Monorail! November 1964
First up, because I happen to know about it, Happy Birthday to our friend Andrew who turns 16 today! Ah, to be 16 again...
Today's first photo is unusual and fun, taken out in the immense parking lot. A Piper Cherokee airplane was on display - would the Disneyland Hotel have been behind us? I think I've seen boats on display in other pix from around the same era. The photographer either waited patiently for the Monorail to pass by (offering a nice juxtaposition), or he just got lucky. The couple checking the plane out think that it is just the thing they need to impress the neighbors, especially when they rev it up at 6:30 in the morning and taxi down their suburban street.
The "standard" version of the Cherokee was $8,500, which is the equivalent of around $72,000 today. The "super custom '52'" at $10,820 would cost almost $92,000. I'll take two!
It's too bad this one is so dark, because it's a neat photo as it is, but would be even better if it didn't look like some kind of armored sea monster. Love those "erector set" metal beams pierced with hexagonal holes.
29 comments:
Major-
Yes - Happy 16th to Andrew - the perfect age to own a Cherokee 'Super Custom' - which just happens to be at the DL Hotel-! The juxtaposition of the plane with the monorail only goes to reinforce the über coolness of the monorail even more. What a wonderfully-unusual image.
Thanks, Major. (Many happy returns of the day, Andrew).
Happy, happy birthday, to Andrew! And many, many more!
I'm just now noticing, for the very first time, that there is a raised round bubble just to the right of the glass dome on top of the Monorail (second pic). Is it some sort of light? A mini skylight? A panic button?
Happy Birthday, Andrew! Hope you Have a good one!
Ah! There's Melodyland Theater in the far distance. I used to walk by that theater from time to time on my way to Disneyland and think of Space Mountain. I sometimes wondered if that's where Disney got the idea for the structure of Space Mountain. Thanks, Major.
Happy Birthday, Andrew! Enjoy your special day!
I love that first photo! What a unique shot of transportation modes:
Cars
Tram
Monorail
Plane
Feet
Thanks, Major!
Plus, truck/camper ;)
A very happy birthday to Andrew, and many happy returns of the day!
The second bubble on the monorail is a set of Pop-O-Matic (TM) dice, so the conductors can shoot craps while the passengers are loading.
Lots of vroooom! in today’s pictures.
Wow, I get a mention in a post right off the bat, and the pictures are great. Then I read the comments... wow. Thanks so much, Major, Nanook, TokyoMagic, Ken, Sue, and Melissa. It really IS a great day, and I was not expecting this!
Now I'm off to fly over Disneyland in my new airplane.
That first pic shows the beginning of the infamous "Cherokee/Monorail Race." Unfortunately, the man and woman didn't know the Cherokee was about to zoom off and...well...it didn't end well.
Who else here has the sound of the Pop-O-Matic stamped into their brain for all eternity?
Happy Birthday, Andrew!
Andrew, I hope you have a fantastic birthday! Remember - while you can fly your new airplane solo over Disneyland at 16, you can't legally carry any passengers until you get your private pilot's license. The earliest you can do that is a year from today. Get your ground school out of the way and start studying.
And, uh, yeah, Major - nice pics. Really. Oh -look at the time!
Stu, who won?? (Obviously not the folks standing right there.)
Click-click
Well Happy Birthday Andrew! A great day, so live in the moment. Don't let anything slip by. When I was 16 I was just getting started doing
anything meaningful, but already hip deep in it. I admire you.
Dark though it may be, the second pic is very cool. I can't imagine what that little bubble could be. Can't really tell if it is transparent or not.
Also really liking that yellow Disneyland tractor like vehicle in the first pic. Sure would like to putt around the yard in that!
Thanks Major and carry on Andrew. You're doing just fine.
Meant 'but you're already hip deep in it' Andrew. I turn 70 in two weeks. Feeling pretty old today.
