Freeway Update

As I went through The Nickel Tour recently, I found a couple more freeway connections I had managed to forget over the years:

• The King Arthur Carrousel was available for purchase by Disneyland because of freeway construction in Toronto. It had previously been in Sunnyside Park, which sits on the shore of Lake Ontario. (I bet the horses like the warmer weather!) The Frederick G. Gardiner Expressway currently runs adjacent to (through?) the park, so that must be the freeway referred to in the book. If you can decipher their shorthand, you can learn a little more about the carrousel at the National Carousel Association's "Census of Classic Wood Carousels (Condensed)." For background on the "Sunnyside Beach Park" or "Sunnyside Amusement Beach," you can learn about that here. (My favorite part is where the author writes that the carrousel "supposedly opened with the park" in 1955.)
  
• "A Tour of the West" was shot mostly from the roof of a car, including travels "along the Los Angeles Freeways." If they had waited, they could have just taken the cameras over to the Autopia!
  

Destruction Sunday

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As the real world intrudes, my posts this week won't feature quite so many words. But they won't all be photos of demolition, either! (Unless that's what people want.)

Destruction Saturday

Need I say more?

Richard Nixon and Disneyland

I might do a post on each individual President and Disneyland (well, those that have a connection to Disneyland) or I might lump many of them together. But I felt Richard Nixon deserved his own post, because I feel he is the President with the closest ties to Disneyland. One could argue that Abraham Lincoln might take that honor, and as important as his robotic performances have been, he never visited Disneyland or consorted with people that did. Ronald Reagan was part of the cast for the opening TV show and returned for the 35th anniversary, but I'm not sure he visited anytime in between or afterwards. And although his Presidential Library is in Simi Valley, Reagan was born in and grew up in Illinois.

So, let's take a look at Nixon and his ties to the Magic Kingdom. He is, of course, the only Orange Countian to become President, born in Yorba Linda on January 9, 1913. As Disneyland is a pillar of Orange County's identity (they kind of grew up together), it is altogether fitting that Nixon's path would intersect with Disneyland's over the years.

Nixon's first visit to Disneyland happened as Vice President soon after Disneyland's opening, on August 11, 1955, and was well-covered by the press. Nixon attended with wife Pat and daughters Tricia and Julie, but also in the party were brothers of Richard and Pat and their kids. C.V. Wood presented Nixon with a key to Disneyland on the steps of City Hall; Nixon was also greeted by Fess Parker. The Nixons toured the Park extensively, riding on the Fantasyland dark rides, the Mark Twain Riverboat, the Jungle Cruise, Rocket to the Moon, and touring the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Exhibit, among other things. I particularly like the Los Angeles Times' account of the ordeal of riding the Tomorrowland Autopia for the images it conjures up:

"The motorcade of midget autos in Autopia was one of the highlights of the day.

"Leading were three secret service men in separate tiny cars, followed by the Vice-President and Tricia, Mrs. Nixon with Michael Ryan, other members of the party distributed two by two in other cars, then three solemn Anaheim police officers, each in his separate car, and two carloads of newspaper photographers bringing up the rear. The crowd loved it and cheered the motorists on."

Nixon, evidently, had a great time, calling Disneyland "a paradise for children--and for grownups, too. I don't know when I've had so much fun." Pat thought he was having more fun than the kids!

The family didn't make it back to Disneyland again for several years, but it was quite an event when they did, as they were the guests of honor to help dedicate the brand-new monorail in 1959. Nixon (in his second term as Vice President) came out West for a four-day swing, attending the opening of the Nevada Silver Centennial at Virginia City (birthplace of Pat) on June 12, attending a 25th anniversary reunion of his graduating class at Whittier College and spending time with his mother on June 13, partying at Disneyland on June 14, and attending commencement festivities at the University of San Diego on the 15th.

