I'm with ya granny! If I lived a couple thousand miles closer and just a couple years older (literally), I'd been right there with you running my tail off thru the gates. I'm sorry, sometimes I can't resist when I see these complaining post, I have to make a smarty pants post. In this world of hyper-sensitivity where everything is an offense or an issue, I think a lot of these folks wouldn't know a true hardship.
...and yes I'm sure you are adorable!! I don't know about the crinolines but I bet you can still rock a poddle skirt and sweater!! My favorite!!
Well, in the interest of full disclosure ...
I didn't run through those gates until
August of 1955. I was twelve. And lived almost three thousand (pre-interstate) miles away. But, following my grandfather's death in early December of 1954, my grandmother bought a shiny new Pontiac (a huge, gray barge of a thing) and announced that we (she and my father, my mother, my aunt, my brother and I) were going to California (the trip that my grandfather had always wanted to take with his family). And we went in August because my grandmother was, among many things, a farmer, and she wanted us to see the country's harvest.
Disneyland was
not on her agenda. I'm not sure that she'd even heard of it. But the rest of us certainly had.
One of my maternal aunts, her husband (whose own family of recently-immigrated Swedes had settled primarily in Illinois) and their two little boys lived in Oxnard. And I'm certain that by the end of that summer they cursed the name
Disney in two languages. Because the six of us must have been the fourth or fifth group of suddenly-very-close relatives to arrive on the doorstep of their small three-bedroom home that summer.
My uncle has always said that he had never been so grateful for his scandinavian stoicism as he was in 1955.
We took a week to drive out from West Virginia. A week to drive back. And stayed a week on the coast. Knott's Berry Farm and Corriganville took a day. Los Angeles (and Hollywood) another. A third was spent with my father's former co-pilot in Ventura. A fourth driving up the coast to Santa Barbara. A fifth was filled with off-shore fishing (for select adults - my grandmother was also a mean fisherman) and a fabulous smorgasbord and the sixth, finally
(For Pete's Sake!) ... at California's most amazing creation. On the seventh day we, biblically, napped.
I've
flown across the country since. And traveled a little here and there. And I do love Disney World. But no vacation, and no place, has ever come close to being, for me, as magical as was
that trip and
that still-raw Disneyland.
As for 'adorable'?
That was kind ...
And I do still have a couple of poodle skirts and a few of those matched sweater sets (the cardigans, when worn alone, correctly buttoned up the back). My single strand of pearls. And a very well-preserved pair of saddle oxfords (
my favorite).
So, do you suppose, if I wore a large
1955 button on my sweater and my Mickey Mouse watch and ears, that anyone at next year's
Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party would get it?
But it would take me longer than from now until then to train up to even a short sprint. So, I think I'd just skip.
ETA: It seems to me that my own generation has a curiously split personality. That those of us born just before or during WWII (and who completed our secondary education in the
very early 1960s), while definitely spoiled, have nevertheless always been more than a little in awe of the two truly remarkable generations before us. If imitation
is the most sincere form of flattery then, no matter how poor the end product, our very flattered parents and grandparents could never doubt our sincerity. And we found watching our 'grown-ups' (and many of their mores and manners) fade from public and private dominance unnerving. In short, I think that many of us preferred being kept to ... keeping.
On the other hand, I don't think that anyone would dispute that those of our siblings born after the war ended in 1945 gave new meaning to the word
rebellion. And to say that they couldn't wait to run the world (and to rearrange or replace its social tapestries) would be monumental understatement. Things, to put it mildly, changed.
Now, it's my generation's turn to exit stage left (mostly ...
) and I hope that I live long enough to see what our kids ultimately do with the place.
But, if this thread is any indication, constants remain. For instance, in our family whining has been met for generations with the question "You know what ...?" To which the only acceptable answer is "Yeah ... I'll live."
Most of them were more mature than that, thankfully. 