TM!, that bubble was so the Monorail navigator could shoot an azimuth with his or her sextant. Inertial navigation systems and later GPS made that capability redundant and the feature was eliminated on later Monorails. Unfortunately, the elimination of the navigator position increased the work load on the remaining crew members, who no longer had somebody they were trained to make fun of.
Stu, thanks for my mental soundtrack for the rest of the day.
Happy Birthday, Andrew! A plane!? Funny. I actually got a trip to DL for my 16th. I and a friend rode the train down, stayed in a Motel whose name I can't remember, and rode the train back to SJ.
A Cadillac El Dorado in '64 was about $6600. So, not much more for a plane?
I don't remember the trams being so utilitarian. It looks like they bought it off the lot and painted it. I guess Bob Gurr was busy with other projects. I always enjoyed the ride in from the parking lot.
Thanks, Major
zach
DrGoat, if you drive that tractor/tram around your yard, you’ll also be pulling about 40 guests behind you. ;). Your birthday’s July 24?
DrGoat, Lou calls people in their 80s - ‘youngsters’ - so you have nothing to worry about. You’re still a kid! Remember, we never grow up...we just learn how to act in public.
Sue
Sue (and Lou), thanks for the encouragement. I do feel the mileage lately, though. July 19th is the day, and you are so right. Never did grow up, but can act in public accordingly. Most of the time. As a matter of fact, I was cruising through the store last week and spotted a walking, talking Robby the robot from Forbidden Planet. It was only 20 bucks so I had to have it.
Also wanted to thank Chuck for the link to Freshbaked on Youtube (from Alice post on Tokyo's blog)
Thanks L&S. You are always a treasure.
Happy Birthday Andrew, wish you well.
Major, these are fun pics for sure. Who knew that airplane sales were promoted at the hotel. Of course, the plane was brought in by truck, but it is still unusual to see.
My Dad and his brother bought a two-seat Cessna 150 plane in the late 60's, just for fun. They both earned their licenses and flew for about 10 years. I enjoyed flying with them, but the costly avionics required to fly into larger airports and the increasing price of fuel in the 70's meant that I never went beyond ground school. Just couldn't afford it on student income and my income never caught up with the costs. Eventually, the cost of fuel and insurance brought them to sell the plane before I could ever fly it.
We flew a few times in a rented Piper 4-seater, but Dad preferred the high-wing Cessna design. The ground school and the overall experience has been a source of fun all my life. It adds an extra dimension to travel to know what's going on. I really enjoy flying and airports, even if I can't pilot.
I really like photo 2, a very rare shot of the old station. Tokyo, I have no idea what that little dome is for, thanks for pointing it out. Like Chuck, the first thing I thought of was a navigation window for taking azimuth measurements. Bombers and older planes before modern avionics had similar ones. Maybe the designers wanted "the look" even if it was difficult to get lost driving the monorail. Like the yellow revolving beacon, no real reason to have one, but it looks great.
Cheers to Dr. Goat, I know that feeling too.
Thank you Major, these pics were a lucky find.
JG
Monorail pics are always welcome. Would have been fun if they took guests up in the airplane. Looks like it might have been a light day for the parking lot - lots of room for taking off. Just be sure to duck under those high tension lines!
The original Disneyland Hotel was an interesting design with that scaffolding of beams running about. Though overall it was a more refined style of Mid-Century Modern, the holes cut into the beams are very expressive - almost Googie.
And a Happy 16th to Andrew. But remember when you take the plane up that Disneyland is restricted airspace. Otherwise you will have your wings 'clipped'. :)
Back in '62, we thought the future would have most of us commuting in planes...sort of like the Jetsons. Well that didn't work out. But the costs were reasonable compared to today. While I too had experiences in light aircraft, the financial burden eventually 'grounded' me as well. My alternative...gliders. Who needs an engine except for the tow? KS
My gosh, I’m away until 10:30, and there are 20 commments?! This is gonna take a while…
Nanook, I really thought that the plane/Monorail photo was a neat one, definitely unusual.
TokyoMagic!, hmmm, it looks like a little skylight, but why would they need a little skylight right next to the big bubble dome?