Pat and the girls got an early start at Disneyland on June 14, "dashing from one ride to another," while Nixon attended church services with his mother in Whittier. After lunching in Walt's Apartment above the Fire Station, the Nixon family led the extended procession celebrating the additions of Disneyland '59. After opening the Matterhorn and becoming the first sailors on the Submarine Voyage, the Nixons helped to dedicate the Disneyland-Alweg Monorail System and took the first ride on that. Associated with this dedication is one of my favorite Bob Gurr stories--the time he kidnapped the Vice President!

Before getting to the story, you have to understand that, even on its Opening Day, the Monorail was still really in its testing phase. It had made precisely one complete loop around its track before June 14. Bob was fairly confident he could get the Monorail to at least drive out of camera view (this was a big TV event), but after that, all bets were off. Well, prior to lunch, Walt had brought the Nixons up to the Monorail for a sneak preview. He brought them in the cab and tells Bob, "let's go." So, naturally, Bob complies. As the train loops around out over the Submarine Lagoon--with a view directly back to the station--Bob sees that the Secret Service agents had been left behind! As they were pulling back into the station, the Secret Service ran alongside the train... but Tricia and Julie wanted to go again, so the monorail made another loop. As Bob tells it, as they exited the Monorail after the second trip, and began heading down the speedramp, Nixon turned around to see all the Secret Service agents sitting in the train!

After the Disneyland festivities, the Nixons held a family reunion at Knott's Berry Farm, with personal attention from Walter Knott.

On June 6, 1961, Nixon spoke at a Republican fundraiser at the Disneyland Hotel, at an event sponsored by the Orange County Republican Central Committee. (He and other Republicans were frequent visitors to the Disneyland Hotel for banquets and speeches.)

On September 2, 1961, Nixon and Tricia toured Disneyland while the press tried to determine if Nixon was going to run for governor of California.

On August 16, 1968, after meeting with California Governor Reagan, the Nixons visited both Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm.

After election as President, Nixon frequently visited Orange County for stays in the "Western White House" in San Clemente. On one such visit, on August 10, 1969, Air Force One was welcomed at then-Orange County Airport by bands from Disneyland and Santa Ana High School playing "Hail to the Chief." Although Nixon returned to Orange County following his resignation--even taking up an interest in California Angels baseball--I was unable to find evidence that he visited Disneyland again after 1968 (besides at least one Disneyland Hotel speaking engagement).

But Nixon's Disneyland connections extend beyond his personal appearances. Two of Nixon's top staff members as President also had close ties with Disney and Disneyland. H. R. Haldeman served as White House Chief of Staff from the time of Nixon's inaugural in 1969 until April 30, 1973. Prior to this he had also worked on Nixon's unsuccessful California gubernatorial bid in 1962. His day job was with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Though I have been unable to learn more, I have found authoritative references that Disneyland had an account with the agency (on which Haledman worked). Additionally, Haldeman had some level of friendship with Walt Disney and served as the first chairman of the board of trustees of the California Institute of the Arts. (More tangential is that Haldeman's grandfather was a branch manager for the Crane Company, an original Disneyland lessee.)

Many people know that Press Secretary Ron Ziegler worked as Jungle Cruise skipper while attending USC. Actually, he was born in Kentucky and first attended college (Xavier) in Cincinnati, on a football scholarship. That summer he and a friend drove across the country to visit Ziegler's parents, who had relocated to Los Angeles. They got jobs at Disneyland as weekend Jungle Cruise skippers. While employed there, he met a number of Cast Members who went to USC. Though he had intended to return to Xavier, he liked Disneyland and the California lifestyle so much that he transferred to USC and involved himself with campus politics. This led to contact with Haldeman--and Nixon. Haldeman then employed Ziegler at J. Walter Thompson, where he worked on the Disneyland account.

