July 17 · This Day in America
On 160 acres of plowed-under orange trees, Walt Disney opens a place that should not work. Opening day is chaos: counterfeit tickets, a hundred-degree heat wave, fresh asphalt soft enough to swallow women's heels, a plumbers' strike that leaves the fountains dry. Insiders will call it Black Sunday. None of it matters. Tens of millions watch the live broadcast, and Disney stands at the flagpole and reads the dedication aloud: "To all who come to this happy place, welcome." He had bet everything, mortgaged his life insurance, to build a park where the streets curved you toward wonder instead of the exit. The country had never seen anything like it and could not stop coming. By month's end it draws twenty thousand a day. A man had imagined a better afternoon and then, stubbornly, built it.
Source: www.pbs.org
Also on this day · 1944
At a California naval magazine, munitions being loaded for the Pacific detonate in a blast felt for miles. Three hundred and twenty men die instantly, two-thirds of them Black sailors assigned the dangerous loading work under white officers. Weeks later, hundreds refuse to return to the same conditions. Fifty are convicted of mutiny. Their stand helped force the Navy to begin desegregating its ranks.
Source: www.nps.gov
“To all who come to this happy place: welcome. Disneyland is your land.”Walt Disney, 1955