Includes bibliographical references and index.

Sunday, July 17, 1955, 4 a.m
How I got to Disneyland
A horrible name for a mouse
The Railroad Fair
The Lilly Belle
World's Fairs, Coney Island, and the decline of the amusement park
Dwarf Land
Getting started
Buzz and Woody
Orange County
Buying on the sly
Roy
Like nothing else in the world
The almost broadcasting company
Selling the idea
Imagineering
The Admiral
The instant jungle
Arrow
Harriet and the model shop
Real trains
King of the wild frontier
The struggle for sponsors
Van Arsdale France founds a school
The Pony Farm
Demands of the Jungle Cruise
Milking the elephant
Autopia
The Moonliner
Through the castle gate
The perfectionist at work
Ruth's role
Union troubles
"We're not going to make it"
Tempus fugit
Dateline: Disneyland
Dateline behind the cameras: Black Sunday
Damage control
Something worthwhile
Plussing
The mountain and the monorail
Disneyland '59
"Do you have rocket-launching pads there?"
Suing God in heaven
A perfect fascist regime
The greatest piece of urban design
The first goodbye
Beautiful?

"By the early 1950s Walt Disney's great achievements in animation were behind him, and he was increasingly bored by the two-dimensional film medium. He wanted to work in three, to build an entirely new sort of amusement park, one that relied more on cinematic techniques than on thrill rides, one from which all tawdriness had been purged. He achieved it, but just barely: he ran out of money, had to borrow against his life insurance, fell out with his studio, frightened his family, and endured much ridicule. What he built was far more influential than is generally understood-for one thing, Disneyland's Main Street sparked an architectural preservation movement that touched every American downtown-and remains controversial: many see it as a retreat from life itself. What is beyond argument is that Disneyland was something new, both in public entertainment, and in the way its "lands" managed to chime with how millions of Americans wanted to view their country-six hundred million Americans so far, and they just keep on coming. It reflects the park's uniqueness, but just as strongly that of the man who built it with a watchmaker's precision, an artist's conviction, and the desperate, high-hearted recklessness of a riverboat gambler"-- Provided by publisher.