Walking through Disneyland, you'll spot cast members dressed up as cowboys in Frontierland, jungle explorers in Adventureland, and small-town shopkeepers on Main Street. But, back when the park first opened in 1955, the employees weren't pretending. These were true-to-life characters, hand-picked for their amazing backgrounds. Now for the first time you can get to know these fascinating personalities in "The 55ers: The Pioneers Who Settled Disneyland" by David Koenig.You'll meet close to 700 Year One cast members from every department in the park, including:¿ Disneyland's notorious first general manager C.V. Wood and his "Texas mafia"¿ Vesey Walker, the bristly conductor of the Disneyland Band and the 16 often-crazy musicians who followed him,¿ The always-too-serious Marshal Lucky and his never-serious-enough nemesis, the villainous Black Bart,¿ The adorable sweeper Trinidad,¿ K7 the Kaiser Spaceman,¿ The original Jungle Cruise skippers,¿ The Merlin's Magic Shop magicians,¿ The Puffin's bakers,¿ The Hobbyland model airplane flyers¿ The Golden Horseshoe can-can dancers,¿ Plus the very first nurses, security officers, firemen, wranglers, ticket sellers, newsboys, switchboard operators, ride operators, and many, many more.The book features hundreds of never-before-published images, most of them provided by the original Disneylanders themselves. The candid photos provide peeks inside a number of long-vanished areas of the park, including the Sunny-View Jams & Jellies shop, the Plantation House chicken restaurant, and the Adventureland Bazaar.

Although historians have begun to recognize the accomplishments of Disney Studio’s female animators, the women who contributed to the early success of Disneyland remain, for the most part, unacknowledged. Indeed, in celebrating the park’s ten-year anniversary in 1965, Walt Disney thanked “all the boys . . . who’ve been a part of this thing,” even though hundreds of women had also been instrumental in designing, building and operating Disneyland since before its grand opening in July 1955. Seeking to reclaim women’s place in the early history of Disneyland, The Women Who Made Early Disneyland highlights the female Disney employees and contract workers who helped make the park one of the most popular U.S. destinations during its first ten years. Some, like artist Mary Blair, Imagineers Harriet Burns and Alice Davis, “Slue Foot Sue” Betty Taylor, and Disneyland’s first “ambassador,” Julie Reihm, eventually became Disney “legends.” Others remain less well known, including landscape architect Ruth Shellhorn, parade choreographer Miriam Nelson, Aunt Jemima’s Kitchen hostess Alyene Lewis, and Tiny Kline, who at age seventy-one became the first Tinker Bell to fly over Disneyland. This one-of-a-kind book examines the lives and achievements of the women who made early Disneyland.

From its beginnings, Disneyland was destined to be something entirely different from the standard mid-century amusement park. To sell his dream park to investors and the public, Walt Disney recruited Hollywood art directors and sketch artists to design the grounds around the mythic settings and high-minded ideals commonly expressed on the silver screen. This book focuses on the initial planning of Disneyland and its first year of operation, a time when Walt personally oversaw every detail of the park's development. Divided into chapters by park zone, it reveals how the five sectors were constructed using illusionistic tricks of stage design. Reaching beyond structure and design, chapters also explore how the sectors--Main Street, U.S.A., Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland and Fantasyland--represented themes found in Disney stories, familiar movie genres and American culture at large.

Over the next three decades, the number of Americans over fifty will double, swelling to more than a quarter of the population. Already we are living thirty years longer than a century ago, with further gains expected in the coming years. The end result is a new stage of life, one as long or longer than childhood or middle age in duration, and one spent in unprecedented good health. Yet, as individuals, and as a society, we've shown little imagination or wisdom in using this great gift of a third age. Marc Freedman identifies the new longevity as not a problem to be solved, but an opportunity to be seized-provided we can engage the experience, talent, and idealism of older Americans. At a juncture when the middle-generation faces a time-famine, struggling to simultaneously raise kids and work long hours on the job, the older generation is awash in free time, poised to succeed women as the trustees of civic life in this country. In the process they stand to find new meaning and purpose in their lives, and abandon the limbo-like state unfulfilling for so many older individuals. Freedman argues that the aging phenomenon, the massive transformation that many portray as our downfall, may in fact be our best hope for renewal as a nation.

When I was young, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War was ancient history to me. However, as I now reflect on my life, I suddenly realize how young our country is for I knew somebody who knew people in the Revolutionary War that ended over 225 years ago! GrandmotherGranniemother of my Grandfather Herbert Windsorwas born in 1835 and died in 1927 when I was fivea wonderful old lady I loved. She was 10 in 1845, 60 years after that war ended. I am sure there were numerous veterans then 80-90 years old. And so, I touched the woman who touched some veterans of the Revolutionary War! She also had to know quite a few in the Civil War when she was 20-years-old, a war that ended only 57 years before my birth. Put in this perspective, what has happened to our country in that time is incredible from total population, to trains, planes, telephones, automobiles, medicines, radio, TV, computers, a man on the moon and millions of new citizens from all over the world! None of these people could even have conceived of such marvels nor a life expectancy from about 35 to 40 to 83 plus. My life has seen an explosion in technology that now affects the entire world. I have been privileged to be in on the beginning of some of that technology. * * * * * I have written these memoirs so that the family and possible future generations might share in my experiences of a life of many involvements, many accomplishments, some failures, many contacts with the famous, and a life for which I can be so grateful. As the youngest of four, I often was rebelliousI wanted my own way. I suspect this was partly due to inheriting some of my fathers genes. (Occasionally I had tantrums which were easily handled by mother who would say, Go on and yell, Ill wait. That pretty well cooled my attempt at getting attention.) Still, I was brought up in a loving family, the four of us with our parents were all for each other. Thanks to Dads success in business, we were brought up, even with the Depression, with comfort. Throughout my career, I was known for being quite creative. I think that too came in part from Dad being very positive about doing things his way. I wanted to challenge him on many things and that caused me to think about new ways. I never could have guessed I would marry a girl from my kindergarten class. I was based in California and fearlessly spoke up to my commanding officer (a Major) whose name was the same as a fellow member of Tiger Inn at Princeton. He changed my orders that permitted me to call a girl I had dated at Vassar and while on a weekend date in La Jolla, I visited the parents of Mary Randolph who lived there. I always enjoyed the Randolphs, each of whom had creative talents and an unusual sense of humor. They enjoyed small situations that would pass by most people. Their only child absorbed the best of each. Sixty years later she could still reel off a classic story while having fun doing it. Randy has been an extraordinary companion all these years. She was always very creative with great talents in so many ways. Still, except for our common background in Bronxville, from the start we had different interests. Mine were sports and music and taking risks. Hers were reading, writing and avoidance of conflict. By necessity she was brought up frugally. The fact we stayed together all these 68 years is a great tribute to her hanging in as she raised our kids, cooked their meals on time, dressed them, and drove them to wherever. In our earlier years when we were still trying to adjust to each other, she once said she should have married a 9-5 husband who didnt commute. Her support for my passion for various jobs with late hours and business trips while she was stuck at home made my life possible. How lucky can a man be. She raised four wonderful children, each quite different from the other yet each closely and lovingly attached to each other and to us. NOTE: To minimize confusion when Randy

A revealing glimpse backstage at Disneyland, its development, and its operations.