FROM 2007
JACK LINDQUIST
talks about Disneyland's opening day
and the bad press it received

by Scott Wolf

Jack worked at Disneyland from the first year it opened, initially in advertising. Later he was the Vice President of Marketing for Walt Disney Attractions, and ultimately became the President of Disneyland. I don't think it's using the term loosely to say Jack is a marketing genius.

To say it was an absolute treat for me to be able to interview him about his career with Disney would be a gross understatement. It is my extreme pleasure to be able to share with you this interview with this wonderful person.

Scott Wolf: Were you at Disneyland on opening day?

Jack Lindquist: I was there on opening day but as a guest. I was a guest of Kelvinator. (At the time, this future Disneyland President was working for an ad agency and Kelvinator was one of his clients.)

SW: What did you think of opening day? I always hear stories.

JL: It was a debacle.

SW: It was.

JL: It was. It was so overcrowded, and it was I think 105. I don’t know, but very very hot. But traffic wasn’t a problem, they had a great system of directing traffic. It came right into the parking lot, and then everything came to a halt. You had tickets that said enter at 1pm. Well, the people that had tickets that said 8am, 9am, 10am weren’t leaving. They were just adding more people going in, nobody was coming out.

SW: So they were only going to allow people in for a certain amount of time?

JL: They didn’t say if you came in at 8:00 you should be out by 12:00. They just thought people will come in, they’ll do a couple hours and leave. They didn’t. It was a madhouse. It was a mess. I had my five year old son, and after about an hour he got on one attraction. The Canal Boats. And so the canal boats take off and you wait there… forty five minutes later it got back being hauled by about a half a dozen guys with big rubber boots and my son on it.

It broke down. And there was no food. You stood in line for a half hour to get a coke. There was no drinking fountains ‘cause Walt had that decision to make about two weeks before Disneyland opened. There was a plumbers strike, so it was either bathrooms or water fountains, and he went for bathrooms, which was smart, but so there was one drinking fountain in the whole park. So it was awful.

All of us in marketing, the advertising department, the publicity department, we were all under a group called Public Relations. Eddie Meck was the first publicity manager for Disneyland and he was an unbelievable person. He was an old Hollywood publicist, had worked for RKO and Twentieth Century Fox and went to work for Disneyland. I knew Eddie Meck since I was probably ten years old. My dad was a purchasing agent out at RKO. Eddie Meck at the time was manager of the RKO Hill Street in downtown L.A. so we could go down to the Hill Street theatre, ask for Eddie Meck, he’d let us see the movies free. So I knew him, a wonderful man and a perfect person for Disney.

Now all the press that was there opening day wrote these horrible articles about how terrible and how awful this new thing was that Walt Disney had built. You know, what a debacle it was. Eddie Meck got all those people over the next eighteen months or two years to come back and see the park like it should be on a normal day, and he turned that whole thing around.

More from Jack:
Before Disney and his early Disney days
Walt Disney and his favorite Disney memory
His most elaborate marketing campaigns
Also, see Jack's interviews on my sister site www.resortambassadors.com

See other interviews

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in the interviews are solely those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mouse Clubhouse. Mouse Clubhouse accepts no legal liability or responsibility for any claims made or opinions expressed within.