FROM 2007
JACK LINDQUIST
talks about Walt Disney & his favorite Disney memory

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.

I love getting together and learning everything I can from Jack, and it is my extreme pleasure to be able to share with you this interview with this wonderful person.

Scott Wolf: How involved was Walt when you were there in the early days?

Jack Lindquist: Disneyland was his baby. Nothing happened at the park that Walt didn’t approve. You know, you didn’t change the price on a pencil in the Emporium, or a t-shirt without Walt going in and approving it.

One of the first times I got the chance to work directly for him was the opening of Sleeping Beauty Castle.

SW: The walk thru?

JL: Yeah, the walk-thru and dedication and Shirley Temple was going to be a part of the ceremony and I had the chance to write the speech for Walt. So I sat down at a typewriter and said, “Okay, now what the (heck) should I say?” So I wrote something, sent it up there and I’d heard from most everybody that Walt will change everything. So I was waiting for it to come back, I never heard a thing. He came down the day of the dedication and I met him over at City Hall about an hour before the dedication, and he took the speech out of his vest pocket and said, “Who wrote this?” I thought oh boy, next thing he’ll say is, “You’re fired.” So I said, “I did.” He said, “Oh.” And didn’t say a word. Put it back in his pocket, went to the opening and he read it and didn’t change one word. So I was very pleased and proud of that.

SW: I can imagine. What are your thoughts and feelings about Walt? What kind of person was he?

JL: There’s so much that’s been said about him, so many different people, so many different words. To me, the main thing was he was a man, totally confident in his own convictions. He knew what he wanted. He knew what he liked. He was willing to gamble his reputation, his fortune, and do it. He never spent a nickel on market research. He wanted to do Disneyland. It was done exactly like he wanted. He hoped people liked it, but, that wasn’t important. He was going to do what he wanted. That’s a very special person.

In a lot of way he was a riverboat gambler. I mean, he’d roll the dice and see what happens. Snow White, same sort of thing. Who’d go to see a full length cartoon? Everybody thought he was crazy. But he believed in it. He did it. And it was that wonderful thing, what he liked the public liked even more.

SW: Do you have a favorite memory from all your years at Disney?

JL: Yeah, I have one little memory that probably stuck with me more than any other right from almost the first year. It was Christmas Eve, 1955. We closed at six and it was about five o’clock and I was walking down Main Street. You could have shot a cannon off and not hit anybody. There was nobody. There was one family walking out of the park, walking down towards the big Christmas tree in Town Square. It was a man, and his wife, and two kids, about, oh I’d say ten and eight, a boy and a girl. They were all dressed in clean clothes, but you could tell they were not real good clothes. They were wearing overalls and they were walking along, they were going past the Emporium and the little girl turns to her mother and says, “You know, Mommy? This really is better than having Santa Claus come.”

Here was a family, probably not too well off, who would take their kids to Disneyland, and probably said, "If we go to Disneyland there won’t be any toys." That really stuck with me. I thought, “Well, we are doing something good.” That was important.

More from Jack:
Before Disney and his early Disney days
Disneyland's opening day and the bad press it received
His most elaborate marketing campaigns
Also, see Jack's interviews on my sister site www.resortambassadors.com

See other interviews