And Then There Was One

Ray Van De Warker and Bob Penfield had just graduated from Anaheim High School and were out looking for summer jobs when they drove by a sign that said Disneyland was hiring. It was June 1955.

The two 18-year-old former high school football teammates drove up to the old Anaheim farmhouse serving as Disneyland’s personnel office and applied for jobs as ride operators. Across the street, an army of workers was scrambling to complete Walt Disney’s dream park in time for its grand opening, less than four weeks away.

Van De Warker and Penfield were hired on the spot.

“We were just looking for something part time because we were going to go to college,” Van De Warker recalled. “We ended up going to work and never leaving.”

Van De Warker and Penfield were among the approximately 600 workers hired for Disneyland’s maiden summer season.

They are the only two original employees still working at Disneyland. And when Van De Warker begins retirement at the end of his shift today, after 41 years, there will be only one left, his old friend Penfield.

“He’ll be the last one, the last of the Mohicans,” said Van De Warker, 60, who says he’s receiving an attractive retirement package from Disneyland and is ready to retire.

“I feel good about leaving, I really do,” he said, sounding as upbeat as old Mickey himself. “But I’m going to miss the place, there’s no doubt. When you go to work at the same job for 41 years, it becomes a part of your life. You don’t just turn and walk away from a part of your life that easy.”

Van De Warker is manager of key control in the security division. (Disneyland, which now requires a 12,000-member peak season work force, has at least 1,500 doors “and for every door you’ve got 10 keys at least,” he said.)

But that’s only Van De Warker’s most recent title.

As he said, he’s “worked in just about everything there is to do here at Disneyland.” He’s been in attractions, merchandise, food and security. He also supervised the behind-the-scenes pony farm where all the park’s horses are boarded, managed the Disneyland-owned Heidi Motel on Katella Avenue and managed Disneyland’s since-demolished Gulf gasoline station at Katella and West Street.

“I was even Santa Claus one year for the employees’ Christmas party,” said Van De Warker, who was dubbed “Catfish Jones” by a fellow keel boat operator when they raced their boats for a segment of “The Mickey Mouse Club” filmed at the park.

The nickname stuck, he said, though only old-timers know him as Catfish Jones.

During his decades as a Disneyland cast member--as employees are called--Van De Warker says he never considered working anywhere else.

He and Penfield are members of Disneyland’s exclusive Club 55, whose membership is open only to employees who have been working at the park since it opened on July 17, 1955. About 130 original employees were still working at Disneyland in the early ‘70s when the club was formed. Although Van De Warker and Penfield are the last two members at Disneyland, it has three other members--all at Walt Disney World in Florida.

“The company’s been really good to us over the years,” Van De Warker said. “It’s a fun place to work. There’s always something different going on.”

It was that way from the start.

Both he and Penfield started as ride operators on the carousel in Fantasyland, working six days a week at $1.55 an hour.

When they started work four days before the park opened with a star-studded, invitation-only extravaganza that was broadcast live by ABC-TV, Main Street hadn’t even been paved. In the days leading up to the opening, he said, “this place looked like an ant farm. There were workmen everywhere.”

The night before the grand opening, Van De Warker and other Fantasyland ride operators were still being trained on the Snow White and Peter Pan rides.

“We literally spent the night at Disneyland,” he said. “I remember going inside the Peter Pan attraction at one point to grab a few hours’ sleep, and the Chicken of the Sea pirate ship wasn’t even painted. When I came out two or three hours later the whole thing was painted.”

Van De Warker remembers that when Fantasyland was unveiled on opening day, the drawbridge of Sleeping Beauty Castle was lowered and several thousand schoolchildren stormed through.

“It’s probably the one and only time the castle drawbridge has been up,” he said, recalling that the carousel had to be shut down several times that day: There was only one strand of chain around the ride, and kids would duck under it and jump on while the carousel was moving.

Both Van De Warker and Penfield were captured briefly on camera riding with the carousel’s first load of passengers.

But they share a more enduring claim to fame at the Magic Kingdom.

Van De Warker was foreman of the Indian canoe ride in Frontierland in the early ‘60s when a Samoan outrigger canoe racing team boarded his canoe. “As we left the dock I swear you could see light under the canoe they were so strong,” he recalled. “We passed the Mark Twain, which was illegal; you weren’t supposed to do it, but there was no way to slow them down.”

