life inside the Disney Parks

life inside the Disney Parks

“The Beginnings

How Walt Disney’s midlife obsession with miniatures and trains led to the creation of the world’s greatest theme park”

“It was June 1955—only six weeks before Disneyland was scheduled to open—and Walt Disney was worried. His risky new park in Anaheim, California, was still a work in progress—hardly more than the orange groves it had been built on. From the start, construction had been plagued with problems, including a record deluge”

“of rain. Now Main Street wasn’t paved; Sleeping Beauty Castle—the centerpiece of the park—wasn’t finished; and Tomorrowland barely existed. Plumbers told Disney that, because of a strike, they couldn’t make both the drinking fountains and the bathrooms work. Walt, of course, opted to fix the bathrooms. “People can buy Pepsi-Cola,” he said, “but they can’t pee in the street.”

The project itself had repeatedly gone over its original budget of $4.5 million. Two months after construction began in July 1954, the cost had risen to $7 million. Then it skyrocketed to $11 million. “We were still talking $11 million in April when I was walking down Main Street with [Disney’s older brother] Roy and a representative from Bank of America, who scanned the project and said it looked closer to $15 million,” said Joe Fowler, the former Navy rear admiral who had been put in charge of the park’s construction.

“By opening day, the investment had risen to a whopping $17 million—largely because Disney himself was never satisfied, a personal characteristic that led to a process he called “plussing.” As he did with his films, the 53-year-old wanted everything to be bigger, better, more surprising, and more innovative. At the last minute, for instance, he decided that he wanted to create an attraction featuring the giant squid from his 1954 hit 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which he helped spray-paint on the night before the opening—even as he continued to micromanage everything else. At three a.m., he was demanding new murals: “Get me an artist!” he shouted.

But Walt ultimately let go—well, he had to—and on the morning of July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened to an overflowing crowd of 28,000 people. Despite the considerable flaws, it was a revolutionary moment in American culture—and the fulfillment of a dream that had begun less than a decade before with, of all things, a model train.

On December 8, 1947, Walt wrote a letter to his sister: “I bought myself a birthday present—something I’ve wanted all my life—an electric train . . . I have set it up in one of theouter rooms adjoining my office so that I can play with it when I have a spare moment. It’s a freight train with a whistle, and real smoke comes out of the smokestack—there are switches, semaphores, stations, and everything. It’s just wonderful!”

The filmmaker had been fascinated by trains ever since his boyhood in Marceline, Missouri, the small town where his father, Elias, moved his family in 1906, having failed as a carpenter in Chicago. Little more than a whistle stop between the Windy City and Kansas City, Missouri, Marceline was nevertheless a bucolic paradise for little Walt, who spent his four short years there prowling Main Street, sketching the animals that populated the family farm, and, not least, marveling at the locomotives. The experience exerted an enduring influence on nearly everything Disney did—from homey films like Pollyanna to Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A. It was, in fact, “the most important part of Walt’s life,” his wife, Lillian, later said.

The youthful idyll didn’t last. Times were hard, and Elias was not cut out for farming. In 1911, he once again uprooted his family and moved to Kansas City, where he was reduced to running a paper route. His principle employees were, not surprisingly, his four sons. Little Walt, the youngest, would rise in the predawn darkness and work all day—often in freezing cold and snow so deep it sometimes reached his neck. Now and then he fell asleep, exhausted, in apartment foyers. But the beleaguered boy nurtured big dreams that reflected the two things that would end up defining his life: escape and control.

Eventually he found both of them in Hollywood. In the 1920s, having embarked on an unsuccessful career as an animator, he traveled west—by train, of course—to join his brother Roy, who had sought relief from chronic respiratory ailments in the warm desert air. “I packed all of my worldly goods—a pair of trousers, a checkered coat, a lot of drawing materials, and the last of the fairy-tale reels we had made—in a kind of frayed cardboard suitcase,” Walt said later. “And with that wonderful audacity of youth, I went to Hollywood, arriving there with just $40.”

摘录来自

LIFE Inside the Disney Parks

The Editors of LIFE

此材料受版权保护。