Disneyland Hotel Workers Fired for Not Shaving Mustaches

One expects to find fantasy in Disneyland, but outside the gates is the real world. From a hotel I look for pleasant, efficient service, and comfortable accommodations (including sufficient lighting); personnel should be clean and neat and it might be that outlandish costumes, makeup, and/or hair styles might not be advisable. Disneyland people go too far--the requirements should end with “clean and neat”--or perhaps Disney directors don’t remember how to cope with the real world.

Someone describes the policy as being outdated and another says, “They’re stuck in the past;” it’s hard to figure where, though. Beards and mustaches have been worn throughout the ages. Christ is usually depicted with an unacceptable beard and long hair. Others who wouldn’t be hired according to that policy to name a very few, are Ben Franklin, Henry VIII and other royal Henrys, Shakespeare, Myles Standish, Buffalo Bill Cody, Charles and Henry Dana, R.L. Stevenson, Bret Harte, M.L. King Jr., U.S. Grant, Einstein, Victor Herbert, Lincoln, Judge Robert Bork, my father, whom I don’t remember without a mustache (I’m over 60), and probably a good number of my ancestors who helped settle this land. But then, the latter would have had no truck with Disneyland anyway--they would have looked on such falderal as sinful--the work of the devil. Something seems to be at work to come up with such ridiculous rules.

LOUISE ARNOLD

LaJolla