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By Root 1343 0

their clothes at drive-in dry cleaners. My father wouldn’t have anything to do with any of this. He thought it was somehow unseemly. He wouldn’t eat in any restaurant that didn’t have booths and a place mat at each setting. (Nor, come to that, would he eat in any place that had anything better than booths and place mats.) So my drive-in experiences came when I went out with Ricky Ramone, who didn’t have a dad but whose mom had a red Pontiac Star Chief convertible and who loved driving fast with the top down and the music way up and going to the A&W drive-in out by the state fairgrounds on the east side of town, and so I loved her. I’m sure Ricky was conceived in a car, probably between bites at an A&W.

By the end of the decade, America had almost seventy-four million cars on its roads, nearly double the number of ten years earlier. Los Angeles had more cars than Asia, and General Motors was a bigger economic entity than Belgium, and more exciting, too.

TV and cars went together perfectly. TV showed you a world of exciting things—atomic bombs in Las Vegas; babes on water skis in Cypress Gardens, Florida; Thanksgiving Day parades in New York City—and cars made it possible to get there.

No one understood this better than Walt Disney. When he opened Disneyland on sixty acres of land near the nowhere town of Anaheim, twenty-three miles south of Los Angeles, in 1955, people thought he was out of his mind. Amusement parks were dying in America in the 1950s. They were a refuge of poor people, immigrants, sailors on shore leave, and other people of low tone and light pockets. But Disneyland was of course different from the start. First, there was no way to reach it by any form of public transportation, so people of modest means couldn’t get there.*7 And if they did somehow contrive to reach the gates, they couldn’t afford to get in anyway.

But Disney’s masterstroke was to exploit television for all that it was worth. A year before the park even opened, Disney launched a television series that was essentially a weekly hour-long commercial for Disney enterprises. The program was actually called Disneyland for its first four years and many of the programs in the series, including the very first, were devoted to celebrating and drumming up interest in that paradise of fantasy and excitement that was swiftly rising from the orange groves at the smoggy end of California.

By the time the park opened, people couldn’t wait to get there. Within two years it was attracting 4.5 million visitors a year. The average customer, according to Time magazine, spent $4.90 on a day out at Disneyland—$2.72 for rides and admission, $2 for food, and 18 cents for souvenirs. That seems pretty reasonable to me now—it is awfully hard to believe it wasn’t reasonable then—but evidently these were shocking prices. The biggest complaint of Disney customers in the park’s first two years, Time reported, was the cost.

From our neighborhood you only went to Disneyland if your father was a brain surgeon or an orthodontist. For everyone else, it was too far and too expensive. It was entirely out of the question in our case. My father was a fiend for piling us all in the car and going to distant places, but only if the trips were cheap, educational, and celebrated some forgotten aspect of America’s glorious past, generally involving slaughter, uncommon hardship, or the delivery of mail at a gallop. Riding in spinning teacups at 15 cents a pop didn’t fit into any of that.

The low point of the year in our house came every midwinter when my father retired to his room and vanished into a giant heap of road maps, guidebooks, musty volumes of American history, and brochures from communities surprised and grateful for his interest, to select the destination for our next summer vacation.

“Well, everybody,” he would announce when he emerged after perhaps two evenings’ study, “this year I think we’ll tour battlefields of the little-known War of the Filipino Houseboys.” He would fix us with a look that invited cries of rapturous approval.

“Oh, I’ve never heard of that,”