there today.”

Wardle travels often, especially in anticipation of Disneyland’s 50^th anniversary, and remembers meeting a tough, middle-aged businesswoman about a year ago in New York. He showed her a picture of an old attraction called the “House of the Future” and noted her reaction: “I looked at her face, and she transformed into a 6-year-old right in front of me.

“It’s amazing. We were in New York at a meeting. Everybody was over 35, and everybody there had a memory of getting on a plane or getting in a car and coming to Disneyland.”

That ability to make sure people come back again and again is one of Disneyland’s greatest strengths, and the reason it welcomed its 500 millionth guest in January 2004. Paul Lasley is a veteran travel writer and commentator for KABC and National Public Radio who was raised in Southern California and remembers his parents’ dropping him and his brother off at Disneyland “almost every summer day.”

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