This Day in Pop Culture for October 1

1971: Walt Disney World Resort Opens

The Walt Disney World Resort is most visited vacation resort in the world boasting of an annual attendance of 52.5 million. Originally designed as a sister theme park to Disneyland, WDW’s Magic Kingdom opened its gates on this day in 1971 at Bay Lake, Florida.

Originally, instead of becoming a carbon copy of Disneyland, part of the plans called for an “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow,” (EPCOT) a planned city that would serve as a test bed for new innovations for city living. Though the end result was quite a bit different from the original plans, EPCOT also opened on this day in 1982.

Later, the Disney/MGM Studios (now called Disney’s Hollywood Studios) opened in 1989, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened in 1999. (Image: Walt Disney World Resort)

1907: Plaza

The luxury hotel and condominium known as The Plaza opens on 5th Avenue in New York. The first guest to register was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt.

2018: Bluey

Six-year-old, animated Blue Heeler puppy, Bluey and her family made their TV debut in Australia. A year later she appeared on Disney Channel and Disney+ in 2020.

1908: Model T

The Ford Motor Company began producing the first mass-affordable automobile priced at $825. As Henry Ford said, you could have “any color – so long as it’s black.”

1942: Little Golden Books First Books

As an attempt to print children’s books inexpensively as possible, Simon & Schuster and Western Printing began a joint venture to produce a series on inexpensive children’s books.

Little Golden Books released a dozen of titles on this day. Each book contained 42 pages (28 pages were printed in just two colors and 14 were printed in four colors) and sold for .25 cents. One of those books, The Poky Little Puppy, has become the best-selling children’s book of all time. Other books in the first series included Three Little Kittens, Bedtime Stories, Mother Goose, Prayers for Children, The Little Red Hen, Nursery Songs, The Alphabet from A to Z, The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, Baby’s Book of Objects, The Animals of Farmer Jones and This Little Piggy and Other Counting Rhymes.

Since its beginning, over 1200 Little Golden Books titles have been printed in over 42 countries. In 2023, the Taylor Swift biography became the fastest-selling book in Golden Books history – one million copies were sold in just seven months. Today the books are published by Penguin Random House.

1962: Here’s Johnny

Today, a nervous Johnny Carson hosted his first Tonight Show on NBC.

1949: Our Mrs. Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks’ Annie Allen was published. She was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry a year later.

1933: Hey Babe

Yankee Babe Ruth pitched his final game and hit his 714th home run of his career.

1955: The First and Only Season of The Honeymooners

Based on a recurring comedy sketch featured on DuMont’s Cavalcade of Stars variety series and later on The Jackie Gleason Show, The Honeymooners TV show began airing its first and last season on CBS.

The show starred Gleason as the hot-headed, bus driver Ralph Kramden, Audrey Meadows as his sarcastic wife Alice, Art Carney as Ralph’s dimwitted friend and sewer worker, Ed Norton and Joyce Randolph as Ed’s cheerful wife. The characters were later inspirations for the main four characters of the cartoon series, The Flintstones.

While debuting as the #2 series on TV, the show later dropped down to 19th place. Gleason thought that he had begun to run out of ideas. He and CBS agreed to end the series after 39 episodes. But The Honeymooners never really went away.

In September of ’56, Gleason’s variety show resumed with The Honeymooners’ characters returning in sporadic installments through 1970. Then they appeared in five different specials (one for CBS and four for ABC) from 1973 to 1978.