FROM: No Event Too Small Published Wednesdays

Disneyland Press Preview, 1955

On the day before Disneyland opened to the general public, Charlie Ridgway was there with other reporters and Hollywood celebrities to get first peek at what Walt had built. Disaster! Press coverage of the event was cruel. But Charlie saw through it.

- by Charlie Ridgway, June 15, 2011

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I attended the 'International Press Preview' at Disneyland on July 17, 1955, the day before the park opened to the general public.

Since I lived nearby, I was the first newsman there. The event was supposed to begin at noon, but my wife Gretta and I arrived at around 9:00 AM, and they let us in anyway. I remember watching Walt Disney on Main Street, U.S.A. as he frantically rehearsed his lines for the live ABC broadcast scheduled for later that afternoon.

(One of the co-anchors for that broadcast was Ronald Reagan, on-site in Tomorrowland!)

The live broadcast turned into a fiasco. They were trying to do the broadcast in the middle of their star-studded park preview for the press and for select Hollywood celebrities, and it was too much for them to handle at once. Everything went wrong. Most people became frustrated and left the park, because so few of the rides were working - and those that were working tended to break down.

Around 11:30 AM, I started to see the crowds coming through the gate, and I told my wife that we'd better get someting to eat while we had the chance. It was a good thing we did: about an hour and a half later, they ran out of food!

We managed to enjoy a good prime rib dinner at the Red Wagon Inn, after which my wife told me: "I can see the park anytime; it's too crowded now, and so I'm going home."

But I stayed, of course, and spent much of my time in the press tent watching the televised coverage. I walked over to Town Square to see the big dedication, and saw that my employer, the Los Angeles Mirror-News, had sent several reporters and photographers to cover it.

Toward the end of the day, around 5:00 AM, I came out of the press tent and noticed that the park was nearly deserted. Even though the Press Preview was scheduled to continue until 7:00 PM, most of the invitees had gone home. I called my wife right away. "Come on, back", I told her. "Let's go ride something."

Dorothy Fisher, a local reporter, had been hired to help with publicity, and she came along with us on the rides. By that point, most of the rides were operational, and we had a wonderful time.

At the end of the day, I called in my report to the rewrite guy at the Mirror, but none of what I told him made it into the paper. Many of the other reporters had already phoned in their stories, and all they wanted to talk about - and all the paper wanted to print - was what had gone wrong. Two or three of the movie columnists who were friendly with Walt also wrote nasty stuff about the park.

I was ashamed that none of them were able to see past the problems to the tremendous potential of Disneyland - potential which wasn't long in being realized.

Don't want to wait another week to read more from Charlie Ridgway? Don't blame you! I can help: first, read my review of Charlie's book, Spinning Disney's World, and then... buy it! The book brims with Charlie's well-told stories, and it spans the length of his Disney career, from Disneyland to Disney World and beyond.

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