Todd James Pierce - Three Years in Wonderland: The Disney Brothers, C. V. Wood, and the Making of the Great American Theme Park

Three Years in Wonderland

The Disney Brothers, C. V. Wood, and the Making of the Great American Theme Park

Todd James Pierce

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright 2016 by Todd James Pierce

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-62846-241-8 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-4968-0381-8 (ebook)

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Everybody said, What the hells he want that damn amusement park for? And I couldnt think of a good reason exceptI dont knowI wanted it.

WALT DISNEY, on the origins of Disneyland

We fought.

C. V. WOOD, on his relationship with Walt Disney

Three Years in Wonderland

Six months after Disneyland opened, the Disney brothers fired the parks first general manager. Their reasons likely included mismanagement and fraud, perhaps arson as well.

The first general manager of Disneyland was not an animator, nor was he a longtime studio employee. The first general manager was a tall, no-nonsense Texan named C. V. Wood, a man without any previous experience in the outdoor amusements industry. He was a conman, a jokester, a person whod forged his own college degree. By most accounts, he was warm, personable, and exceptionally loyal. Insightful and brilliant, he was too smart for school. He was a man fascinated with Hollywood, determined to make his mark in Tinsel Town. In this regard, he was a success.

In his lifetime, Walt Disney only opened a single amusement parkDisneyland in Anaheim, Californiabut C. V. Wood opened many.

Shortly after leaving the Disney brothers, Woodmore often referred to as Woodystarted a consulting firm, called Marco Engineering, that designed Disneyland-style theme parks for investment groups around the world. Woody started out small, working with only a few ex-Disneyland employees on a project called Pacific Ocean Park. One year later, he employed over a dozen men who once worked for Walt. By the end of the 1950s, he had hired nearly 100 studio artists, architects, engineers, and operations specialistsmany of them money-whipped out of the Disney stables with higher salaries and generous benefits.

To the press, Woody once boasted that he would build some 35 [Disneyland-style parks] throughout the country. He opened outdoor extravaganzas in California, Colorado, and Massachusetts. He designed and oversaw the development of the first Six Flags park in Texas. In 1960, he completed a near-perfect replica of Disneyland a few miles from Manhattan, a park called Freedomland. It was the largest and most expensive fun center in the world.

In speaking to reporters, Woody openly called himself the Master Planner of Disneyland. With clients, he minimized Walts contributions to Disneyland, telling one that Walt made wonderful movies and invented Mickey Mouse, but he didnt know anything about theme parks.

For this, Walt sued him.

If you read through both the first and second editions of Disney AZ, a massive company encyclopedia, youll find entries for Bill Evans, the man who landscaped Disneyland, and Admiral Joe Fowler, the man who oversaw much of the parks construction. Youll even find a few sentences on Van Arsdale France, the man who wrote the original employee training manual. But youll find no entry for C. V. Wood. His name has been carefully scrubbed from almost all official Disney publications.

But the fact remains that aside from Walt Disney, C. V. Wood was the single greatest contributor to the American theme park culture of the 1950s and 1960s. In some ways, his influence was more pervasive than that of Walt Disney. In his later years, Woody formed yet another company to create planned communities across the Southwest, towns that incorporated the extravagance and themed space of a Disneyland-style park. His most famous project, Lake Havasu City in Arizona, was a resort community built around a quaint English-style village. Spanning the nearby lake was the London Bridgethe actual London Bridge, which Woody shipped, stone by stone, to Arizona, where he reconstructed it over sand. The town, he figured, needed a tourist icon, much like a theme park needed a castle.

For Woody, the lesson of Disneyland was simple: he believed that Americans were drawn to spectacle, that they wanted to live in an environment that felt as large as a Hollywood movie. Woody and his designers changed America: they created theme parks; they built themed residential communities; men from his company later designed malls and reworked Las Vegas hotels into a series of cinematic showpieces. But the work of C. V. Wood is mostly forgotten.

Runners-up are rarely extolled for their vision and greatness.

When I first approached the Walt Disney Company to obtain information on C. V. Wood, I was told that the records on Woodys employment were beyond the publics reach, locked up in their legal department. One member of the Walt Disney Archives went so far as to explain that the files on C. V. Wood were not even available for him to review.

Over the following eight years, as I researched material for this book, I developed a good working relationship with a few people at the Walt Disney Company. They provided me with a great deal of useful informationsuch as dates and notations from Walt Disneys personal datebook and contact information for retired employees who had worked for the company during the 1950sbut each time I broached the subject of C. V. Wood, I received the exact same responseincluding one such note from Dave Smith, founder of the company archives: I regret that we cannot make copies of these items [available] for you.

Some retired Disneyland employees also refused to comment on C. V. Wood. I wont talk about that kind of stuff,

For me, it soon became clear that the files on C. V. Wood were kept in the Disney legal department because, at some pointmost likely, decades agocompany executives no longer wanted C. V. Wood included in its public history or in the history of Disneyland. There were also legal issues concerning C. V. Wood and Disney. But that only made me believe that the actual story of Disneyland was far more interesting than the version presented in old press materialsa story that spoke not only to Disneyland but to how that first cinematic theme park changed America.

That story, I soon learned, was largely focused on C. V. Wood.

Though C. V. Wood often described himself as a Texan, he didnt start his life in the Lone Star State. Woody was born on December 17, 1920, in the border town of Waynoka, Oklahoma. His family lived in a white brick house, centered on two acres of grassland, only a block from the train station where his father worked as a conductor and brakeman on the Santa Fe line from Waynoka to Amarillo, Texas. C. V. Jr. was most likely named after his father, Commodore Vanderbilt Wood,

At the time of his birth, Woody was a large babyso large that his family would later claim that he weighed 12 pounds. His mother, Eva Beaman Wood, had so wanted a girl that when she first heard her child was a boy, she began to weep, Its a boy, to her sister even though she was still half-sedated with ether. Oh, I dont want a boy, she cried. In his early years, his mother often dressed him in gender-neutral clothes, such as peg-top rompers. During his first year, his long hair lightened to a golden blond. More than once, his mother and his aunt put a little rouge on his cheeks and tried to pass him off as a girl, lamenting to each other, Oh, wouldnt he have made the sweetest little girl? But one day, when he was around three,