Friday, July 24, 2015

Dazzling Diamonds at Disneyland: Free Tickets!

Disneyland...7 miles from the home I grew up...employer of me, my bro and my dad...favorite place to visit no matter how many times we went...turned 60 this summer which prompted an awakening within to re-live the magic once again. 

I worked in the park in the summer of 1979, when Disney began its year-long silver anniversary celebration. I spent hours and hours at The Plaza Inn restaurant, still functioning today, and more hours in the park goofing around on my off hours. I could enter the park at anytime with my employee card so we'd go over, park in the employee lot, bug our friends who were working, go on the Matterhorn and Space Mountain, watch the fireworks and go home. Quite a good summer job for a college student. Those were the days when rides required a ticket! Employees could get great deals on ticket and admission booklets so we stockpiled them while we could. As I was sorting through my stuff recently, I came across these two fully intact ticket books. I paid $6.75 for a Disney entrance and 11 rides. Hard to imagine that that was a significant outlay of cash in those days. It was even harder for me to believe that I had two fully intact ticket booklets! After looking around on E-bay to see if they were worth much, (they were not), I called Disneyland to see if they do anything with them. Their response was incredible. Their policy is to honor any valid admission ticket no matter when it was purchased. The only catch was that the booklets had to be fully intact, which they were! So when we walked up to the gate and handed them these tickets, the supervisor was duly impressed and happily gave us two park tickets in exchange for them!
Happy girl with her free tickets in hand!
Everyone was pretty excited to see them as most of the "kids" who now work at Disney were not alive in the days of the tickets! So, we were granted free admission to the park which would've cost us $99.00 a piece! Not a bad investment back in 1979!
So the lesson here is that Disneyland tickets really do never expire! I had heard this and was thankful that I had hung onto these tickets. It was the perfect way to spend them...celebrating Disney's Diamond Celebration! Stay tuned...more blogs to come on our adventures!

2 comments:

  1. Wow. How excitting. Did u work at disney during the summer home from North Park?

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  2. I just turned 60 as well - and I already mentioned my link with the great Mouse!! What fortune that you found those two ticket book! I envy you and Doug but I am glad that you had a super experience!

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