Working with Disney (23 page)

DP:
Was your first assignment there with Tomorrowland?

JC:
My first assignment was as a ride operator on the old Autopia freeway.

DP:
Oh, the one without a track.

JC:
I worked that for one week, and then Jack Reilly, who was our area manager, came out and asked me if I could fit into this space suit. At that time, you got somebody that fit the costume, not the costume to fit. I said, “Sure.” He said, “It'd just be a couple of hours.” It was for
Life
magazine. Well, I was in it for a little over two years.

DP:
On opening day, were you working on Autopia?

JC:
Yeah, I was working on Autopia.

DP:
Do you remember anything special about that?

JC:
Yeah, it was quite an ordeal for these children to come out here and drive their own cars. And it was amazing how many movie stars we had
out here. I had Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor. They were married then, and they brought their children out. Alan Ladd was out here with his family. Dean Martin was out here. It was a lot of fun. They enjoyed driving. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. It was really cute with their kids because they were bumping each other in the car. [Frank would] turn around and say something to Sammy, and Sammy'd say, “Yeah, but you gotta learn how to drive.” Frank would say, “Yeah, but you bumped me.” It was a lot of fun.

DP:
That was a fun Autopia, because I remember it didn't have a track down the middle, so you could really bang around.

JC:
We had the police cars, too, then.

DP:
Oh, were there?

JC:
Yeah, we had one going in front of twelve cars and one behind. And if they did something wrong, and we had to cite them, we wouldn't give them their little driver's license from Richfield. A little yellow license we issued out to all good drivers.

DP:
Yeah, I'm sure I used to have one. It seems to me that you used to be able to get stuck up on top of the freeway and somebody would come out from the bushes and get you started again.

JC:
We had people work out in what we called Timbuktu. If somebody got stuck or jammed in the curb or something, we'd jump on it and move the car out.

DP:
When you were working there, did you have a chance to meet Walt Disney?

JC:
I saw him daily. Matter of fact, I was working on the Matterhorn—this was after I'd come out of the space suit. I was foreman of the Matterhorn, and I was doing a book called
Know the Ropes of the Matterhorn
for the University of Disneyland. I was walking across the Tomorrow-land area and somebody pulled the two books I had—
Third Man on the Mountain
[1959] and
Seeing the Alps
[perhaps
Walking in the Alps
by Kev Reynolds]—that I was going through so I could get some information.
Somebody pulled the books out from under my arms, and I turned around. I had a closed fist. I thought one of the employees was joking around. Here it was Walt! “Oh, no! Don't hit me!” Then he asked me what I was doing. I told him. Then he got the area assistant manager and he told him, “You'd better get somebody to open up the Matterhorn. John and I are going to sit here in front of [the] 20,000 Leagues [exhibit], so we can talk about the book.” We were there about forty minutes, and he told me if I needed any help who to call and so forth. I thanked him very much. But that's the kind of a guy he was. He'd stop and talk to all the operators.

DP:
After you worked in the space suit in Tomorrowland, what did you do then?

JC:
I went back to operations. I don't know if you remember the film,
Forty Pounds of Trouble,
with Tony Curtis?

DP:
Yes.

JC:
I was in that when I was on the Matterhorn. That was a lot of fun, too. They really enjoyed it. As a matter of fact, that's the first thing that they ever did out here as far as filming. That was the only one.

DP:
And you're currently working in communications?

JC:
I'm the manager of Communications Services, which entails the telephones, the mailroom, the main files which house contracts and so forth out of the Legal Department, the records center, the forms control area, our copy equipment, microfilm equipment, microfiche equipment, and typewriters. So it's a complete service.

DP:
How have you managed to keep your Disney spirit all these years?

JC:
I think it is really knowing Walt Disney, knowing what he believed in. When he talked to you, you knew that the man had a deep feeling for what he was doing. I think keeping that in mind, and then we have an annual Club 55 get together every year. [The club is for] all of the employees who started in 1955. Right now there are thirty active employees. It's ironic because it's our thirtieth year—thirty of us left who are
active in Club 55. It just worked out that way. And then every five years, all the inactive retirees come in, too. I think each year when we have that, it rekindles—you know, we sit there and we talk about Walt, and we talk about the area and so forth. So, you keep that feeling—knowing the man and knowing what he believed in and then seeing what he really put together and made it work when everybody else thought it would be foolish. Those are the things that really keep me moving, knowing that Disneyland will always be here even though I'm gone.

DP:
What do you think is the key or main ingredient to the success of Disneyland?

