By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My recent Disneyland trip probably was not my final visit there. As my hair grays and my wrinkles multiply, however, it may have been one of my last excursions to the Magic Kingdom of Anaheim.
That’s enough to make a fella think.
As a result, when churros, Mickey/Minnie, or yet another fun attraction did not distract me, my mind filled with thoughts of what was, and of how many more of those “whats” might be in my future.
I don’t think it’s too morbid or unusual to entertain thoughts of mortality while visiting Disneyland in your 60s. After all, Walt Disney was only 65 years old when he passed away in 1966, just a decade after he opened the place.
Having now gone there about 10 times over the last half century, I’ve realized that a Disneyland visit is like traveling through my own personal time machine. Just like Walt wanted, I see yesterday, today, and even tomorrowland.
My parents were New Englanders, transplanted west in the early 1960s by the United States Air Force. When we got to Utah, neither of them had been to Disneyland, which opened four years after they got married.
Still, we were Disney fans already.
Each Sunday night we gathered in front of our black and white TV to watch Disney’s “The Wonderful World of Color.” That’s when I fell in love with a cartoon about dancing bears picking up litter.
When I broke my foot a few years later, my get-better-soon gift was the soundtrack album for the brand new 1967 Disney movie The Jungle Book. My favorite song on the album was “The Bare Necessities.” (See a pattern?)
I finally made it to Disneyland six years later. In the mid-1970s, an adult family friend took a school classmate and me there during a driving trip to California.
The general one-day admission and a book of ride tickets cost us young teens about $10 each. (Spoiler alert: it costs at least ten times more today.)
Some of the attractions I saw then are gone now. This includes Skull Rock and Pirate’s Cove; the Skyway ride; the People Mover; Tomorrowland’s Mission to Mars; and the Main Street Electrical Parade.
Many rides that did not exist back then are fixtures today. These attractions are: three of the four Disney mountains (Space, Splash, and Big Thunder); Mickey’s Toontown; Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge; the Indiana Jones ride; and all of California Adventure.
That earlier era was more relaxed in many ways. For example, our chaperone did not even join us in the park. He dropped us off on the side road—now covered by Downtown Disney—between the park and the Disneyland Hotel.
Later, he picked us up at the same place when the park closed. I don’t know how, but we managed all those travel logistics without cell phones to coordinate with each other.
Park crowd control innovations like the “Fast Pass” and “Lightning Lane” did not yet exist, but once in the park we headed for the big noisy E ticket rides (Pirates of the Caribbean and the Matterhorn) and navigated the lines pretty well.
My souvenir? A set of animated postcards from the Pirates ride. I think I still have them somewhere.
About a decade later, after I graduated from law school in 1986, my sister and I took my mother to Disneyland. The highlight of her first and only visit was a dance with Pluto, a story I tell here.
I made my next half dozen visits to Disneyland as a newlywed husband and then as a father. My wife Vicki was pregnant during two of those trips, so her parents joined us and provided me with my first models of grandparent Disney behavior.
Our Disneyland movies and photos show the evolution of our children from toddlers to tweens to teens. Certain moments from each of those trips are engraved forever in my memory banks.
During her first visit, our daughter Erin at age 3 was both drawn to and repelled by Goofy.
Our fearless middle daughter Megan insisted on riding the Big Thunder Mountain roller coaster when she was just barely tall enough to do so.
When he was just a young boy, our son Danny joyfully cavorted with Buzz Lightyear early one morning in Tomorrowland.
During one visit in 2005, all three of them performed dances or karate with a group from the preschool and dance studio where Vicki works. That year we celebrated Disneyland’s 50th anniversary, and I was just five years short of my own half century mark.
By the time we made our two most recent trips, all the kids had become young adults and I was either close to or over age 60.
No matter a visitor’s age, of course, no one chills out at Disneyland. It always is a get up early and walk 15,000 to 20,000 steps per day kind of vacation. Thus, we launched a family tradition when our kids were younger.
We always left Disneyland around lunchtime so the kids could sleep and/or swim before returning refreshed to the park for the rest of the evening and night. Now I am the one who needs this extra rest.
During our latest trip my wife and I carried around new life titles—grandparents! We were grateful to be there for the first Disneyland visit by our grandsons Wally (3.5 years old) and Finn (7 months old).
The latest trip was like and unlike previous visits.
Walt Disney built Disneyland 70 years ago on 160 acres of land that used to grow oranges and walnuts. Now the full resort sprawls over 500 acres in an urban setting. I hardly recognized the place.
Unlike my first visit some fifty years ago, when I sought out the fastest and noisiest rides, these days I am content with the quiet Disneyland places found off the beaten path.
One of them is the “Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln” show, which I write about here. Unfortunately, like me his aging fan, Mr. Lincoln needs great moments of rest and relaxation, and so the show was closed for a facelift during our latest visit.
Thankfully, the Enchanted Tiki Room was open. There’s never a long line there and they serve Dole Whip pineapple ice cream. In these my golden days, I really enjoy places “where the birds sing words and the flowers croon.”
There’s also a new little plaza near Cafe Daisy in Toontown where, early in the morning, one can sit quietly under an umbrella and eat cinnamon donuts. We did just that.
And speaking of going off the beaten path, I am amazed that so few people go to the Animation Academy in California Adventure. During our latest trip, I had the grand hall/lobby almost to myself.
I waltzed around holding grandson Finn as the symphonic sounds of the classic Disney songbook serenaded us. He probably will not remember it, but I always will.
Our grand boys had the same amazed reactions, looks of thrill and delight, and enthusiastic character interactions at Disneyland as did our children. But our new role this time was to step back a bit, and let their parents have the front row seat for those memorable life moments.
Park logistics also dictated that we cede authority to the younger (and more tech-savvy) hands of those parents. Everything that happens at Disney these days—tickets, dinner plans, ride reservations—goes through an app on a mobile device.
I used to be the Master of Mouse House, the Fast Pass hero who shrewdly set day/ride schedules and fearlessly led our O’Brien clan past lines and lines of those Disney-doomed folks who did not plan to fail but who failed to plan.
During our most recent trip, however, my job was much less complicated—keep up with the younger folks, don’t get lost (too often), and try not to drool (too much) on myself.
Given the trend lines, if I make another visit to what is often called the “Happiest Place on Earth,” I may be sitting in one of those plastic Disney rental strollers. I’m kinda looking forward to it.
Walt Disney once famously said, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”
In contrast, my own time machine hurtles towards completion. Every moment I move closer to an expiration date for which, says the Gospel of Matthew, I’ll never know the day nor the hour.
Disneyland magic cannot change that circle of life process. And in many ways, for me, it reveals it.
In the afterglow of my most recent trip, as I consider both the place and the man with gray hair and wrinkles who visited it, the lovely lyrics from a song in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast come to mind: “There may be something there that wasn’t there before.”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
