Disneyland- 60 Days to 60 Years: 1968

I'm thrilled to be participating in 60 Days to 60 Years- a blog series highlighting each year as we count down to Disneyland's 60th anniversary.

1968 was an important year for me- it was the year I was born. I did not visit Disneyland in 1968, but I've long been interested in what special places were like during that year.

A while back, I learned about the pictorial souvenir and guide books that used to be issued each year. Found in gift shops on property, they were a great keepsake to commemorate a visit to the park. It's hard for us today to imagine a time when not everyone had unlimited photographic powers at their fingertips- but back when cameras and photos were not as prevalent as they are now, these souvenirs offered many families a great option for capturing the sites and experiences of their visits.

One of the things I find interesting about these pictorials is the candidness of many of the photos. Today, promotional material put out by the company is meticulously crafted- photos are staged, the people are models with a careful balance of demographics, and everything is just so. Outfits are coordinated, and everyone is smiling. When I look through photos in the old guidebooks, I get a much "realer" sense of that slice of life. Few photos seem staged, candid shots abound, and we get a more honest feel for the environment.

With that, I share some photos and highlights from the 1968 version of the Disneyland Pictorial Souvenir and Guide:

The cover! While this book was published for 1968, this famous photo 

on the cover was taken a few years earlier. 

Ahhh, maps! I have a thing for maps. I'm drawn to them. I especially love the retro look of some of the maps in the souvenir books- and this one is no exception. Simple, stylized, and meant to give a broad picture rather than a detailed road map. I could look at a map like this endlessly.

Following the map, the pictorial goes on to highlight each land, with photos, and descriptions of the highlights in each area.

The page above features what just may be the greatest photo ever- two nuns about to embark on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride (a journey made more ironic when you know where the attraction brings them in the end)!

With limited space in the pictorial, the photo in the lower right (enlarged below) is an interesting choice for inclusion. I guess they were really pushing the cleanliness idea...

Walt's quote about Disneyland After Dark:
"It's difficult for me to choose my favorite time of day to be at Disneyland... naturally, I enjoy them all. But one which has a special attraction for me is Disneyland After Dark. As night falls, a new kind of magic and excitement takes over in Disneyland. Aboard the Mark Twain there's a real Dixieland Band. The Tahitians in Adventureland really dance up a storm. While you're in Tomorrowland, I suggest you take in our band over there. And I never miss dropping in at the Plaza Gardens. Like most people, I have fun just watching others have fun."

Towards the end of the guidebook, the pages on Disneyland Hotel and "Service a la Disneyland" advertise the then-state-of-the-art onsite hotel, as well as many of the sponsors found throughout the attractions, shops, and dining locations.

 

back cover

Are you interested in seeing a Souvenir Pictorial and Guidebook from a special year? They are widely available through online resellers, and they're usually fairly affordable. These special books give us a fantastic glimpse of what the park was like at various points through its history.


Thanks to DidiMarie (@Distherapy) and Gayle T (@Disneygals)  for hosting 60 Days to 60 Years! make sure to visit all the other stops on this sixty year journey...

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Wordless Wednesday: October Calendar Shot

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Thanks to Deb @ Focused on the Magic  for hosting 

the Wordless Wednesday Blog Hop! 

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Hats, revisited...

The hats kept calling me back! I had to do a follow up on this recent Wordless Wednesday post on hats. I didn't want to let them remain wordless, because each of these has a special Disney memory to go along with it.

Starting clockwise from the upper left, that's me back in 1977. I first featured this, and two other of these old style beautiful hats here, for a Wordless Wednesday history theme. This shot was taken during my first trip to Disney World. Le Chapeau, the hat shop on Main Street, used to be filled with these fancy creations. I'm not sure if they always had them, or if it was just for a short period of time. Someone recently suggested they may have been there for a year or so after the bicentennial celebration, but that's just a theory. I haven't been able to find much info on these, so if you know anything, please share! I don't look very happy in this photo, because I found out just moments before the photo was taken that I was only modeling the hat, and I was not in fact getting this as a souvenir. In hindsight, I can understand how impractical (and expensive, no doubt) it would have been to purchase the hat- but at the time, I was crushed. It would be decades before I'd return to the Magic Kingdom, and Le Chapeau was my first stop when I finally made it back. I sunk a tiny bit when I strode inside, only to find baseball hats and Mickey ears- no fancy hats to be found anywhere.



The hat in the upper right is a cloche hat, which I got at Disneyland. I've always loved this style of hat, popular in the 1920s, and they were not yet back in style or readily available at the time I found this one. They've since become ubiquitous, and similar hats can easily be found in a variety of clothing stores and shopping mall accessory shops. This one, however, will always be special to me...because it came from Disneyland.








Next is a baseball hat, also from Disneyland. I was fortunate to visit Anaheim for a work conference several years back, and of course I extended my trip a bit so I could visit the parks. I forgot about the California sunshine when I packed my bag in the cold, gray north east, so I needed something to shade me from the sun. I've always loved that Disneyland font, so when I spotted this "D" on Main street, I scooped it up. This remains one of my favorite go-to hats; perfect size, perfect shape, perfect softness.





Ah, Epcot. My home away from home, my favorite place in all of WDW. I fell in love with the 30th anniversary logo and color scheme, and wanted to get my hands on anything I could when the merchandise was released in October 2012. I was not able to visit the parks at that time, and items went quickly! Thanks to a very special family member, I found this under the tree at Christmas a few months after the 30th celebration.







And that brings us to the hat in the middle of the collage- my daughter's first set of ears. We agreed to purchase whatever ears she wanted during her first visit. She had done some reading about Walt, and she was drawn to his famous quote that went something like, "I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing- it all started with a mouse..."

When she found a set featuring that quote, she knew she had found her ears!

Do you have a favorite Disney hat? Tell us about it in the comments...