"It's because of Disneyland that I ended up at the White House," Ziegler recounted in 1970. (If they had built the Hall of Presidents on Liberty Street, we might have heard a President remark, "It's because of the White House that I ended up at Disneyland"!) Had Ziegler not gotten the Disneyland job, he would not have had the opportunity to get closely involved in Nixon's campaign--and American culture would be the poorer for not having the remark on "inoperative statements" in regards to Watergate.

Folksonomies

Welcome back to Thesaurus Thursdays! Some of you may be wondering about how this Disneyland thesaurus relates to folksonomies, which are the combined result of people (like you, over there) tagging web documents. The benefits are the cost (hey, people do it on their own time--it's virtually free!), the closeness of the tags to how people see and think about things (they use their own vocabulary rather than one imposed upon them by a thesaurus), and the speed at which new concepts can be introduced to index documents. I certainly think folksonomies can be very powerful tools and a nifty aggregation of collective wisdom. But the purposes behind this Disneyland project don't mesh so well with the limitations of folksonomies.

First of all, a chief purpose for a thesaurus is terminological control (related to nomenclature, but not exactly the same thing). You want to use "Indy" to tag documents related to the Indiana Jones Adventure, I want to use "Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye." If you wanted to find all photos on Flickr, you'd have to try a number of search strategies and know every possible synonym somebody might use. That's using different terms for the same thing. You can also use the same term ("Indiana Jones") and mean different things (the movie, the character, the Audio-Animatronics figure, the attraction...). With a folksonomy, it's a bit of a free-for-all. And with Disney, there's never been a shortage of official names for things, so I'm not creating a bunch of my own terms. The language that Disney uses serves as the guide and should be pretty familiar.

A really big drawback for me regarding folksonomies is the lack of hierarchy. Davelandblog uses tags pretty well, but there's only so much one can do with a flat structure. For instaince, in a recent post on Matterhorn Climbers, the blog has tags for "Disneyland," "Fantasyland," "Matterhorn," and "Matterhorn Climbers." A good hierarchy would allow you to just have "Matterhorn Climbers"--all the rest is known from the structure. Then if somebody said, "Let me see all of Dave's posts about Disneyland," they could do an inclusive search and find that. Or if they just wanted to search on Matterhorn Mountain (inclusive), it would turn up photos of the mountain, the attraction, and climbers. I do not know of any structured folksonomies.

I believe most folksonomies that exist are pretty general. That is, on Flickr or del.icio.us, the whole breadth of human activity and knowledge is game for tagging. It's very difficult to develop an organizational structure for that sort of thing (and then to maintain it--!). But I do consider the history of the Disneyland Resort to be knowable and structurable. While it's certainly a significant task to assemble and maintain something approaching a complete record of Disneyland's history, it's only a few hundred acres and its story only occupies a bit more than fifty years. That's not a lot compared to everything (including Disneyland!). And it certainly seems more doable than trying to learn about every place in California (I only got up to around 12,000 before the thesaurus project distracted me).

Finally, the entirety of folksonomies seems to be the tags and the documents to which they are applied. There is no further metadata for the tags. My Disneyland thesaurus project is not just an authority file of index terms and lead-in terms, but contains a significant amount of information for the preferred terms. (Indeed, it is the basis for the encyclopedia.) In addition to relationships between terms, there are many different types of note fields, to record operational or birth and death dates, scope of sales or food products served, and especially definitions and other information gathered from various sources. I had tried organizing this in a Microsoft Word document in the early 2000s that grew to be over 1,000 pages, but found it difficult to think about all the relationships this way. Kevin and I believe that our ability to go through the thesaurus term-by-term will keep us from overlooking entries for the encyclopedia.

(It occurs to me after I write the above that I have included some non-folksonomy examples in my discussion here. Folksonomies are more properly when different people are tagging the same things, rather than when people are tagging their own things in a relatively unstructured manner. The limitations are fairly similar for both, however.)

