Chapter 2

Looking for a Summer Job

Our family had moved to Southern California only a short time earlier.

In 1969, I had been hired as a special education teacher in a junior high school, and I later moved into teaching high school students with learning disabilities. I enjoyed teaching, but we were a young family, we were expecting our second son, and I decided some additional income would be helpful.

One advantage of being a teacher was that my summers were largely free. Disneyland, on the other hand, was entering its busiest season just about the time school let out. My wife had worked at Disneyland in Food Service before we were married, so the idea of working there wasn’t entirely foreign to us. I decided to see whether Disneyland might have something available for me during the summer.

I didn’t have any particular Disneyland job in mind. I wasn’t one of those people who had dreamed for years about working on a particular attraction, and it certainly had never occurred to me that I might become a Disneyland Security Officer. I filled out an application, went in for an interview and was quite willing to hear what they had available.

During the interview, the person I was talking with mentioned something that surprised me. Security liked hiring teachers.

As it was explained to me, teachers tended to be a little older than many of the young people applying for seasonal work, and we were accustomed to dealing with people and handling situations that could sometimes become complicated. Looking back, that makes considerable sense. Anyone who has spent much time teaching junior high school students has already had at least a little experience with crowd control, conflict resolution and people who don’t necessarily follow instructions the first time.

I told the interviewer that Security sounded interesting, so I was sent over to talk with them. They hired me almost on the spot.

It was only after I began working that I realized how many teachers there were in Disneyland Security. The department apparently considered us a pretty good source of part-time and seasonal officers. Our schedules also fit Disneyland rather well. When schools were out for summer, Christmas or spring vacation, Disneyland was often at its busiest and needed additional people.

Even Ike Isaacson, who would later become the Manager of Disneyland Security, came from a teaching background. At the time, of course, I knew none of that. I was simply pleased that I had found a summer job.

Learning Disneyland From the Other Side

My trainer that first weekend was Ron Pogue. Ron spent Saturday and Sunday taking a group of us through Disneyland, both onstage and backstage, teaching us the basic Security procedures and showing us a Park we had previously known only as guests. I had no way of knowing it then, but Ron was beginning a remarkable Disney career of his own. He would eventually move into Disneyland Operations management, become Manager of Fantasyland, join the Tokyo Disneyland project in 1979, and ultimately serve as a vice president of Disneyland International and Walt Disney Attractions Japan. He retired in 2000 after a 34-year Disney career.

The training involved much more than learning rules. We walked Disneyland.

We learned both onstage and backstage areas, along with the basic Security procedures we would need on the job. For a new employee, it was quite an introduction. I had been to Disneyland as a guest, but now I was beginning to see the working Park behind the one the guests saw.

There were Cast Member entrances, backstage passageways, service areas and routes that a guest would have no reason even to know existed. There were ways to get from one part of Disneyland to another without walking through the guest areas. There were doors and gates that had always simply blended into the background when I visited as a guest but now had a purpose I needed to understand.

That was one of the first things I discovered about working Security at Disneyland: you had to know the Park.

Guests were going to ask questions, and they expected you to know the answers. More importantly, when something happened, you needed to know where you were and how to get where you were needed. Disneyland looks fairly simple on a souvenir map. It becomes considerably more complicated when you begin learning what is behind the buildings, beneath some of the attractions and on the other side of those gates marked for Cast Members only.

Ron was helping us learn a Disneyland that most guests never knew existed.

Casual-Seasonal

Like most new Security Officers hired for the busy season, I came in as a Casual-Seasonal Officer. That designation described the job pretty accurately. Disneyland wasn’t promising me year-round employment. I was there primarily because the Park needed additional help when attendance was high.

That meant summer, but it also fit surprisingly well with a schoolteacher’s calendar. After summer ended and I returned to the classroom, Disneyland could still use me during Thanksgiving, the two weeks around Christmas and spring vacation. Those were exactly the times I wasn’t teaching and Disneyland was crowded.

My starting wage was $2.12 an hour. That doesn’t sound like much more than pocket change today, but in 1970 it seemed reasonably good for the part-time work I was looking for. Some of the other prices around Disneyland make the difference in time even more obvious. At the Cast Member cafeteria called the Inn Between, I remember being able to buy a full dinner for about twenty-five cents and add a drink for another dime. The food was served cafeteria-style and, as I remember it, was generally pretty good.

So there I was: a 27-year-old schoolteacher with a growing family, earning $2.12 an hour as a Casual-Seasonal Disneyland Security Officer and eating a thirty-five-cent dinner at the Inn Between.

I had gone to Disneyland looking for some extra summer income. I had no idea what adventures lay ahead.