Goofy Golf, Panama City, June 1964

I have a pair of fun vintage slides featuring Goofy Golf in Panama City, Florida, circa 1964! This place looks like the ultimate in miniature golfing, with a level of fun and creativity that has rarely been surpassed. And hey, it's still operating today!

Check out this photo, with a massive Easter Island Moai gazing calmly into the parking lot. Notice the people on top of his head!  To our right is a ferocious dinosaur of unknown species. Goofy Golf opened in 1959, thanks to a man with a vision - Lee Koplin. 

From the Roadside America website: Lee advertised Goofy Golf as "A World of Magic." It definitely looks otherworldly, showcasing a menagerie of wildly painted, thematically discombobulated giant figures built to grab attention from passing cars. There are ancient monuments and space age icons, with a few monsters and aliens tossed in. You can crawl inside a Chinese dragon or stick your arm out the nose of a Easter Island Tiki head. All of Goofy Golf's biggest characters have colored light bulbs for eyes, and they glow at night.

More from "Roadside America": ...most of Lee's Goofy Golf artwork is interactive, challenging players to putt through or around or into them. The two 18-hole courses were built with mechanized hazards: a snapping alligator, a monkey with a ball-swatting tail, a dinosaur using another monkey as a yo-yo. Golfers have to hike through a subterranean black light cave between holes 7 and 8, skewing their vision with hot pink and green UV stalactites. What a place! I'm so glad that Goofy Golf is still around for people to enjoy after more than 60 years.

Two Leftuggies

I have a pair of nice leftuggies for you, served up hot and fresh! You have a choice of regular fries or sweet potato fries, or fresh fruit.

From August, 1959 comes this nice (and postcard-worthy?) photo of a Horse Drawn Streetcar as it headed south toward Town Square; I wonder if there was another streetcar heading north, since our streetcar is just coming out of the track split? There must be a better term than "track split", but my assistant can't come up with one. I love the look of Main Street here, still sporting its original colors, with no weird fake brick patterns to distract. Notice the signs overhead touting the latest additions to the park, I wish I had a complete set! There are also wonderful paper signs on the lamp posts, though you have to squint (and stand on your head) to see those.

This next one is dated "June 1966", and while the photographer was almost certainly trying to get a good photo of Mickey Mouse's floral portrait, we also get a swell view of the Freight Train, as well as the back half of a 1966 Pontiac GTO, possibly part of the 1966 "Spring Fling" giveaway. Looking online, a 1966 GTO in mint condition with low mileage could go for over $100,000 today, and one went for over $180,000.

 

Skipped Slidez

Notice how I spelled "Slidez" with a Z? That's how you can tell that I am hip and "with it". Jealous?? Sometimes it isn't easy being this charismatic.

So here's a slide that I did not scan long ago because it had shifted to shades of pinky-magenta (Hey! I dated Pinky Magenta in high school!). But I decided to try a bit of Photoshop magic, and LO! It turned out alright. This is a nice view of the Castle, but it's enhanced by the umbrellas, and the hu-mans. We can just see the sails of the Chicken of the Sea pirate ship, they are really billowing, the wind was a-blowin'. This slide was hand-dated "July 20, 1957", by the way.

Have you ever had a seat at a baseball stadium that was slightly behind a column? "Obstructed Views". Well, here's an obstructed view of Fantasyland, as seen from the queue of the Skyway Chalet's steps. It's not great, but not bad either. I like the yellow, blue, and white umbrellas in the foreground, and the Pirate Ship with the striped sails, but the thing I like the best is the lines of Skyway gondolas in those original '50s colors, as they diminish in size all the way to Holiday Hill - named after Sir Albert Holiday (I did it again!)

Tomorrowland Spaceman

I always enjoy any photos featuring the Tomorrowland Spaceman. If he's accompanied by his Space Gal, so much the better - but she was getting her hair done on the Moon, what are ya gonna do? Both of today's examples are scans of black and white photo prints.

This fellow obviously grew up in the microgravity of space - his bones and muscles didn't have to struggle against 1g. If he'd grown up on Jupiter (one of the floating cities), he'd only be two feet tall! This fellow seems to have stepped through a dimensional portal into an early 20th-century plaza of some kind. How strange and squirmy these tiny hu-mans are!

This particular Spaceman spent most of his life on Earth (or Urf, as he calls it), so his height falls within acceptable International Space Academy parameters. The little girl posing with him is wearing her brand-new Goofy t-shirt, which is pretty cool!

More Stuff From the Box(es)!

You saw the title, so you already know that we are going to enjoy even more STUFF FROM THE BOX! Even though I have mentioned that I have actually gone through several boxes, I kept the original title for tradition's sake. Should I change it to "Stuff From the Boxes"? 

