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Charlie

About the Column

Disney Legend Charlie Ridgway's window on Main Street proclaims: "No Event Too Small". From his start in 1963 at Disneyland, through his retirement over 30 years later as Disney's Director of Press and Publicity, Charlie organized many press events, both big and small, not to mention quite a few celebrations, spectacles, and galas. Here on Disney Dispatch, Charlie will share some of his memories of Walt Disney and the original Imagineers, of movie stars and politicians, and of his day-to-day life as the man in charge of Disney's public image. Bona fide Disney history? You bet. And Charlie's style makes that history crackle and sing.

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FROM: No Event Too Small Published Wednesdays

Cast Members in Cars

On Walt Disney World's opening day, park executives hoped for crowds - but not big ones. They didn't want a repeat of the barely controlled chaos of Disneyland's opening day. An endless line of cars heading toward the park was NOT on the agenda...

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In my last column, I wrote about the efforts taken by Disney to ensure that opening day at Disney World would not bring the chaos that shadowed opening day at Disneyland.

Around 5:00 AM, several hours before the scheduled opening of Disney World, Card Walker (Disney Executive Vice President) and Dick Nunis (Disney Operations Director) went aloft in a helicopter to assess the situation firsthand. They flew toward Orlando and looked down in expectation of light highway traffic.

Instead, they saw a solid line of headlights stretching into the distance, inching its way down I-4 in the general direction of Disney World.

Walker and Nunis thought all those cars were driven by guests on their way to the park. If that were the case, we'd have our hands full, and I could just imagine how the papers would cover the story. It was the last thing we wanted on opening day!

But a moment later, Walker and Nunis noticed that most of those cars were turning off onto I-535: the wrong way!

It didn't take them long to realize that the 'solid line of headlights' represented not guests but 5000 Cast Members coming to work. (Nowadays, Disney World employs upwards of 60,000 people, but in those days, 5000 cars were more than enough to clog the roads.)

The doomsday predictions were wrong. Disney World was packed on opening day, but not to the point of disaster; in fact, we handled those crowds quite well, and we knew we'd made the right decisions.

Don't want to wait another week to read more from Charlie Ridgway? Don't blame you! I can help: first, read my review of Charlie's book, Spinning Disney's World, and then... buy it! The book brims with Charlie's well-told stories, and it spans the length of his Disney career, from Disneyland to Disney World and beyond.

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