The 55ers: The Pioneers Who Settled Disneyland

Walking through Disneyland, you will spot cast members dressed up as cowboys in Frontierland, jungle explorers in Adventureland, and small-town shopkeepers on Main Street. But, back when the park first opened in 1955, the employees were not pretending. They were true-to-life characters, hand-picked for their amazing backgrounds. Now for the first time you can get to know these fascinating personalities in a new coffee-table book from MOUSE TALES author David Koenig. THE 55ers: THE PIONEERS WHO SETTLED DISNEYLAND; will introduce you to over 700 Year-One cast members from every department, including: Disneyland s notorious first general manager, C.V. Wood, and his Texas mafia; Vesey Walker, the bristly conductor of the Disneyland Band, and the 16 often-crazy musicians who followed him; The overly serious Marshal Lucky and his never-serious-enough nemesis, the villainous Black Bart; Adorable sweeper Trinidad; K7 the Kaiser Aluminum Spaceman; Original Jungle Cruise skippers; Merlin s Magic Shop magicians; Puffin s bakers; Hobbyland model airplane flyers;Golden Horseshoe can-can dancers; Plus the very first nurses, security officers, firemen, mule wranglers, ticket sellers, newsboys, switchboard operators, TWA Rocket to the Moon hostesses, and many, many more. THE 55er; features more than 300 never-before-published images, most of them furnished by the original Disneylanders themselves. The candid photos provide peeks inside a number of long-vanished areas of the park, including the Sunny-View Jams & Jellies shop, the Plantation House chicken restaurant, and the Adventureland Bazaar. This is the most unique cast of Disney characters you will ever encounter.

Raised in the shadow of the Matterhorn, David Koenig has become the theme park industry's best-known outsider, writing six unauthorized books about the inner workings of the Mouse House. From his first book, the best-selling MOUSE TALES: A BEHIND-THE-EARS LOOK AT DISNEYLAND; (1994) to his latest, THE PEOPLE V. DISNEYLAND: HOW LAWSUITS & LAWYERS TRANSFORMED THE MAGIC (2015) and THE 55ers: THE PIONEERS WHO SETTLED DISNEYLAND (2019), he has spent more than 25 years scraping off the pixie dust to give fans an unvarnished, but always appreciative, peek inside the magic.