JC:
I think it's in the one word
Disney
—the man himself—and I think if you tie
Disney
to the word
dream,
I think this is what people remember. When they come here and they find out—first of all, it's very clean, and I think that that's the main thing that they keep coming back [for], and I think the courtesy of the employees, knowing that they are very important people to them, they do pay their salaries—those are the things that I think have maintained the audience that we get.

DP:
How long did you work at Disneyland?

VF:
Thirty years.

DP:
How did you happen to go to work at Disneyland?

VF:
The first vice president–general manager at Disneyland [C. V. Wood] was a man I'd worked with before in Texas, and then we'd done some consulting work together. He had been with Stanford Research [Institute]. Walt retained him to be vice president—general manager. Then finally about six months before opening, they found out that they needed a training program, so he knew that I had done that sort of thing and retained me on a consulting basis. Then I stayed around.

DP:
Did you work with the training program during your entire career at Disneyland?

VF:
Well, I sort of set up what is called the University of Disneyland. I sort of set up the first orientation program.

DP:
I was really impressed with the orientation program when I went through it. It was quite extensive and made me feel part of the whole team right from the beginning.

VF:
When you went through, it was probably a little bit more sophisticated than when we started out. But it's still a good program.

DP:
Were you working in that capacity when the park opened—the first day and the first summer?

VF:
Yeah, 1955. I was on a contract at that time, a week-to-week contract to organize the orientation and training program and to set it up.

DP:
During the time you worked there, I'm sure you had a chance to meet Walt Disney?

VF:
Yes.

DP:
Can you tell me what your impressions were of him?

VF:
I thought he was a sensational man, really, one of the most important people in my life. I didn't work for him directly. I usually worked for
somebody that worked directly for him, but I did know him. In fact, I'd write my handbooks pretty much with him in mind, because he had a good sense of humor and had his own idea of what he was doing. I think he was a genius of a type.

DP:
I would agree with you there. What would you see as the key or main ingredient to Disneyland's success?

VF:
There are so many of them. In the first place, I'm quite prejudiced—I'm catholic in my tendencies, you see—because Disneyland itself is the one place in the world that Walt personally designed and then had maybe eleven years to work around and form it, so I use the expression that it's the roadmap of Walt Disney's life or mind. So just the basic design, the detail, and everything else is one thing. We had a lot of comments from people who said they would come back because the people were so friendly and the place was so clean. So you have this personal design. And Walt was there, you know. He walked over every foot, so it was molded by him and then the people—we invest an awful lot in the attitudes of our people and in the cleanliness of the park.

DP:
Looking back over the years, are there any outstanding memories that you have from 1955 to the present at Disneyland?

VF:
Yeah. Everybody has a lot of them, you know. My general philosophy is that you gotta look ahead. You can glance in the rearview mirror, but you better keep your eyes on where the hell you're going, you know.

DP:
Along that vein, how would you see the future of Disneyland?

VF:
I'm very bullish about it right now. Nineteen-eighty-four was a hell of a year, if you followed the history of Disney. People were trying to buy us out, we had a change in top management, but now we have a very aggressive top management in [Michael] Eisner and [Frank] Wells, and that sort of thing. Hopefully, they'll come up with some movies that will then help Disneyland. You see, the last blockbuster movie we had was
Mary Poppins,
and
Mary Poppins
made enough money, as Walt said, to pretty much pay for the Pirates of the Caribbean, New Orleans Square, the Haunted Mansion, and a few other things.

DP:
From what I've read, it sounds like the next addition may come from outside of Disney, with the George Lucas attraction themed to
Star Wars.

VF:
That's what I gather. Personally, I hope that nothing really changes much on Main Street or in most of the place—it's like the Vatican, you know. If attendance drops off at the Vatican, they're not going to take out Michelangelo and put in Andy Warhol! But Tomorrowland—the world changes so rapidly that it's almost impossible not to have it Todayland. So I'm very optimistic that we'll come up with some stuff in Tomorrowland that will make it very, very exciting.

DP:
That seems to me, too, to be the area where you could have the most changes, because there are so few attractions that I think attendance has dropped off. One of the attractions I worked on was Mission to Mars. It didn't seem to be as popular as some of the other ones.

VF:
Mission to Mars, you know, was a warmed-over—when we first opened, we had the Rocket to the Moon, and, by God, we got to the moon before Sputnik! We could see [Sputnik] go by from a bar across the street. At that time, it was a pretty progressive idea, but, my God, that's one of the problems: you start in planning something, and by the time you get it done, it's a couple or three years, and by that time, the world has changed so damn fast.

DP:
I just read yesterday that Tomorrowland was originally supposed to be 1986, so we've almost caught up to the original Tomorrowland.

VF:
We're past it!