WALT DISNEY’S ‘BLACK SUNDAY’
The opening of Disneyland in 1955 was a major misfire — but that didn’t last long
Disneyland would change American culture, but Day 1 was an epic fail.
The high heels sinking into asphalt that was still curing was not the image Walt Disney dreamed of for the opening day of Disneyland.
The park was a triumph of industry and imagination — a $17-million marvel of postwar enthusiasm, where man-made mountains looked like they had existed since the dawn of time, and the 1890s frontier town looked like an image from a woodcut, with antiques sourced from across North America. Before it opened, the New York Times said “amusement park” was an inadequate term. It was a world’s fair for children, unique on Earth.
That is the legacy that endures 61 years later, but staffers — “cast members” in Disney parlance — can tell you that opening day on July 17, 1955, was marked by overcrowding, heat and snafus. They call it “Black Sunday.” A disaster.
It was a preview of sorts, meant for celebrities, press and various VIPs, with a live television broadcast. But tickets were counterfeited and the park was unprepared for the 35,000 that came.
Traffic jammed the freeway, and children were reported to be urinating in the parking lot because they had been trapped in their cars so long.
Some rides weren’t ready, some broke down and vendors ran out of food. A plumbers strike in the weeks before the opening meant Walt Disney had to make a decision: the bathrooms were working, but not the drinking fountains. “He was criticized for that, but he was right,” Disney retiree Bob Penfield, 79, writes in an email.
Penfield, who had just moved to California from Iowa, was then 18, making $1.65 an hour. He was supposed to be in charge of the Peter Pan ride, but it wasn’t finished, so he was working at the Carousel in Fantasyland, and saw a swell of children running over the drawbridge toward him. “A little trivia is that 3 of those kids ended up working at the park,” he writes.
Disney had sourced the carousel from Toronto’s Sunnyside Park, and it was emblematic of all the small details that went into the park: he wanted only galloping horses, so “their legs were broken . . . and the horses reformed into jumpers,” a local California paper reported.
The orange groves, walnut and cypress trees of rural Anaheim had been torn away and the whimsical kingdoms of Disney’s imagination had been built in a year with a backbone of steel, electricity and natural gas.
The construction company’s manager of operations said there had never been a project like it: “Many of the items were constructed from artist’s sketches,” he told the press.
Walt Disney said that the park would never be finished so long as imagination prevailed, but surely, he would have liked a few water fountains for opening day.
“We still don’t know what happened — whether someone printed up double the number of tickets,” Disney exec. Card Walker told the Associated Press in 1980. There were two mistakes, he said. They weren’t ready for the crowd, and they were trying to do too much with a television special on opening day.
Penfield said life at the park smoothed out later that summer, with more rides and attractions opening, and staff finding their groove. Attendance was steady. Walt Disney was often there on weekends, before the park opened.
“He would sit with the employees for coffee, etc.,” Penfield writes. “Always paid his way. Loved chili and hotdogs. Who doesn’t. One thing that most people don’t know about Walt is that he spoke Spanish pretty well. I talked to him numerous times, always got the impression that any question he asked you, he already knew the answer, but wanted to hear what you thought.”
Penfield went to school to become a forest ranger, but he was hooked and never left the park.
He met his wife, Judy, there — the first woman to work in the Frontierland Shooting Gallery — and he worked his way up to project management, retiring in 1997, age 60. His name is written on a window on Main Street U.S.A., a hidden tribute reserved for few.
He still lives in Anaheim, and likes to visit the park, which is twice as big as it was then.
“The cast members are very good, but I worry that the young ones don’t know the legacy of Walt Disney and what he did,” he writes. “He was clearly a genius.”
Penfield is the unofficial historian of Club 55, the name for the original “cast members,” who began in 1955. There are now 13 surviving, some in their 90s.
“Most people think of the opening day as a mess, but a great day,” he writes. “Walt proved all the critics wrong.”