First Tour

Best job at Disneyland? Aspiring cast members’ consensus
answer for Most Coveted Position is—Tour Guide. As a result, the
chosen few are usually among the park’s best, brightest, and most beautiful.

They are entrusted with the most intensive guest interaction role—single-handedly
entertaining and pampering higher-paying guests, often celebrities or
dignitaries, for hours at a time. Guides must memorize a lengthy spiel,
often speak multiple languages, and wield a mean rider’s crop.

The Tour Guide department rose to prominence in the 1960s, under the
leadership of Cicily Rigdon. She groomed them into a prim, proper and
respected group, dressed in English equestrian outfits that coordinated
well with Cicily’s British accent. From their ranks rose, one a year,
a Disneyland Ambassador who would represent the company around the world
and often appear at Walt’s side during TV shows, parades, and other appearances.

Guide June Halverson directs her group aboard the Omnibus in October 1958.
Note the breadbox-sized megaphone hanging from her arm. Photo from the
November 1958 Disneylander, © Disney.

But there was a time earlier that Cicily likens to the Dark Ages, back
in the late 1950s when Cicily was just starting out by selling tickets
to the park’s Holidayland picnic area. You see, this crack organization
of professional guides actually began as more of a rag-tag outfit, hastily
thrown together under emergency conditions.

Practically from Day One, Disneyland had considered offering guided tours.
But in the hectic early days, there always seemed to be something more
pressing to deal with. Management lacked the time in the summer and the
manpower in the off-season to put together a tour program.

The proposition finally began gaining momentum midway through 1958. Who’s
given credit for the idea depends upon who’s telling the story. One source
attributes the program to marketing director Ed Ettinger, who during a
plane trip to New York supposedly hatched the scheme as a promotional
gimmick.

Club 55’er Bill Hoelscher credits the park’s creative entertainment director,
Tommy Walker. Back in the 1950s, Anaheim was in the middle of nowhere,
so Disneyland contracted with a bus line to offer shuttle service from
Los Angeles, Long Beach, and other cities. Problem was, these tourists
typically had to catch a bus home a few hours later. “Tommy thought
that there was a need for guided tours for people on a limited amount
of time,” Hoelscher explained. “People would come from L.A.
on a bus, and they only had four hours, but they wanted to see the highlights
of Disneyland, so that they needed to have someone to take them around.”

Yet perhaps the most logical explanation for the birth of the tour guides
comes from one of the originals, Donna Clark (née Jackson). “People
were just used to taking guided tours at such places,” she said,
“So we had many requests.”

During the waning days of the summer of 1958, Tommy asked several other
divisions if he could borrow a few of their seasonal workers after Labor
Day. Van France of the Disney University offered up survey-takers Ruth
(Bartling) Boehlke and Evelyn Huepel. Operations donated Bep Jones and
Carla Gammon. Lessee Carnation provided Donna Jackson.

No one expected much from the experiment, so the draftees kept their
old jobs. While waiting for guests to sign up for a tour, the guides could
occupy themselves taking tickets or scooping ice cream.

From his own “Customer Relations” department, Tommy appointed
staffer Larry “Hutch” Hutcherson as a sort of foreman, and hand-picked
his roaming musicians/comedians Bill Skiles and Pete Henderson to take
out the very first groups. Skiles and Henderson were quickly making a
name for themselves as the “Disneyland Doodlers,” playing dueling
pianos and in a two-man band, doing a “sounds of Disneyland”
comedy act, and participating in sketches throughout the park with Wally
Boag, Lucky the Sheriff, and others. Although Skiles and Henderson were
undisciplined, Walker wanted them as an insurance policy. Tommy wasn’t
sure how interested guests would be in park trivia or the history of a
place that was only three years old and, if anything, Skiles and Henderson
knew how to engage an audience.

The gameplan was simple: For $3.25, guests would receive a strip of five
tickets. Following their escort, guests would begin with an Omnibus trip
down Main Street, head left to the Jungle Cruise, and circle the park
clockwise, sampling one attraction in each land. Tours would end in front
of Sleeping Beauty Castle, where the guide would give each attendee a
ticket to ride another attraction on their own and a Disneyland Souvenir
Guide (a 25-cent value!).