A Mineral King Camping Trip

In September 2003, fresh from my "retirement," I took a week-long road trip throughout the State of California. One of my destinations was Sequoia National Park. While on CA-198 headed toward the park entrance, I passed the turnoff for Mineral King. Hey, Mineral King! I had heard about MK, but really knew very little about it. Ski resort and bears represented the sum total of my knowledge at the time. I filed the information away for later reference. While at the visitor center, I purchased a history of Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, The Challenge of the Big Trees by Lary M. Dilsaver and William C. Tweed (available for free online here). While Mineral King did not become part of Sequoia until 1978, its history is tied in with the park and so the area and its possible development as a ski resort are brought up several times.

The more I learned about Mineral King, the more intrigued I became. I also came to find out that the battle over improving the road to MK was a fundamental part of the whole ordeal (and you know me and roads!). I vowed to visit the area--sooner rather than later, preferably. And I knew just the person to act as my chauffeuer.

Bob Gurr and I share an interest in hiking and California. We went on a week-long camping trip along the San Andreas Fault in October 2004 and really had an excellent time. When I asked him if he were interested in this trip, I didn't know that he had worked on the project off-and-on for twelve years! Though he got several patents for the ski lift designs and was assigned to the road/alternative access part of the project, he had never visited Mineral King. We made our plans to visit June 30-July 2, 2005.

Since Bob had the Honda CRV (much more practical for camping than my car), he was the driver. He told me he's always enjoyed driving anyplace in the world--works for me! It allowed me to concentrate on taking photographs, anyway.

The road to Mineral King isn't too much better now than it was in the 1870s, when a toll wagon road was constructed for the mining activities occurring above the valley. The County of Tulare had long maintained it (excepting the relatively brief period it was a state highway in the 1960s), but it was by no means a high speed road. To its credit, it was mostly paved! But it winds ever higher into the Sierra, passing by the private inholding of Silver City before reaching the valley itself. We first stopped off at the campground to set up our gear. No reservations taken; first come, first served. We chose a campsite off in the back (the site, we later found out, most recently visited by a bear).

It had been a long drive and we planned to mosey around the valley, with a longer hike planned for the next day. As we drove up the road and passed one trailhead, I caught my first glimpse of the vaunted marmots of Mineral King. For whatever reason (perhaps the salt), these guys like to feast on car parts (belts, hoses) early in the summer. One recommendation to ward them off is to leave the car's hood open, but that didn't make sense to me. The thinking, I guess, is that they'd prefer to work in the dark; I think it just gives them more room to work, as seen below!

The general store in Silver City sells "fencing" to place around the base of the car, preventing marmots from getting into the car's machinery in the first place. I had informed Bob of the marmot menace prior to our trip and he brought along a large tarp; he drove onto it and we tied it securely, as so:

Since our hike planned for the next day was up to Eagle Lake on the western side of the valley, we decided on a short hike on the eastern side, as far as we felt like going. This visit followed a year of unusually heavy rains in Southern California, so even at this date the streams still exhibited considerable velocity in their flow. At the first such stream we had to cross, we stopped to survey it and determine the best place to cross. While doing so, we struck up a conversation with a friendly woman who was doing the same thing. After some talk about how this was our first visit to Mineral King, she said that she and her husband had a cabin in Mineral King. When I shared that Bob had worked on the Disney project, she gave us the cabin name and location and said her husband would really like to talk to him. We made plans to stop by at the end of our hike.

Our leisurely stroll only made it as far as Franklin Creek, which we decided would give us more problems to cross than we wanted to deal with. (Had we set our goal as Farewell Gap or points beyond, we likely would have pressed onward.)

