Rolly Crump - More Cute Stories Volume 1: Disneyland History

More Cute Stories, Vol. 1: Disneyland History

By Rolly Crump

Copyright 2014, Rolly Crump

Cover Art: Rolly Crump

Cover Design: Pentakis Dodecahedron

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the authors imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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[intro music]

Jeff Heimbuch : Hello, I'm Jeff Heimbuch, coauthor of It's Kind of a Cute Story by Rolly Crump. Over the course of writing the book, I found that Rolly had an incredible amount of cute stories to share. So much so, that we weren't able to fit many of those stories into the book. Because there are so many more stories to tell, and because so many people want to hear them, we decided we had to share them with you somehow. And who better to tell you more of these cute stories than Rolly himself. Hence, what you're listening to right now. And now we present to you More Cute Stories Volume One: Disneyland History .

Rolly Crump : Hi, I'm Rolly Crump and I'm going to tell you some stories about what it was like in the beginning, with Disneyland, which was an absolutely incredible time frame. I can't tell you how excited everybody was when that started to take place. To be part of it became even far more exciting.

In the beginning, Walt used to go to Griffith Park with his two daughters, and take them on the carousel ride that was there, and let them go on the swings and everything. He'd sit there and watch them have a good time, and that's kind of when it all started to click in his head, about how maybe there should be something for the families to go to. It was the mother, father, the children, whatever, it wasn't just the kids.

That was the idea that kind of kicked him off and got him started. From there, he went to Knott's Berry Farm. They'd started sort of a, not a theme park, but they had bought and built a ghost town. Walt loved the ghost town that they had down there. He watched the people and their families and everything, and that kind of helped spur the idea even stronger. That he should do something for family entertainment. Outdoor entertainment. So thats basically the beginning in his head.

He actually then had 10 acres, across the street from Disney Studio, and he had some of his designers draw up a little theme park idea to go onto the 10 acres. Once that was completed, he realized that it was too small for the ideas that he wanted to put in there. So he started giving some thought about what the size should be. Somewhere along the line he'd heard that Stanford University had a division that could kind of help him with the growth of Southern California. So Walt contacted Stanford University and told them what he wanted, what he was interested in, and they in turn, introduced him to a gentleman called Buzz Price. So Buzz Price was brought on to help with the question of "Where should be build this?" There was a rumor, at one time, that Walt might build the theme park in the San Fernando Valley. Well, Buzz said, "No, no. The growth of Southern California is going to be going south." He suggested the best thing to do would be to do it in Anaheim, in that area.

So by this time, Walt had pretty much started visualizing what the park should be. But he needed financing. So he got a hold of Herb Ryman, who was one of his illustrators there at the studio, and sat down with Herb for a solid weekend at Herb's house and said, "Let's do a master plan". The interesting thing about it is, Herb and Walt did this master plan in one weekend, which was the real plan. He did that and took it to New York to get financing. What happened was, obviously, things started to fall into place because of that, and that's when they acquired the property in Anaheim. This was around 1953. I had started working in Animation in 1952, and was there at the beginning of all this. But none of us in Animation knew what the hell was going on.

Then around 1953, we used to see things on the lot that were really quite different. Pretty soon you saw Walt riding around in a carriage, or sometimes you'd see him in a stagecoach drawn by horses, and he was always wearing cowboy hats and boots and stuff, and we thought, "What the hell is going on?" So the rumor did get out that Walt was planning some sort of an entertainment area, and we kind of really enjoyed it. In fact, there were times when the helicopter would land right on the field out front there. We never knew what the hell was going on because it was kept pretty secret.

When Walt decided to build Disneyland, he wanted to create a company that was in charge of the design of it. He called this company WED, which were his father's initials: Walter Elias Disney.

Walt loved to play with names. He had another company that was called Retlaw, which was Walter spelled backwards. That was a company that was set up for some of the parts of the park that Walt continued to own, so the money that was made off of that went to his family. So he loved playing with little names like that.

So, anyway, thats what WED was. WED was on the third floor at the Disney Animation Building, when they designed Disneyland. A lot of the fellows worked up there; in fact I had an office up there when I was first asked to come work for WED. It was in the studio property. Then there was a concern, a legal issue, that they weren't allowed to have two companies on the same piece of property. So we had to move WED out of Disney Studio, and we went over to Sonora. They leased a little building on Sonora and WED was moved over there. That's when we all went over and became employees to WED. That was the beginning. It was interesting because at that point in time, I think there were only 60 people that worked at WED, and that included the janitors, the secretaries, the designers and everything. 60 of us were in charge and that group of 60 are the ones that started doing everything up to the World's Fair. Which is absolutely amazing. I mean, we did the Tiki Room with that. It was a great time frame. It was really fun.

Walt used the lot, the studio, to start developing different things. One thing was, he got Ken Anderson to design the dark rides. He always felt, in the beginning, that the dark rides should kinda represent his classics, which was Peter Pan , Snow White , Mr. Toad , those rides. And so, the next thing we knew, and we saw this, we physically saw this, in the back lot in one of the gigantic corrugated barns they had back there, they were doing a mockup of the rides. The rides were being designed, how they ran and everything and of course the sets were being designed. Ken Anderson was in charge of all of that and he did a gorgeous job. In fact, the interesting thing about Ken was, he did those original dark rides and then he didn't continue on. He decided not to join WED, join Cannibals Island, and he decided to go back into animation.