Book Review: In Service To The Mouse by Jack Lindquist

IN SERVICE TO THE MOUSE

My Unexpected Journey to Becoming Disneyland’s First President

A Memoir by Jack Lindquist with Melinda J. Combs

Imagine you had the opportunity to sit with a Disney Legend and let him tell you stories about the old days. The way things really happened. Pretty much unfiltered. Imagine sitting and hearing a bunch of short stories that add up to one incredible life. The book is 240-pages and contains 62 chapters. As an ad man, he knew how to get to the point. Jack and Melinda have written a terrific book. Well worth it if you are a collector of early Disneyland stories. But it is so much more then just Disneyland as we shall see.

Jack was appointed the first President of Disneyland in 1988. However his career in the park goes way back. He was there even before the park had opened. The story of how he got his job is says a lot about his life and the forthright comments throughout the book.

He tells a touching story of the early years when a family was walking through Town Square and he overheard how there would be no Christmas presents under the tree but the visit to Disneyland more then made up for that.

He felt his greatest strength was ignorance. Since they did not know what they were doing since it had never been done before, they just experimented and sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not work.

Jack invented or inspired a number of events that we associate with Disneyland. This is the guy who thought up Date Nite, the Magic Kingdom Club, Dixieland at Disneyland and Grad Nite.

Date Nite was a way to keep people around past the original 8pm closing time in the summer. The Magic Kingdom Club provided discounts to its members and at one time had 5.5 million members. Dixieland at Disneyland brought some of the finest musicians to the banks of the Rivers of America including Louis Armstrong. The inspiration for Grad Nite came from a call from a group of PTA ladies. As Jack describes, “They called because the year before some students celebrating at a grad party in Southern California were involved in a tragic automobile accident.”

He touched on historic events such as the Yippie invasion, the 30^th Anniversary Gift Giver Extraordinaire, and the “We’re going to Disneyland/Walt Disney World” ad campaign.

During the Yippie invasion, about 150 protestors took over the fort on Tom Sawyer Island. Jack just stopped running the rafts and they were stuck there all day with no place to go.

The Gift Giver Extraordinaire contest gave away a prize to every 30^th guests with the 30,000^th person winning a car. Jack bet his career on the promotion and it drove traffic from 9.4 million to 12.5 million in year. For the famous line now utter at the end of major sporting events, it was Jack who worked hard to make it happen under impossible circumstances.

We learn about things that never seem to pop up in any other book such as the proposed Philippine and Iranian Pavilions for Epcot Center, Disney’s ownership of the Queen Mary, and how he created the Disney Dollars monetary system.

We learn the old school attitude toward park admission and prices. Boy, have things changed. For me, one story touches home. When asked where did I get this passion for Disneyland, I try and tell them about growing up in nearby Whittier. He said, “In the early days of the park, there were a lot of people, particularly women with small children from six to ten years of age who drove up in the morning during the summertime and bought general admission tickets for about $2.50 a day. We started seeing the same people doing this day after day: Buying tickets and dropping off their children.” I was one of those kids.

Jack is not shy with his opinions. He tells us why he opposed having characters in Epcot Center and still thinks it is a bad idea, why building California Adventure was a mistake, and how he would fundamentally change Main Street.

I purchased this book from the author at the MiceChat 6^th Anniversary celebration (great event) for $26.95. I did not get a discount but I did get my book signed by the authors and the current President of Disneyland, George Kalogridis. That was pretty cool.