Hot dogs come in packages of 12, buns come in packages of 10. Why is that?

Image: Disney

Let’s again circle back to the party analogy above. What happens when you prepare for six people but 28 arrive instead? Multiply that process by one thousand. Literally.  The logistics of running a Disney theme park are an amazing series of steps taken by disciplined employees. The company has streamlined and improved all of them over decades of operation. On their first day in 1955, they were completely flying blind. They had estimates, of course, but the park reached the expected level of traffic within the first two hours of opening. Put yourselves in the shoes of the employees working that morning. Your day would be an awkward combination of primal fear and flop sweat.

Early on, Disney’s staff recognized a disaster was in the offing. Their supply of food wasn’t going to last long. First, they ran out of hot dog buns and then they ran out of wieners. I’d love to hear the explanation about why they didn’t purchase a symmetrical amount of wieners and buns, but that’s small fry relative to the other issues popping up across the park. As fate would have it, Disney was facing a second crisis. The local plumber’s union was on strike. Now, Walt Disney proudly proclaimed that he interacted well with every union claiming Disney employees. Since none of the union people was famous enough at the time to countermand this assertion, we’ll assume it’s true. Whether through bad luck or bad negotiations, however, plumbers were on strike on July 17, 1955. So, that’s 6,000 tickets, 28,154 guests and a shaky water supply.

Main Street wouldn’t have been clean that day

Image: Disney

One of the logical outcomes of living in a civilized society is that we take things like a ready supply of clean water for granted. Nobody at Disneyland on opening day did that. That’s because they couldn’t. Walt Disney himself faced a difficult issue in the days leading up to the debut of his dream park. He was offered the Sophie’s Choice of plumbing. His employees could guarantee him that either the water fountains would work or the toilets would. He chose…wisely. As he joked in later years, people could always buy a Pepsi, the official soft drink of Disneyland, but they couldn’t take a whiz out in the open on Main Street. Please don’t try to prove him wrong on the latter point.

Disgruntled opening day guests ranted that Disney intentionally shut down the water fountains in order to push sales of Pepsi products. I love a good urban legend as much as the next guy, but I have to call bunk on that one. Those who complained have no idea how close they came to standing in a theme park with 28,150 of their closest strangers, none of whom had access to a public bathroom. While Disneyland did leave Uncle Walt strapped for cash when it opened, a few thousand dollars in Pepsi sales weren’t worth the danger of a negative perception of the park. Many of the invited guests worked in the media, and he wanted everything to go smoothly so that they would print only the kindest things about his dream park. Oops.

And you get mad when Space Mountain is closed

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Amazingly, the plumbing wasn’t even the only utility fight waged behind the scenes by Disney employees. A gas leak occurred in Fantasyland, and that led to the shutdown of Adventureland, Frontierland, and Fantasyland for the afternoon. As a reminder, Disneyland offered five themed lands when it opened. The gas leak shut down 60 percent of the park. And that had the carryover effect of cramming all the park guests even closer together in the remaining two themed lands. So, they had 22,000 more people than expected, and they could host them in only 40 percent of the expected space. I get claustrophobic just thinking about it.

Arguably, that wasn’t even the worst thing to happen at Frontierland. As a proud Missourian, Disney wanted to hearken back to his roots with a steamboat ride. You know it as the Mark Twain Riverboat attraction, and it remains open to this day. The first ship, however, almost took a page from the Titanic. The park planners never stopped to wonder about the maximum capacity of the ship. While that would never happen today, it was understandable in the 1950s. After all, Imagineers had no reason to believe that enough people would ever simultaneously get on the boat for capacity to be an issue.

Within hours of opening day, capacity was a terrifying issue. In the months afterward, park planners calculated that the Mark Twain could hold about 300 people safely. On opening day, more than 500 people were riding the riverboat when the situation took a turn. The crewmen received training to highlight the best views of the river. Excited day one guests would run from side to side of the boat in order to enjoy the scenery. The boat started rocking.