K. Martinez, funny, my friend Mr. X emailed me to say, “Notice the Melodyland Theater”! Wow, you walked all that way? I’d think you’d have sore feet before you even got in the park.
Lou and Sue, you forgot hot air balloon (just out of frame).
Melissa, Pop-O-Matic, the greatest invention since… since… well, there IS no greater invention. No more throwing those dice by hand, potentially blinding a bystander.
Andrew, take lots of pictures while you’re up there!
stu29573, it is always sobering to see a photo of somebody’s last minutes before they are beheaded by airplane wings. I definitely can hear the Pop-O-Matic!
Chuck, I could have sworn I’d seen news stories about kids much younger than Andrew who could fly a plane, but maybe that’s with an instructor.
Lou and Sue, a young Harrison Ford won that race.
DrGoat, now I’m going to have to go look at similar photos - and I do have a few similar photos that aren’t so dark. Maybe a little more light will help. It could just be a running light… And yes, we get to see the nose of one of the old tram tractors. I think they were known colloquially as “mules”.
DrGoat, the meaning was clear! Hey, 70 isn’t so old (I’ll be there all too soon).
Chuck, shooting azimuths is now outlawed due to overhunting. Navigation on a Monorail reminds me of when I took my mom to a train museum and we walked up some steps to see where the engineer sat. “Where’s the steering wheel?” she asked.
zach, jeez, I never got to go to Disneyland on my birthday! And if my mom had thought about it for two seconds, she would have had the perfect birthday present! Wow, amazing that you could buy a plane for just a bit more than a fancy car. Of course now you can buy a really fancy car for over a million dollars so… yeah.
Lou and Sue, wow, you have big birthday parties!
Lou and Sue, when my grandma was in her 90s, she had more energy than my neighbor, who was decades younger. I think a lot of it was her outlook on things.
DrGoat, I can think of no finer birthday present (even if you buy it for yourself) than a walking, talking Robby the Robot! 20 bucks? Take my money!
JG, maybe there was a Piper convention being held at the Disneyland Hotel? I’m OK with the plane being brought in by truck. If you own it, it was in a truck at some point! A friend of a friend got his pilot’s license, and has offered to fly my friend anywhere he wants, now he just has to come up with a cool place. He’s thinking of Catalina island. I would have suggested Disneyland, but it’s not his thing. That’s OK, I like him anyway. I’ve never been in a plane that small; once in Alaska we took a fairly small plane to Denali, but it was a good deal larger than the Piper in the photo, and I thought that was a freaky experience. Bob Gurr is a pilot (I know he flies gliders, at least), maybe he really did mean to put in a “navigation window”?
Omnispace, oh man, that would have been awesome. One of my dreams is to go back in time (1964 would be just fine) and get a good aerial look at the park. Armed with a camera and tons of Kodachrome slide film, of course. How much fuel do we have? I do think of those pierced beams as being “Googie”, not sure what the experts would say.
KS, just let Andrew know that he has to turn on his cloaking device. Those are real. The idea of everyone flying where they want to go is fun, but can you imagine the skies full of thousands of vehicles if people fly the way they drive? It would be pandemonium!
Major, your comment about driving the plane down the street reminds me, there is a subdivision in Fresno called Sierra Skypark where you can do just that.
The subdivision has it's own airstrip and all the streets are extra wide to allow planes to taxi. The house lots are big enough to have both hangars and garages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Sky_Park_Airport
Never flew in here, but saw it flying over on the way somewhere else.
JG
DrGoat, my pleasure! Credit also goes to Sue for turning me onto another video by the same guy that led me to that one.
JG, there used to be a subdivision like that in suburban Omaha (I want to say maybe in Papillion?). The name escapes me, but when it was built, the houses all had built-in hangars under the main structure, like an extra big second garage that faced the back of the house, where the taxiway and runway were. When they closed the airfield in the mid 2000s, there were only one or two homeowners who were actually hangaring airplanes at their homes anymore.