Word spread through the park about the Samoans’ phenomenal speed. Suddenly there was interest in seeing just how fast those canoes could go.

Penfield, foreman of the Jungle Cruise at the time, challenged Van De Warker and the Navajo Indians who worked on the canoes to a race. (Van De Warker said Disney insisted that American Indians work on the canoes and went to a Navajo reservation to do his hiring. But “the Navajo are from the desert,” he said. “None had the slightest idea how to paddle or steer a canoe” when they arrived.)

Penfield and his Jungle Cruise workers came down to the Rivers of America in Frontierland before the park opened one morning and, said Van De Warker, “we had ‘The Big Canoe Race.’ Of course, the Indians won because we had paddled the canoes every day.”

Thus was born Disneyland’s now officially sanctioned annual employee canoe race.

Throughout his early years at Disneyland, Van De Warker had several encounters with Walt Disney, including one in the late ‘50s that, he said, “I really cherish and remember well.”

He was foreman of the Jungle Cruise ride. Early one morning before the park opened, he was getting ready to take a “dead-head run” on the river--the first trip of the day to make sure the animated animals were working properly.

“As I got ready to leave the dock that morning, Walt walked up and stepped aboard my boat and asked if he could go with me. I said, ‘Sure, Walt, it’s your boat.’ As we left the dock, I turned to him and said, ‘Walt, can you explain to me a little bit about the Jungle Cruise?’ ”

A ride that normally took eight minutes wound up being at least 40 minutes long as Disney explained in detail what had inspired him to create the Jungle Cruise and what he planned for it in the future.

Van De Warker still marvels at the memory: “It was just a one-on-one with Walt Disney. Just him and I. He was a very cordial, easy man to talk to.”

And, as another encounter proved, Disney also had a sense of humor.

“One time, I was working the canoes, and Walt came down with his granddaughters,” he recalled. “As we left the dock, someone in another canoe said, ‘Let’s race!’ We got back into dock, and Walt is soaking wet. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, boy, am I in trouble.’ But he got out of the boat with a smile from here to here: We had won the race, and he was just tickled.”

Van De Warker and Lois, his wife of 38 years, plan to move from Anaheim to Logan, Utah, where they’re building a house, which will include a woodworking workshop for Van De Warker.

Tonight Disneyland is throwing him a private party at the Disneyland Hotel with more than 100 of his friends and co-workers. On Tuesday, the Adventureland restaurant Aladdin’s Oasis will be closed to the public for a party in his honor for all employees who want to drop by and say goodbye.

So how does Penfield, now construction manager in the facilities division, feel about becoming the last original employee still working at Disneyland?

He laughed.

“More interviews,” he said, explaining that any time anyone wants to know what it was like in the old days, they call either him or Van De Warker. Now, he said, “I won’t have Ray to correct me on all these stories. I told him to stick by the phone and answer all the trivia questions I can’t remember.”

As for his own retirement, the 59-year-old Penfield said, “I’ll put in at least another six years. Who knows?”

But retirement was the last thing on Van De Warker’s and Penfield’s minds earlier this week as they met up for a nostalgic stroll through park. Like any friends who have known each other so long, they joked and bantered good-naturedly. And as they walked down Main Street and into Frontierland, one memory sparked another.

They remembered how slow it was at Disneyland the first few winters after the park opened and how, late in the day, ride operators in Fantasyland could go 30 minutes without seeing a single guest.

To kill time, Van De Warker said, the bored ride operators would use the carousel as a roulette wheel: They’d place coins on the ground around the carousel, and, wherever a paper marker stopped, the lucky winner scooped up his winnings.

And, Penfield recalled, there were times--before the teacups ride had brakes and clutches that prevent the cups from going too fast--that the ride operators would see who could spin the fastest and longest before getting sick.

Then there were the footraces the ride operators would have through the Snow White ride. With a stopwatch running, they’d race through the entrance and out the exit--first with the lights on, then with only the black lights on and then in complete darkness.

“Bob still holds the record,” Van De Warker said. “The problem is, he knocked down two scenes to do it. What’d you do that in, 10 seconds?”

“Oh, less than that,” Penfield said.

So who’s to argue?