The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 426

Anaheim: Home Survival of Disneyland and BY ART SEIDENBAUM 'busses Into flaming pits to be melted down into pig iron and slag." In the center of his frame, Bradbury sticks some scientists busy testing the cancerous effects of smog upon little animals. In other parts of the canvas, he slaps on 300 new busses, all belching fumes in our basin. And he. overpaints with burnt umber; color the whole polluted. Bradbury, the usually far-sighted author, then takes a hard, angry look backward, to a time 17 years ago when Los Angeles had transit and tranquil skies and the noise from the population explosion had not yet shell-shocked local leadership.

What went wrong, he claims, was that we wrecked our public arteries in the middle of our growing pains. We stopped dead with automobiles. To get us back in mixed gear requires a radical solution, believes Bradbury: make Walt Disney mayor of Los Angeles. "Or if not mayor, at least city planner, builder, architect and engineer." He continues, "I am deadly serious about this." What If Disney cannot go along with the program? then use his name if possible. Then get a man like him to do the undirty work.

Then create movement and magic and get off the dime. So Anaheim, funny-named flatland, suddenly looks like a seedbed for survival. All that Disney play might really work. Maybe the traffic engineers who dared the freeways (en masse transport) could have learned as much by crossing the Anaheim street. And now when I look back at the Disneylng motion on my pleasure trip, I can only think Bradbury.

Which is big. show, recommendable enough to detail. At first, I did not connect events one and two at all, not stopping to think about how we fellow freeloaders trav- eled. But travel we did! From the Disneyland Hotel wr monoralled to the park. Then we took a surface train to a riverboat And we must have walked, on pedestrian thoroughfares only, for five miles no 1 traffic signals; collisions, Along the way, we heard music.

The riverboat has a Dixieland crew: Five old Muskrat Ramblers headed by dean banjoist Johnny St Cyr, 73. Across the dock Were the Gertrude Ward gospel singers: raucous and reverent at the same foot-stomping time. On different routes, we saw transport as we went: submarines, autos, sky cars, bobsleds and all those other contrivances that power an amusement park. We even got to watch a 72-year-old Tinker Bell (Tiny Kline) fly by wire over the whole place as a signal to start fireworks. At night, though, the major propulsion (and impulsion) at Disneyland Is the dance.

In the Plaza Gardens, the Elliott Brothers front a band that swings smooth in almost all styles (on the floor, teen-agers and people old enough to be their parents kept the same tempos, a rare case of chronological integration). Only a few moats away, the Spacemen and Kay Bell play strictly for the younger gyration: Mashed Potato, Watusi, Surfer's Stomp and all those other pas de deux that seem to separate the boys from the girls. Miss Bell, incidentally, a proper Los Angeles schoolteacher in the wintertime, primly sings In sneakers and skirt while the kids expel their magnificent energies." For watching, there is a superior troup of Polynesians who, with Pacific gravity, do adrenalin dances from Tahiti, Hawaii, Samoa and other lush Eolnts west They operate right near isney's incredible Tiki Room whereby an automated process awkwardly i known as Audio-Anlmatronics birds, flowers, idols and assorted inhumans sing. All Good, Clean Fun? Unequalled, ever-clianging, what a place to go. Good, clean fun when you get there.

This clean business, of course, is partly because Disneyland is dry. The rest Is because some 300 sweepers are constantly, manning their brooms. Still, I have always been skeptical about what must lurk on the other side of the sets. This trip, while we waited for Peter Pan's unwiring backstage, I sneaked into a men's room. Report: Even Employeeland is Immaculate.

It took just one more day for the Anaheim moral to make itself clear. The third thing that happened was a non-fiction story by Ray Bradbury In the current issue of California Home (the western edition of American Home). Off the top of his indignation Bradbury writes about rapid transit the halting, screeching lack of it He 6tarts with a word painting, Inspired by Hieronymous Bosch and George Orwell. It's home: "Detail, lower left corner of canvas," writes Bradbury, "demon politicians, city, county, and state imps and fiends shown tossing street oars and trolley IF I never connected Anaheim with survival First the name was a faraway Joke on the Jack Benny radio shows of an eastern youth. Then It came reaV first as a freeway sign warning that unless I learned my way around Southern California fast, any one of the next five exits would dump me there.

