Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Opening Day July 17, 1955 Main Street

Several years ago I purchased a lot of opening day paper items from the Anaheim newspaper. This was kept by a photographer and his son was selling it on E-Bay. When I picked the items up, I asked if there were any other Disneyland items. The gentleman who was selling the items said yes, there were Viewmasters that were marked for opening day July 17, 1955. Of course I purchased the viewmaster slides as they were personal reels with the opening day in 3-D. To celebrate the 53rd year of Disneyland, here are a couple of images from Main Street on opening day. The first shows Town Square with the International Street sign up on the wall by the Opera House.

The second shows one of the camera set ups they used to get a taller view of the festivities. Of course KABC was the Los Angeles ABC affiliate.

Unfortunately I did not get the slides and another dealer purchased them and broke them up. I do know several of the people who did purchase the slides.

3 comments:

Major Pepperidge said...

ZOWIE!!!!

These Viewmaster views are beautiful, and I can only imagine how they must look in 3-D!!.

Love the forklift for the camera, those were primitive days - - but I'm sure it worked fine.

Thanks for sharing!

Vintage Disneyland Tickets said...

Pure sweetness!!! Oh man, I miss Disneyland!

Anonymous said...

My brother and I played in the orange groves in the area where Disneyland was being built, and used to go hang out in an old blue wooden frame farmhouse that was the construction office. We peered at the drawings on the walls and pestered the poor guys who were the construction supervisors.

When the park opened, we both had wangled jobs as newsboys selling the park newspaper. It was so neat - we got in for free, wandered around selling the papers out of little bags slung from our shoulders, and got in free for everything. Of course we spent more time in the penny arcade, watching Mr. Lincoln speak, and taking the rides than we did selling papers!

Regerttably, our job didn't last long. One evening after woking at the park we were wlaking home - we lived quite nearby. Some guy pulled up to the curb and called for us to get in his car. We ran like Hades through the orange groves and lost him. Our folks of course put an end to adventuring in Adventureland after that!

I looked at your slides hoping that perhaps we would be in one. Drat!