Anyway, here's the latest box... 4" X 4", and a mere 2" deep - but I photographed 40-ish items. Because they're small, see? Meanwhile, I love to spread camphor on warm toast.

Let's start this Stuff From the Box with a goodie, this fun charm bracelet from the 1940 New York World's Fair - from the Heinz pavilion. We've got seven different cans of Heinz products, as well as a shiny green pickle charm, and a swell Trylon and Perisphere charm so that you will always remember where you got this treasure. The cans are each about 5/8" tall. Getting a good photo of this was a challenge, but I'm happy with the final results.

Who's up for some b-ball? Let's hear some chatter out there! I guess this little metal (brass plated I think) baseball bat and glove might be a keychain, but I love it for itself.

The Empire State Building was the tallest building in the world for nearly 40 years - pretty impressive. And it's a beautiful building too, not a glass box. I have a few vintage ESB items, including this neat "sweater pin" (that's what my mom calls these double pins). 1953, hey, that's 20 years A.K. (After Kong).

SO... at some point I got really into vintage employee pins from various companies and stores. I'd see them at collector's shows, in an endless variety, and they are often pretty inexpensive. They just appealed to me! As far as I know, this General Electric "News Reporter" pin is the first employee pin from my collection that I have shared, but you'll see many more. This is about 3/4" in diameter.

Next is this Tom Mix Official Straight Shooters service ribbon and medal, circa 1945 from Ralston cereal. The checkerboard fabric covers a metal bar, and the "medal" is supposed to glow in the dark, though my example does not glow at all. I think that they may have made "glowing" and "non-glowing" versions, but that's just a theory. Darn 77 year old item!

Another employee pin! This one is from RCA (Radio Corporation of America), a swell little award (this pin is just over 1/2" tall) for 1 year of safe driving. Genuine brass and enamel, it is classy as heck. I would be proud to wear it, even though I like to crash my truck into parked cars.

That's it for today's Stuff From the Box(es)! But there's more, MUCH more, to come.

Mark Twain & Stagecoach, April 1959

Here are more scans from a large lot of April 1959 slides! First up is this nice angle next to the docks for the Mark Twain and the Columbia - you can just see part of the raised ramp (to the right) that allowed guests to board the Columbia. Beyond the Mark Twain is the Plantation House, where you could not get fried possum, but you could get fried chicken. I don't understand why people have such an aversion to a whole possum, dipped in batter and deep fried, but I've learned to live with it.

Beyond the lush landscaping we can see a genuine Stagecoach trundling through the wilderness. I'm wondering if the photographer was on another Stagecoach? It could happen! Or maybe the picture was taken from the Disneyland RR. Hard to say.

Zooming in, we can see that the Stagecoach was carrying a full load of greenhorns. Hopefully the mountain lions and flying prairie dogs would pick them off one by one, leaving the folks inside the Stagecoach unharmed. On September 13th, 1959, the Rainbow Mountain Stagecoaches closed forever.

Adventureland, July 1969

Sunday. Snoozers. GO! I recently scanned a small batch of slides, about half of which were taken in Adventureland. And most of those were so blurry that they were completely unusable. The two I'm sharing today have their issues, but I figured that at least they had something worth looking at.

This first one was taken up in the Swiss Family Treehouse, our photographer took a quick (too quick) shot of his daughter (?) as she walked along the catwalks and staircases of the treehouse. I think she is about to view the "pinball room", where the Swiss Family has manufactured a dozen different pinball machines out of old ship's parts. Just because they were marooned on an island didn't mean that they forgot about fun.

You knew that we were going to see a Jungle Cruise image, didn't you? Ever since you volunteered for those experiments in college, you've sometimes had premonitions of the future! Real Stephen King stuff. "Somewhere, somebody will soon be eating a peanut butter and bologna sandwich". Is this ability a blessing, or a curse? Anyway, somebody took a photo of the Skipper, but he is almost lost in shadow. 
 

Freedomland, USA - July 1960

Welcome to Freedomland, USA - located in The Bronx, NY! It was an American history themed amusement park that debuted a month before today's photos were taken. The development of Freedomland had many ties to Disneyland - thanks to the success of the Anaheim park, lots of entrepreneurs hoped to cash in with their own parks. 

Today's slides are from stereo views, but you only get one of the frames, because 3 dimensions is one too many if you ask me. All I need is TWO, and when I'm feeling logy, one will do. 

Let's check out this first photo, showing "Little Old New York", which was supposed to represent the Big Apple circa 1850 through 1900. So... no mimes! The flags in the distance fly above the entrance to the park. Walk into R.H. Macy and get spritzed in the face with Chester A. Arthur perfume (it was called "Forgettable!"). 

If you liked Old New York, you're gonna love Old Chicago. There was a canoe ride - if there's one thing I associate with Chicago, it's canoes. They also had a Great Lakes Cruise with two steamboats. And of course everyone held hands while watching the recreation of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, one of the most-loved conflagrations of all time. But... there was no deep-dish pizza ride - only Walt Disney would have done something as brilliant as that.

