Disneyland Adventure

When I was young, our family made two moves, from Nashville to Chicago and from Chicago to L.A. The kids thought it was exciting. I’m pretty sure the grownups did too. Part of the excitement was that at each stop, we made new discoveries.     

Our first stop was a little house west of Chicago in a town called Des Plaines, which had a couple of outstanding features. One was O’Hare Airport, which began passenger service just at the time we arrived. Not long afterward it became one of the world’s busiest airports. Unfortunately, along with the planes came traffic noise right over our house.    

Another feature, just a few blocks away, was the first location of a little hamburger place owned by Ray Kroc, which was called McDonald’s. We were fascinated by the burger count posted each month—5,000 to 10,000 to 25,000. These days the count is up to 2.5 billion per year, and that first little McDonald’s is a museum.   

My parents never liked Chicago—whether because of the people or the snow or the 360-degree spin my mom took one day while driving us to school—and so my dad found a job in L.A. The Thanksgiving before we moved, we we sat around the dining table and, as he did every year, my father turned on the tape recorder, and each of us said what we were most looking forward to during the coming year. Mom probably said something like “the sunshine,” Dad may have named “new friends,” and the kids? We all said the same thing: Disneyland.   

It was one thing to visit Disneyland, which we did ASAP upon arrival. It was another to participate. 

That fall, I was on the playground of my L.A. school, Calvert Street Elementary, when a station wagon (remember those?) with a circular camera mounted on the roof pulled up to the gate and into the schoolyard. The next thing I knew, the camera was rolling. A few months later, my friends and I were on display at Disneyland, spinning in circles to watch their little movie star in action.    

It seemed the park had a new feature called Circarama: A 360-Degree Tour of the West. I was a star. Well, sort of.