My First Visit to Disneyland

Disneyland in Anaheim opened on July 18, 1955, and my family got to go there on July 19. My parents were old friends of Ron and Meta Hoge, and Ron was then an editor at the Orange County Register. He procured tickets for us somehow. I was 11, and my sister was 9, and we were incredibly excited. We had heard about Disneyland for years on Disneyland, the TV show that we watched faithfully on Sunday nights. We had seen the opening of the park on the TV news the night before, and thought we were incredibly lucky to get to go on the second day.

Our Dad drove us in our unair-conditioned Buick through a traffic jam on Harbor Boulevard, smoking his beloved Camels, while my sister and I bounced around in the seatbelt-free back seat. The parking lot was a large asphalt space, and we were able to park close to the entrance, no need of trams then. We had entrance tickets from Ron Hoge, but we needed to buy ride tickets. Great consultations went on about which combination of tickets to buy, since there were different booklets with different numbers of A, B, C, D, and E tickets. The E-ticket was for the best rides, and for quite a while there was a phrase in common parlance where something being an E-ticket meant it was very good.

There were only 20 attractions in four “lands,” Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland, and Frontierland. Our very first ride was on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in Fantasyland, and it felt like a wild ride indeed. The fun and delight of that first ride stays in my mind, though in subsequent years, we went on the Toad ride and saw that it was really quite primitive. 

Besides Toad, only a few things stick in my memory. The teacup ride made me throw up, and I never went on it again. My sister and I had fun running all over Tom Sawyer’s Island (now some pirate thing) without the parents, even though it was just a dusty pile of dirt with some fake caves on it. It occurred to me even then that we could have done the same in some of the vacant lots near home.

It was HOT! There weren’t enough drinking fountains or rest rooms. Places to buy food and drink were jam-packed. The whole place was also barren, since all the lovely trees and bushes there now had either not been planted or had not yet grown. There was little shade. Did I say it was hot? At least 100 degrees (101 according to Wikipedia), and the asphalt in the parking lot became squishy. Despite the physical discomforts, this first trip to Disneyland remains one of my favorite life memories.

And now that I think of it, the Disneyland TV show had a big effect on my life. I loved the nature shows even more than the cartoons. “The Living Desert” was my favorite, and I still have the book about that show. There were amazing close-up film clips of insects and animals that led to my lifelong interest in natural science. Years later in the late 1980s, I met the man who developed the camera used to film close-ups of flying bees and things like that. 

Things do come full circle -- see my story of our pet “Wilburs.”