This gave us additional time to explore the valley floor, however. While camping was formerly allowed and encouraged here (think decades ago), it has long since been pushed out of the valley proper to preserve the delicate ecosystem. After the time of the announcement of Disney's selection as the winning bidder for the ski resort (in December 1965) and before Mineral King's addition to Sequoia National Park (in 1978), the area hung in limbo. Greater crowds than ever came to see what all the fuss was about, but there were no extra facilities to handle them or additional funds to clean up after them. This is the view from the southern end of the valley:

On our way back to camp, we stopped by the cabin of the woman we had met earlier on the trail. Neither she nor her husband were there, so we continued on our way. The only thing of note from that first night that I recall is a possible historic first: Over dinner Bob and I listened to some of the "Bear Band" demos made for the proposed show for Mineral King (which became the Country Bear Jamboree). I think it's possible that this is the first time those demos were actually heard at Mineral King. We did not see any actual singing bears on this night or at any other time during our visit. (There goes Disney distorting reality again!)

The next morning during breakfast we had an unexpected visitor--the cabin owner had bicycled down to the campground and located us! He was fairly young during the time of the Mineral King development controversy, but remembers various events like a sit-in performed in the valley. Because of his personal experience, he was very interested to hear Bob's knowledge of the project. They also talked about Robert Hicks, an economist from the Stanford Research Institute hired as the project manager for Disney. I think he still owns a cabin in Mineral King, which is how our cabin friend knew him. We were offered a tour of our friend's cabin if we showed up after our hike, so we put it on our list!

Our purported goal for the day's hike was Eagle Lake, but we were willing to turn back if that seemed unobtainable. The day was much warmer than we had expected, but that made the temperature perfect. The trail gradient was excellent. I think we hardly saw anybody else on the trail (excepting a deer and her fawn, who went right down the hill on our trail). As we got into higher elevations, we started to see more patches of snow. We then encountered this magnificent site of a field of snow beneath towering granite walls:

We hiked to the top of the snow and had our lunch looking out over a gorgeous vista of Sierran peaks. The continuation of the trail was virtually indistinguishable after that point and we were satisfied with our hiking accomplishments. We got our promised tour of the cabin--constructed in 1931 on the site of an old miner's cabin--and had an enjoyable conversation with the residents. My favorite part of that was when the man said that he'd like go on a tour of Disneyland with me. "Actually," I replied, "I've co-authored two Disneyland trivia books, one of which is called 101 Things You Never Knew About Disneyland and points out things in today's Disneyland..." "I think I have that book!" his wife exclaimed. That's still the only "stranger" I've encountered to have one of my books! The sleeping arrangement of the kids outside on the deck reminded Bob of spending time at a family cabin in Idyllwild. Also on the way out from the hike I got my favorite photograph of the Mineral King valley, looking south toward Farewell Gap:

The next morning we drove up to the valley one more time for some last looks and photos (the marmots were out sunning themselves) and then made the long, winding trek back down the Mineral King road. On the way out we followed a car with a "Save Disney" bumper sticker--a sentiment I found terrifically ironic in Mineral King.

More photos are available from June 30, July 1, and July 2.

I'll have more reports on Mineral King in the future. I've done extensive research on the project and collected quite a few sources--it was a very long, very public effort to develop the Mineral King valley for winter recreation. I'm writing about it for a research paper right now and for eventual incorporation into my master's thesis, so I hope to be able to use some of my writing for "double duty."

Mickey at the Walt Disney Story

As I mentioned, I spent more than my fair share of time at the Walt Disney Story. It was often (always?) slow; this meant that sometimes walk-around characters would come in for a bit of a break from the crowds. This particular photograph was taken one quiet Sunday morning and is one of my favorites that I have taken. It shows a solitary Mickey (really, just me and the Mick in the Opera House!) watching footage of Disneyland Park's construction. You can read a lot into this... I particularly like the emptiness of the place.

I also have a bit of a repost. The more I looked at the photo of Town Square from Walt's Apartment, the more I wanted the faraway Cast Member removed. So I did that. Now remove Space Mountain and the Old Admin Building, change the pavers back to slurry, repaint some of the buildings, cut back the trees, change the trash cans and... voila! Walt's Town Square.