Disney: Coast To Coast (February/March 1987 | Volume: 38, Issue: 2)

Disney: Coast To Coast

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February/March 1987 | Volume 38, Issue 2

When I was ten years old, my parents entrusted me to TWA for a rumbling eternity in a prop-driven plane that pulled me across the continent to California. I was going to visit my aunt and uncle, but they were merely the agents of my real goal: Disneyland. The park had opened two years before, in 1955, and its effect on me was every bit as magical as the publicists had promised.

I was enchanted by all the rides, but the thing that made the strongest impression on me was Main Street, Walt Disney’s evocation of the small-town America of his youth. I remember standing there in the dusk while the lights came on. I watched them outlining the busy cornices while a horsecar clopped quietly past, and suddenly I wanted to stay in this place forever.

I came home from California fascinated by turn-of-the-century America, and my interest never waned. Instead, it expanded to include other aspects of the national past, and it has put bread on my table all my working life.

I did not stay grateful to Walt Disney for this bequest. By the time I was fifteen I was embarrassed and irritated by him, and in my twenties he represented to me in its purest form a sort of institutionalized self-congratulatory blandness. But people keep outgrowing their outgrowing, and recently, when the presence of a three-year-old in my life forced me back to Disney’s cartoons, I realized that his was a far more imaginative, less sentimental vision than I had believed.

So it was with the greatest interest that, thirty years after my first visit, I made my way back to Anaheim to revisit Disney’s historical reconstruction.

Disneyland is the extension of the powerful personality of one man. It is not, like many perfectly good modern theme parks, a group consensus on what might make a nice place. It is a nice place, of course—so much so that the standard criticism claims it is altogether too sanitized, too cut off from real experience. This doesn’t bother me much; the world provides plenty of real experience whether you want it or not, and I don’t mind somebody trying to trick me into thinking otherwise for a day or two. But I was interested to see whether Disney’s American past was simply the pap some historians have called it.

 

Disneyland’s reconstructed past begins at the gate. The first building you see as you enter is the depot, and chances are pretty good one of the trains that serves it will be pulling in. These are the McCoy: three-foot-gauge livesteam locomotives ravishingly polished and painted. And for all the fantasy that lies ahead, there’s nothing on earth more real than the lush, brassy noise of their whistles.

Beyond the depot lies Disneyland’s main drag. You get to Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, and all the other lands by walking past a couple of blocks of turn-of-the-century storefronts. The models for them can