The situation grew out of control so quickly that some of the display items on the boat fell. One of them struck a journalist squarely on the head, and he presumably did not leave a glowing review of the attraction after the fact. Panicked ride operators begged people to stand in the middle of the boat, which is the only reason the Mark Twain didn’t sink in the man-made rivers of Frontierland. As big a debacle as the Black Sunday debut was for Disneyland, at least there wasn’t a body count. We can joke about it now, but the situation was a lot closer than people realize.

High heels and a sour disposition

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What could make the temperament of the crowd even worse? Oh right. It was one of the hottest days on record for Anaheim during the 1950s. Temperatures soared above 100 degrees. This seems like an excellent time to mention that Disney ran behind on some of its last minute preparations. One of the most notable of these was the pouring of the asphalt flooring for the walkways. There were two reasons for this. The first is that it made sense that Disney wait until the other construction was completed to pave the ground.

The second and more impacting one is that the shoestring budget didn’t allow them much leeway on the subject. In fact, Disney was so broke that they couldn’t afford to add vegetation to several key parts of the park. Uncle Walt instructed his employees to provide Latin-sounding names to the local vegetation, by which I mean weeds, in a vain attempt to trick visitors into believing they were expensive exotic plants. Yes, they were that desperate.

The delay in the paving of Main Street until the day prior to opening led to an unforeseen outcome. The asphalt hadn’t completely set overnight when guests arrived. And it was scorching hot. Also, there’s a reason why pavers place signs warning that asphalt isn’t dry yet. After the substance hardens, it’s an optimal flooring solution. Before it sets, however, it’s soft.

What do many women like do for big events? They dress up, wanting to wear their Sunday best. What’s a key component in dressing up? High heels. Oh yes, it’s exactly what you think. Hundreds of women started suffering a certain sinking feeling. That’s because they were tangibly sinking. The very ground beneath them gave way, causing them to bury their shoes into the asphalt. For anyone in high heels, walking down Main Street on the opening day of Disneyland was a virtual impossibility. That led to many women removing their shoes, and even that was only a lateral move. They were now barefoot, walking on blistering pavement.

Summarizing to this point, many uninvited guests had no food and no free water on a scalding hot day, and only two available themed lands were open for business. A surprising number of them were also barefoot, walking on volcanic pavement. Then again, most of them weren’t supposed to be there, so they shouldn’t have been complaining.

And tomorrow, we’ll do the same thing all over again

Image: Disney

To their credit, most Disney employees showed up for work the next day. That’s not to say that they were happy to be there, but at least they didn’t have the worst job at the park. That honor was reserved for the poor soul who had to inform Walt Disney of what had transpired on opening day. Uncle Walt was so focused on the live television broadcast that he remained oblivious to all the catastrophic events unfolding around him. He only learned of them in the aftermath of the debacle the press was already calling Black Sunday. That couldn’t have been a fun conversation for anybody.

Then again, the sheer volume of kids watching the opening day festivities went a long way in assuring the long term success of the theme park. They saw Davy Crockett talking to Walt Disney, which is like seeing Santa Claus hanging out with the Easter Bunny (and the polar opposite of Robert Cummings kissing a random dancer). At that point, they were hooked and it didn’t matter how much they had to nag their parents. They were going to Disneyland. The park witnessed its 10 millionth visit by New Year’s Eve of 1957, less than two and a half years after Black Sunday. So, none of the nonsense that occurred on Disneyland’s opening day did any significant damage to the brand.

To a larger point, everyone has a disastrous Disney theme park story, but if you weren’t there for Disneyland’s opening day in 1955, your tale of woe doesn’t make the cut. At least the bathrooms and drinking fountains worked at the same time when you were there. Also, Disney had enough food to feed you and your family. And nobody’s shoes melted into the ground. Sure, we can all laugh about Black Sunday now, but visiting on opening day must have been one of the most disappointing theme park experiences ever.