An Interview Tim O'Day
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LP: Beyond writing the text what was your contribution to the book? Did you have much to do with the design, etc?

O'Day: We had a designer in New York, he's designed many books for Disney through the years and I think he did a great job. Everybody loves the time line that’s in the book and I know that was a labor of love on his part. I wrote the captions for the photos and I had some say in choosing the photos and things like that and we tried to find photos that were graphic of all the years. I know some people said some of the pictures in the souvenir book are older pictures. Yeah, but they’re timeless Disneyland pictures. There are certain shots of the castle that were done when it still had the ivy on it. There are shots from the old Swiss Family Treehouse. There was one shot in particular that I always loved that has all the leaves of the treehouse framing the picture and through them you can see the Mark Twain right down the river, it’s a timeless Disneyland photograph. So I had a hand in picking some of those photos which was nice. We actually found some photos that had not been published before that I’m sure you noticed in there. I made sure that a couple of my favorites got in there as well. There is one photo of Walt on the wall in front of the castle with a bunch of little kids. I’ve always loved that photo. I had a little squeeze play and got that picture in. Mainly I was concerned with the text and the captions and some of the photography.

LP: What did you enjoy the most about doing the books?

O'Day: It was trying to tell the story a lot through Walt’s voice. You hear a lot that Disneyland is Walt’s Park and all of that. Walt Disney World is Walt’s park as is Tokyo and Paris as well. All the quotes that he has pertain to this one. So I was trying to find quotes that would carry the story through. If you notice every chapter more or less begins and ends with a Walt quote about Disneyland. And every section about a land gives Walt’s philosophy about that land. I think that was the most fun for me, trying to weave those quotes through the book. And the book also reads not so much like a documentary but as an actual storybook. It has a beginning, a middle and an end and that was the fun part putting the pieces together for the book and making it a cohesive story.

That’s the one comment that I got back from people that actually thrills me the most, it reads just like a story. There is a reason for that. I think some of the other books have taken the park in sections and this one does too but there is a story woven through all of it. I have to say my inspiration for this book - there are actually two books that were inspirations for this. I think the two best books done on Disneyland are any of the souvenir books done by Marty Sklar, those are the books I grew up on so I have a special affection for those. I just think that Marty’s writing and the way he did those this books was terrific. And of course The Nickel Tour I would be very remiss if I didn’t mention The Nickel Tour. The research that Dave Mumford and Bruce Gordon have done is just amazing. And in a nod to them there are no postcards in the souvenir book [chuckle].

LP: How much time was spent on the project.

O'Day: That’s the tough part. It was tough because I was so busy in my previous position with Art Classics that on top of doing the Sotheyby’s auction, the Disneyana, and the International Collectibles Expo and the Mini Convention and presentations for Disneyland, it was very time consuming to do the book. I never read the book at the office because it was all on the home computer so I couldn’t bring it with me if I wanted to… so there were many, many late nights and many, many early mornings. There was a great team at Hyperion to do a lot of the copy editing and things like that. I’m sure there were one or two sentence that didn’t come out coherently since it was done late at night or early in the morning.

But that was the toughest challenge was to find the time and the other thing that took the longest time was to research the photos because we didn’t want to use stock photos. We looked for photos. We didn’t want photos of models. We didn’t want posed models in the book. We didn’t want it to look phony and if you look close I’d say 90 percent of the photos in the book are not staged photos. They are shots of people in the park. They’re very natural looking which is what I was especially looking for. So researching the photos took a lot of time. That was probably the most time consuming part of the book, doing the photo research.

LP: Do you plan on doing more books in the future?

O'Day: There is the talk of maybe another Disneyland book. Another fun take on Disneyland. We want to do it in such a way that it’s something you haven’t seen before. It might include Disney’s California Adventure as well. Right now I’m concentrating on doing the presentations and my new position with Disney Auctions. I think that will keep me busy. The launch of Disney auctions will keep me very, very busy.