Like you, I never got past ground school. Just not enough money, and my eyesight wasn't good enough based on the standards in place at the time for the Air Force to pay the tab. Ironically, they changed the standards a few years later, right after I was too old to qualify; while I was happy for them, it was still kind of hard to watch some of my ROTC students get selected for pilot training with worse eyesight and aptitude test scores than I had at their age (and at least two of them ended up washing out of training). But it is fun to understand what's happening in the background when I fly, and it was critical to be able to communicate effectively with aircrew during my Combat Camera days.
Chuck, I feel for you. I also had high aptitude and bad eyesight. I could qualify for civil private aviation with glasses, but nothing more. I scored pretty high with the Air Force on other things, but ultimately did not enlist or serve in other branches.
I can't imagine having a hangar in my house. We kept the plane under cover at the airport, but not in enclosed hangar, just a roof.
We visited Edwards AFB with the Scouts, a primo facility. I discovered I sure like the smell of an Air Force Hangar, it's like a high-end auto garage, cleaning fluid, petroleum, hydraulic fluid, rubber, all those good man-cave odors. The NASA hangars are like operating rooms, white floors, white walls, just super-high-end everything. I think I would have liked the Air Force, maybe it was a bad decision skipping it.
JG
JG, I was aware that there were communities that were centered around the concept that everyone had an airplane. So crazy! Do they have any sort of air traffic control? Or do people just go when and where they want to go?
Chuck, my brother is into bass fishing and watches tons of YouTubers who travel all over and share their adventures. There are communities in Florida with big houses built right on the water, with large “garages” that they can drive their boats right into. As for the homes in Omaha with the hangers, I guess you can turn those into the world’s largest dens. Get a real big home theater! Flying an airplane sounds like fun, but I’ll bet there’s way more to it than I imagine. Whenever I see video footage of a plane landing in with a stiff crosswind, I think, “No thank you”. I’ll let smarter, more skilled people fly the planes.
JG, I don’t know about flying a plane, but my dad knew guys who had serviced Navy aircraft, and then went on to make huge money maintaining civilian aircraft after they left the military. I always thought that would be a good way to go! Not that I have any mechanical aptitude either…
Major, as far as I know, Sierra Skypark was General aviation, Visual Flight Rules. You would announce your tail number and plane type "Cessna 65 Tango"; intentions; "southeast approach for downwind leg" and acknowledge latest weather "we have report "india" on the "unicom" radio channel frequency for the airport, check visual and take off or land when clear. There is no tower ATC for these little po-dunk airstrips. You change your radio channel to match the frequency for the airport you are heading for, so you can hear the local traffic and just listen to what's going on. Pattern altitudes are pre-set, so you know how high to fly, etc. I used to know the range of those settings, but all forgotten now.
That's why it was easier to fly out in the country, there were lots of little civil aviation airports like Merced, Hanford, Tulare, Kettleman City, Porterville. We could fly out for an hour, land and get a burger and fly home without much to-do. It was all very informal, and pilots are very careful, not like drivers today. But the rules changed to require transponders and more complex costly radios etc. It stopped being as much fun. There are old pilots, and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots.
One of my Eagle Scouts joined the Army and specialized in helicopter repair. After his tour, he works for an oil platform company, keeping their helos flying. He makes major bank, but as you say, he has the aptitude for the machines.
JG
Thanks for the wishes, Stu, Chuck, Zach, and JG!
DrGoat, thank you! Getting to know everyone makes this meaningful, and I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
KS, I really enjoyed seeing DL from the air. Now maybe one day I’ll get to see it from the ground…
Getting to know everyone makes this meaningful, and I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
Andrew, don't worry, we're not going anywhere for a looooong time...we aren't that old! ;)
Do you have a new trip date for Disneyland, or is your family waiting to see what happens?? Just curious, as I'm just waiting til next year to plan anything.
Thanks, Sue! Like you, my family is waiting to see when we'll be able to go to Disneyland. We're hoping for next summer!
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