Biography | Walt Disney — The Dedication He Read in Town Square on 17 July 1955
· 1955-7
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Biography | Walt Disney — The Dedication He Read in Town Square on 17 July 1955
kevin
People treat 17 July 1955 as the day the turnstiles opened to anyone with a ticket.
That Sunday was an invitation-only press preview and a live ABC broadcast, Dateline Disneyland, with some two dozen cameras on the grounds.
Walt Disney stood in Town Square and read the bronze plaque that is still the park's official welcome.
The inscribed lines begin: To all who come to this happy place, welcome.
Disneyland is your land.
The rest of the plaque dedicates the park to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, dated 17 July 1955.
UPI counted about 35,000 invited guests that afternoon. The public ticket windows opened the next morning, 18 July.
The park sat on former orange groves in Anaheim. Construction had started a year and a day earlier.
The live show ran long and ragged.
Fountains failed. Asphalt softened in the heat.
A gas leak shut Tomorrowland for part of the afternoon.
The date the company keeps is the day he read the plaque, not the first paid Monday.
Town Square is still the first civic room inside the gates.
Photo: NASA, public domain, portrait of Walt Disney, 1954.
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