Secrets Revealed

Over the years of putting out the “E” Ticket, Leon and Jack Janzen have learned many Disneyland facts and secrets, including these:

* Besides a growling snow beast, the Matterhorn also hides in its peak a basketball half-court for Disney “cast members,” as the employees are called at Disneyland. Seriously. “I played hoops in it,” says Leon Janzen.

* The turn-of-the-century buildings lining Main Street U.S.A. are hollow and connected over their first-floor shops and eateries, and that connection forms a continuous corridor, through which cast members may travel from one end of the street to the other.

* During the park’s early years, children could rent bamboo poles and fish off landings at Tom Sawyer’s Island. Waters were stocked with fish kept in place by underwater netting.

* Engine cars of the Disneyland Railroad are named for executives of the Santa Fe Railroad, an early park sponsor. The trains are the E.P. Ripley, the C.K. Holliday, the Fred Gurley and the Ernest S. Marsh.

* The dark water that flows through the Jungle Cruise, the Rivers of America and the moat of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle is all part of an interconnected network that travels downhill and is recirculated via a pump at Tom Sawyer’s Island.

* According to current Disney lore, the burning cabin on Tom Sawyer’s Island was ignited by a careless settler. “Hostile Indians” were originally blamed for the blaze, and a later revisionist account pinned it on a moonshiner turf war.

* Although now synonymous with something wild and wonderful, the E ticket did not exist when the park opened. Tickets went as high as D until 1959, when more elaborate rides like the Submarine Voyage, the Monorail and the Matterhorn opened.