Disneyland, known as The Happiest Place on Earth, celebrates its 70^th anniversary on July 17, 2025. Over the last 40 years, I have had the distinct honor of interviewing Disney cast members – and some who would become cast members – who were on hand for Disneyland’s opening. This is one in a series on that important day in Disney history.

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Charlie Ridgway, who capped his wide-ranging professional career by being named a Disney Legend in 1999, was among the thousands of overheated people in attendance for Disneyland’s opening day.

He was on assignment, covering the event for the Los Angeles Times-Mirror newspaper.

“It was hot,” Charlie remembered during an interview I had with him in 2014, “and there were way too many people in the park. And not only that, but many of the attractions kept breaking down.” The day became known as Black Sunday for a reason.

It was so chaotic that Charlie told his wife to go home. He’d stay for a few more hours, he told her, gather more material for his story, and then he’d head home, too.

But a funny thing happened: The crowd started to thin out, most of the malfunctioning rides were up and running and it started to cool off.

“I called my wife and told her to come back,” Charlie said. “When she returned, we had a ball!”

The story of how Charlie Ridgway got to cover Disneyland’s opening day – and how he became a Disney Legend – is fascinating, considering that his career had more twists and turns than the Matterhorn Mountain roller coaster.

In 1952, Charlie was a journalist with a young family when he took a huge gamble: He and his wife Gretta and their two children moved from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he worked for The Erie Dispatch newspaper, to California on the promise that there “might” be a job waiting for him.

It turned out to be a life-altering decision.

“I decided I needed to get into a bigger market,” Charlie said. “I had fallen in love with Los Angeles during (World War II), so I decided to go out to L.A. in 1952.”

But finding a job for any journalist back then was next to impossible. “I was told by a number of editors that ‘every newsman in the country wants to come out to California; there aren’t enough jobs to go around.’

“The only one who gave me any encouragement at all was the managing editor at the Los Angeles Times-Mirror, who said he couldn’t promise me a job, but he’d try to make a place for me sooner or later.”

So Charlie and his family headed West. A few weeks after arriving, fate intervened.

The Times-Mirror managing editor “called me one day and said, ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ It seems that the police reporter, a cameraman and a photographer were going to fly down to the desert to cover a train wreck and the plane crashed on takeoff. The reporter was killed.”

All of a sudden, the paper had an opening for a reporter. “I went to work as a general reporter,” he remembers. “To get me acquainted with the town, they put me in a police radio car around the Hollywood area, because that’s where all the news was happening.”

With a steady income secured, Charlie and his wife Gretta settled down, buying a house in the quiet Los Angeles suburb of Anaheim.

“It was a sleepy town of 16,000 people when we moved there,” he said. During the summer of 1954, “I used to see the construction going on in Disneyland when we’d go down to the beach. We didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it, but I knew it was going to be something very different.”

Charlie, who always had a nose for news, knew there was a story there, tucked behind the construction barricades off Harbor Boulevard, Ball Street, West Street and Katella Avenue.

“I kept trying to get my city editor to let me do a feature on Disneyland, but he kept saying, ‘Let’s wait until it’s nearly done.’

“At that time, it was kind of a business story … and most of the business writers were saying it (Disneyland) was going to be a terrible failure.”

But Charlie persisted and eventually was given the OK to write a pre-opening day feature on the park. And thanks to that two-page spread, Charlie was invited to cover Disneyland’s opening day.

Over the next few years, whenever Charlie got stuck for a story, he’d find some type of human interest feature at Disneyland. After leaving the Times-Mirror, he went to work for the Long Beach Press Telegram and continued to find great stories at Disneyland.

In 1962, when future Disney Legend Marty Sklar was transferred out of Disneyland’s publicity department to work for WED Enterprises for the all-hands-on-deck effort involved with the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, Charlie was asked to take Marty’s place.

At first, he balked at the idea of working any type of public relations job.

But “Disneyland was the one PR job I thought I would enjoy, and I was right,” he said. “And my radio and newspaper background helped me to understand what the reporters needed and how best to work with them.”

It didn’t take long before he established himself as Disneyland’s go-to publicist, dreaming up some of the most classic promotions in park history, including the swashbuckling press preview to coincide with the opening of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction.

He was so skilled at what he did that when the company was putting together a team to help get Walt Disney World in Florida up and running, Charlie was asked to relocate to another sleepy suburb with a major construction site, this time outside of Orlando.

Charlie credited his success as Disney’s preeminent press agent to his days as a journalist. Indeed, it seemed Charlie always had newspaper ink flowing through his veins.

“My background as a newspaperman and a radio man helped me in so many ways,” Charlie said.

“My father was on the staff of the Chicago Tribune as the agricultural editor. I used to travel with him when I was a kid when he’d go out during the summer picking up material for stories.”

After serving honorably during World War II, Charlie studied journalism at the University of Missouri, carrying on a family tradition: His father Frank was the first person in the nation to receive a joint degree in agriculture and journalism from Missouri. And while at Mizzou, Charlie met his future wife, Gretta Sayers.

After earning his degree in journalism, Charlie received some rather prescient advice. “My dad said newspapers are bound to be a dying breed and encouraged me to get into radio. He was pretty wise.”

Charlie began his radio career as a news announcer in a small town in Illinois. “It was the third oldest station in the country,” he said. “It began as a grain reporting station in its early years. It was a clear channel station in the middle of the dial, so at night, you could pick it up in Australia. It was heard all over.”

Although the station played country music and had an on-air talent staff of 14 musicians, Charlie was strictly the voice behind the microphone. “I was on the air with short newscasts during the morning at breakfast time,” he said. “During the afternoon, I was a disc jockey for three or four hours, and then I did the evening news at 6 at night.”

In an effort to further his career, Charlie found a radio job in Erie, Pa. “I worked for a 5,000-watt radio station there for three years, then I went to the Erie Dispatch” … his first job as a newspaperman.

That job lasted about a year before his fateful move to Los Angeles and what would become a Disney Legend-worthy career.

Charlie’s list of credits at Walt Disney World include setting up the iconic LIFE Magazine “gang” photo prior to WDW’s opening, putting together the resort’s 15^th, 20^th and 25^th anniversary celebrations and dreaming up the grand-opening celebration for EPCOT, the first time live satellite uplink technology was used.

NEXT: Jack Lindquist went from sweaty bystander on opening day to Disneyland’s first president.

Chuck Schmidt is an award-winning journalist and retired Disney cast member who has covered all things Disney since 1984 in both print and on-line. He has authored or co-authored eight books on Disney, including his latest, Marty, Mickey and Me, for Theme Park Press. He has written a regular blog for AllEars.Net, called Still Goofy About Disney, since 2015.

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