Only later, I learned that it was the geographic headquarters of "The Magic Kingdom" Disneyland. I laughed: Anaheim, which sounds like a brand of tsausage (in competition with Seiden-baum), the home of fantasy and the animated daydream; the incongruity of It all. But of a sudden, the real future the asphalt, I-beam, Internally combustible future has been focused for me In Anaheim. Three things lately happened around Anaheim, all oddly related, to make the name a Joke no more. First, the Institute of Traffic Engineers held a convention there.

These are the men with one Of the most brain-boggling jobs of our generation: human flow. From all the Western states, the road-givers came. They sat still for three days at the Charter House Hotel and worried about mobility. Cities Here to Stay One major meeting considered the question of our cities, particularly this free-floating Ink blob of a city, 'Los Angeles. Could It, would it, should It survive? Experts addressed themselves to the question and the engineers.

Edward Hearle of the Rand Corp. said that cities will "not only endure, they will expand." Robert Tyler, a design boss at Welton Becket, agreed but rightly fretted the esthetics to come. Prof. Kent Lloyd of USC took a political tack, pointed to five major problems transportation, sprawl, governmental Irresponsibility, delinquency, racial tensions and admitted that although cities were here to stay, he might not elect to stay In the cities. It was a keen panel, with well-honed things to say, well chaired by Joseph Havenner of the Automobile Club.

The audience of engineers asked excellent questions (it is encouraging by to see engineers concerned with the humanistic elements of trafficking people from A to B). But one of the unanswered urban problem areas was this very same business of trans- port. There, across the street from Disneyland, in the shadow of the monorail, came no clear call for what to do about mass mobilizing people In a businesslike but peaceful, civil way.1 All the troubles were mentioned from rail pace to snail's pace still, there was no unanimity about whether cars or trains or subways or combinations thereof would be the ultimate answer for a city that Is now coughing (and may one day choke) on the matter of 'movement' After the discussion broke, the engineers piled Into busses which carried them on a three-hour tour of the freeway system. They not only faced up to the problem, they had the courage to roll around In it We can look to them for more answers. The second that happened began as a pure pleasure trip.

Disneyland Invited half a hundred press people to see the antic things that go on thers after dark. It was a splendid STREAMLINED, SOPHISTICATED CIRCUS COMINQ BT ALEENE MacMINN tion, for example, they tackle the washeterias and the latest in cars. And the whole performance has been speeded up in keeping with the times. "Of course," he continued, "you can't go completely modern because each generation goes back looking nostalgically for the scenes they remembered from childhood. "The circus parade," he said, "used to be the biggest thing about a circus coming to town.

Now, we'd Just tie up traffic, so we do the parade as part of the show." 1 'f A big item that hasn't changed Is the charity entertaining the circus performers do. "When we arrive in Los Angeles, we'll stop at a hospital and entertain the children," Carroll said, adding that in a year's time up to a million people see these charity circus shows. Quoted Carroll: "A circus manager once said that you can't run a circus on dollars alone. You've got to have a little heart" That tradition will go on as long as there are circuses. "LAY-DEES AND GEN-TELL-MEN THE CIRCUS IS COMING TO TOWN!" But when the Ringling Bros, and Barnum Bailey troupe of 600 (300 animals, 500 people) unpacks at the Sports Arena on Thursday for a 13-day run, things will be much different than they were "in the good old days." For one thing, the "cast" will not (have been traveling as they formerly did In a slow 99-car car-, avan, divided in three sections (side show and cook house, big top, performers).

They will arrive In Los Angeles on Wednesday on a compact, streamlined 17-car train. Once here, they will check Into modern hotels which have hot and cold running water and coffee shops no more setting up at the circus grounds where water for bathing was obtained by bucket from a water wagon and where food was served at the "pie As a veteran circus1 advance man, Norman Carroll, put it "We're no longer in the hotel and restaurant business." The circus performers can now concentrate on entertainment. Gone are the days, too, of performing in a dusty ring under a canvas tent. The "big top" of today is generally a modern new' arena, complete with air conditioning and escalators. "Even the animals like taking the escalator to the arena floor," commented Carroll, "and no longer do the performers come down ringing wet from performing at the top of the tent where the temperature often reached 114 deg." Gone now, too, are the roustabouts who used to set up the show.

The "help" today is made up of skilled union men who know the fastest, best and safest way to "get the show on the road." How has the circus performance itself changed? "For one thing," Carroll answered, "we don't carry a sideshow anymore. The medical profession put that out of business. "The circus of today is more sophisticated. The clowns satirize timely topics. In this year's edi MNI tto angtUOnusi calendar, Sunday, july 28, 1963.