John Catone, a native of Girard, Ohio, applied for a job at Disneyland in March 1955. On opening day, July 17, 1955, John was working on the Autopia attraction. His greatest claim to fame came when he donned a space suit and wandered through Tomorrowland to greet guests. When I interviewed John by telephone on March 13, 1985, he was the manager of communi-cation Services at Disneyland. John died on April 7, 2005. His contributions to the Disneyland story are memorialized by a window bearing his name over the Mad Hatter shop in the town square on Main Street U.S.A.
D P : I understand that when you first worked at Disneyland, you had the
privilege of being the Spaceman in Tomorrowland.
J C : Yes.
D P : That must have been quite an experience.
J C : It was.
D P : Was it pretty hot in that costume?
J C : Oh, yes. I’d stay in there about twenty-five or thirty minutes, depend-ing on the heat. That thdepend-ing weighed sixty-six pounds. It was made by Kaiser Aluminum. It was a Kaiser suit. I used to average about thirteen thousand pictures a day with children and adults.
D P : That’s really something! I imagine you were really a celebrity to kids
at that time.
J C : I was. It was quite an achievement for those kids to take a picture
with a spaceman. Of course, today it doesn’t sound like much.
D P : I was there in 1956, so I remember what it was like before all the
space adventures. How did you happen to go to work for Disneyland?
J C : Well, I heard that they were taking applications, and I came down
here in March of 1955 to put in an application. I was working in Long Beach at the time. I had been working as an assistant manager and head lifeguard of a swimming pool back east. So they called me up and I went down for an interview. After the interview, I accepted their job.
D P : Was your first assignment there with Tomorrowland?
J C : My first assignment was as a ride operator on the old Autopia
freeway.
D P : Oh, the one without a track.
J C : I worked that for one week, and then Jack Reilly, who was our area
manager, came out and asked me if I could fit into this space suit. At that time, you got somebody that fit the costume, not the costume to fit. I said, “Sure.” He said, “It’d just be a couple of hours.” It was for Life magazine. Well, I was in it for a little over two years.
D P : On opening day, were you working on Autopia?
J C : Yeah, I was working on Autopia.
D P : Do you remember anything special about that?
J C : Yeah, it was quite an ordeal for these children to come out here and
drive their own cars. And it was amazing how many movie stars we had
out here. I had Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor. They were married then, and they brought their children out. Alan Ladd was out here with his family. Dean Martin was out here. It was a lot of fun. They enjoyed driving. Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. It was really cute with their kids because they were bumping each other in the car. [Frank would]
turn around and say something to Sammy, and Sammy’d say, “Yeah, but you gotta learn how to drive.” Frank would say, “Yeah, but you bumped me.” It was a lot of fun.
D P : That was a fun Autopia, because I remember it didn’t have a track
down the middle, so you could really bang around.
J C : We had the police cars, too, then.
D P : Oh, were there?
J C : Yeah, we had one going in front of twelve cars and one behind. And
if they did something wrong, and we had to cite them, we wouldn’t give them their little driver’s license from Richfield. A little yellow license we issued out to all good drivers.
D P : Yeah, I’m sure I used to have one. It seems to me that you used to be
able to get stuck up on top of the freeway and somebody would come out from the bushes and get you started again.
J C : We had people work out in what we called Timbuktu. If somebody
got stuck or jammed in the curb or something, we’d jump on it and move the car out.
D P : When you were working there, did you have a chance to meet Walt
Disney?
J C : I saw him daily. Matter of fact, I was working on the Matterhorn—
this was after I’d come out of the space suit. I was foreman of the Mat-terhorn, and I was doing a book called Know the Ropes of the Matterhorn for the University of Disneyland. I was walking across the Tomorrow-land area and somebody pulled the two books I had—Third Man on the Mountain [1959] and Seeing the Alps [perhaps Walking in the Alps by Kev Reynolds]—that I was going through so I could get some information.
Somebody pulled the books out from under my arms, and I turned around. I had a closed fist. I thought one of the employees was joking around. Here it was Walt! “Oh, no! Don’t hit me!” Then he asked me what I was doing. I told him. Then he got the area assistant manager and he told him, “You’d better get somebody to open up the Matter-horn. John and I are going to sit here in front of [the] 20,000 Leagues [exhibit], so we can talk about the book.” We were there about forty minutes, and he told me if I needed any help who to call and so forth. I thanked him very much. But that’s the kind of a guy he was. He’d stop and talk to all the operators.
D P : After you worked in the space suit in Tomorrowland, what did you
do then?
J C : I went back to operations. I don’t know if you remember the film,
Forty Pounds of Trouble, with Tony Curtis?
D P : Yes.
J C : I was in that when I was on the Matterhorn. That was a lot of fun,
too. They really enjoyed it. As a matter of fact, that’s the first thing that they ever did out here as far as filming. That was the only one.
D P : And you’re currently working in communications?
J C : I’m the manager of Communications Services, which entails the
tele-phones, the mailroom, the main files which house contracts and so forth out of the Legal Department, the records center, the forms control area, our copy equipment, microfilm equipment, microfiche equipment, and typewriters. So it’s a complete service.
D P : How have you managed to keep your Disney spirit all these years?
J C : I think it is really knowing Walt Disney, knowing what he believed
in. When he talked to you, you knew that the man had a deep feeling for what he was doing. I think keeping that in mind, and then we have an annual Club 55 get together every year. [The club is for] all of the employees who started in 1955. Right now there are thirty active employ-ees. It’s ironic because it’s our thirtieth year—thirty of us left who are
active in Club 55. It just worked out that way. And then every five years, all the inactive retirees come in, too. I think each year when we have that, it rekindles—you know, we sit there and we talk about Walt, and we talk about the area and so forth. So, you keep that feeling—knowing the man and knowing what he believed in and then seeing what he really put together and made it work when everybody else thought it would be foolish. Those are the things that really keep me moving, knowing that Disneyland will always be here even though I’m gone.
D P : What do you think is the key or main ingredient to the success of
Disneyland?
J C : I think it’s in the one word Disney—the man himself—and I think if
you tie Disney to the word dream, I think this is what people remember.
When they come here and they find out—first of all, it’s very clean, and I think that that’s the main thing that they keep coming back [for], and I think the courtesy of the employees, knowing that they are very impor-tant people to them, they do pay their salaries—those are the things that I think have maintained the audience that we get.
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