Speaking of the Great Lakes, here are all of them. I've seen them on a map, and they are only about 2.5" long, so I don't know what all the fuss is about. The "Canadian" is one of the steamboats mentioned earlier (the other being the "American"), and it is puffing away in front of that little side-wheeler ("Totsie") - Freeedomland's answer to Disneyland's Keelboats, I suppose. Notice the Santa Fe Railroad passing by on that trestle bridge: The 2 ft (610 mm) narrow gauge Santa Fe Railroad traveled between the Chicago and San Francisco areas of the park. The ride was approximately six minutes in duration and consisted of a loop stretching about 1 mile (1.6 km). Two locomotives named Monson No. 3 and Monson No. 4, as well as passenger coaches and flatbeds, were leased from the Edaville Railroad in Massachusetts, and transported back to the Edaville Railroad via truck in between seasons.

Guess what? I have more Freedomland U.S.A. photos for you to come!

Magic Kingdom Parade, 1988

Today I am sharing the first of four blog posts featuring photos taken by Lou Perry during a 1988 visit to Walt Disney World. As we have seen previously, Lou loves parades! Take a look HERE and HERE to see some past examples. Of course I wanted to know the theme of this particular parade, and found that this one was called "Spirit of America". Apparently it started in 1987 and ran for approximately a year - this thing was elaborate, with many large, unique floats (though I suspect that some were repurposed from earlier parades). 

Whether he was at Disneyland or the Magic Kingdom, Lou liked to view his parades from the steps of Main Street Station. It eliminated the problem of having his views eclipsed by bouffant hairdos. This first image shows the Motorized Firetruck, with the hosts of "Good Morning Britain". Timmy Mallett is threatening the crowd with an oversized maul, while Mike Morris and Kay Burley pretend to not be embarrassed.

Next comes the marching band known as the Main Street Philharmonic, resplendent in red, white, and gold. They're followed by a float that appears to have a large graham cracker in front.

Say, that's no graham cracker! That's the U.S. Constitution. Could it be the biggest copy ever made? I'm going to say "yes", based on 0 minutes of research. These days such a thing might be printed on a giant inkjet printer (Really! They make billboards that way), but back then a squad of artisans must have painted it by hand.

Mickey and Minnie Mouse are wearing their finest colonial outfits, complete with powdered wigs. Just behind them is what must be the Liberty Bell. 

Next we have a float with a bunch of clean-cut singers in dazzling white. I watched a video of this parade to hear which patriotic song they might be singing, but it's a tune specifically composed for this event. They might have been lip-syncing the song, too.

A lighthouse brings to mind the rocky shores of Maine, perhaps. A-yuh. Unfortunately they did not play the deafening sound of a foghorn. Such a lost opportunity. Just behind the lighthouse is what I believe is a "little red schoolhouse". Let the whippings commence!

A silo brings to mind thousands of acres of rolling farmland. Those silos hold corn, wheat, oats, and all the things we need to make delicious pre-sweetened breakfast cereals. Sorry, I'm getting emotional...

If there's a silo, there's probably a barn right next to it. This is a barn that housed giraffes, a source of meat in the early days of this country's history. Say, who's that up in the hayloft?

Well I'll be! It's Clara Cluck. I'm always happy to see one of the old-time Disney characters, and Clara definitely qualifies. She debuted in 1934 in the Mickey Mouse short subject, Orphan's Benefit. Looking good, Clara!

Many thanks to Lou and Sue! Stay tuned for more "Spirit of America" in the coming weeks.

Two Beauties From May 1980

I love Main Street almost as much as I love short shorts, and that's saying something. Especially when it's "classic" Main Street! I will randomly assign "1980 and before" as "classic" because it suits my needs today. Ask me tomorrow and I will probably give you a different answer.

SO... 1980 was Disneyland's 25th Birthday. And that was 42 years ago. Look, I'm not happy about it, but you depend on me to state the facts. It's part of my journalistic integrity. 

Check out this beautiful late-afternoon photo looking north toward the castle. The Chinese Elms have gotten pretty tall, but they've obviously been given haircuts so that they don't block the view too much. (I originally mis-typed "Chinese Elmos", which is something else entirely). It's very busy for May, but gosh it looks so nice. I'll bet the air was starting to cool, and soon the lights would turn on, and the sky would continue to darken. What ride do we want to do first? It's never an easy decision.

We've walked through the castle, and into Fantasyland proper, with the Carrousel twinkling (always twinkling!). I am imagining the song "Once Upon a Dream" playing in that unique carrousel sound, smelling popcorn, watching the Skyway come and go in the distance... no wonder I loved Disneyland so much!