Since there were only seven guides and management assumed the program
would only be temporary, there were no special uniforms. Most of the guides
just wore clothes from home. “At first we didn’t have costumes,”
recalled Donna Clark. “We wore whatever Costuming had. I wore a gray
skirt and my own blue blazer. Lulu [Miller, Disneyland’s one-person Wardrobe
Department] eventually got us uniforms from Pendleton’s,” which consisted
of a red blazer and blue skirts for the ladies, red blazer and blue pants
for the gentlemen.

The guinea pig guides had two weeks to test the concept. They would walk
up to small groups of tourists entering the Main Gate and offer them a
free tour of the park. The guides were given a few pages of basic facts
(“Say, did you know the Disneyland Railroad is built at five-eighths
scale?”) and were then charged with taking “the show” to
the guests. Audience reaction seemed favorable, but nothing spectacular.
Expectations remained low.

To draw attention to the new service, Skiles and Henderson wrote a “Tour Guide
Song.” In theory, every morning the tour guides would line up inside
the park’s entrance courtyard and sing the song to arriving guests. It’s
sung to the tune of “Colonel Bogey’s March” (better known as
the whistling theme from “Bridge on the River Kwai”):

With that, the tours were announced to the public and advertised as “designed
to fill the need of the winter guest who doesn’t know where to start his
trip through the Magic Kingdom.” And the first paying tours were
set for September 17, 1958—the day Guest Relations would look back
on as its very own Black Wednesday.

That first morning, just before opening, our seven recruits positioned
themselves nervously inside the Main Gate. They noticed the crowd appeared
to be a little larger than normal for a Wednesday in September. Little
did they realize that 90 percent of the day’s guests were there to try
out the new guided tours.

Within minutes of the first turnstile click, the crowd began backing
up from the tour guide office at City Hall. Immediately, a thick, slow
line formed from Town Square back out the gate and down toward West Street.

It took all of 15 minutes for Disneyland to run out of tour guides. Hurriedly,
secretaries were pulled out of their offices to give tours. Skipper John
Waite was pulled off the Jungle Cruise and given a group of wide-eyed
out-of-towners. The wives of managers Milt Albright and Bob Reilly were
suddenly appointed guides. Even Tommy Walker, Van France and Dick Nunis
were pressed into service.

“It was a big fiasco,” remembered Waite. “They wanted
groups of 15, no more than 20, but we ended up with 50 on a tour.”

Guides were equipped with clunky, battery-powered megaphones. The black
metal behemoths wouldn’t last long. “They weighed a ton, and nobody
wanted to carry them,” admitted Clark.

Little went right during those frantic first days of tours. Untrained
guides would look out at the dozens of inquisitive guests and their minds
would go blank. Others were forced to make their spiels up as they went
along.

According to Waite, “With so many tours to take, often we would
find ourselves walking backwards while talking to our group. This inevitably
ended up with some guides tripping over flowerbeds and finding themselves
flat on their backs looking up at their tour group from the flowerbed’s
point of view.”

The wildest tours were those of Skiles and Henderson. The duo was big
on having a good time and putting on a fun show, but had little interest
in educating visitors about the park. Bill and Pete would arrange to have
their tours head out one after the other, so they could play off each
other. Instead of following the predetermined route around the park, the
comedians preferred to point out the sights of Disneyland from the Hub,
while recreating the sounds of the attractions and razzing their partner
and his group.

“We only lasted about two weeks,” recalled Skiles, admitting
his tours regularly got out of hand. “People would yell back and
forth, ÔWhat’s going on?’ ‘What are they talking about?’”

That first day, guides endured about three hours of yelling, misplacing
guests, and general bedlam. Finally, they deposited their herd in front
of the castle and trudged wearily back to City Hall, desperate for a break—but
only to be sent back into the park with 50 more tourists.

During the program’s first three days, 2,355 guests would take guided
tours. Management was dumbfounded. No one had ever considered that the
program might be a success.

Instantly, the decision-makers began meeting in the “Hideout”
conference room in the back of the Red Wagon Inn to address the problems.
“The number one thing we learned,” John Waite recalled, “was
that we needed a lot more tour guides.”

Within weeks, nearly 30 more tour guides were hired and a detailed program
of training and scheduling was drawn up. By the end of the first month,
the fast-growing department would lead 804 separate tours for 18,238 guests.

For the first few years, as Disneyland worked out the kinks, guided tours
were offered only during the winter. For that, we should all be thankful.

Check Back In Two Weeks—Tuesday February 22, 2005!

Even with the primitive tour conditions, wouldn’t it be great if we could
step back in time to the 1950s and walk through the Disneyland of Day
One? In two weeks, I’ll tell you how.