Disneyland's Main Street Tobacco Shop (1955)

Hello everyone and welcome back. We’re kicking off the new era of this channel with a real doozy, the Disneyland tobacco shop. New videos will be posted more regularly again, old classic series’ and some entirely new stuff too. Stay turned and thanks again for all your patience. -Jack, TPSE (aka the channel formerly known as Park Ride History)

Back then, not having a tabacco shop would have been as crazy as having one today.

Being able to have a cigar and coffee while my nieces and nephews scream around Disney land would make it 1000% more bearable

It might be noted that Walt loved a French Cigarette called Giantes. It came in a blue pack. They were not common or popular in the US but they were Walt's favorite from when he was a young ambulance driver in WW1 France. By having a shop in his park he had easy access to these smokes, which carried them for him. The shop carried many different brands of cigarettes from around the world. I bought a pack of Peace Cigarettes from Japan when I was 15 years old...yes..15...they had no filter and I got a mean buzz off of them. Just a little note from an old guy that grew up in SoCal and worked at the park in the 70's Thanks for the video

1950s: Disney sells tobacco but not alcohol in the parks. 2020s: Disney sells alcohol but not tobacco in the parks.

One of my favorite smoking related bits of lore is that at the local hospital, Nurses were forbidden to smoke in the operating room. Not the doctors though!

Regarding your question about Cuban seed cigars; when Castro took over Cuba he nationalized the cigar industry. Tobacco growers fled the country taking seeds with them, sometimes smuggling them out. These growers ended up in places like the Dominican Republic and Tampa. So yes, Cuban seed cigars were and still are entirely legal.

This will never get read by most people, but I need to tell a story. One of the partners listed at 3:34 is Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. My grandfather was a dispatcher in a Southern California AT&SF rail yard at the time of the park's opening. Mom was five, and basically got to live on trains for five years. Disneyland was her second home, along with a Pullman car. Her memories and stories were plenty, and fun, and the "cigar store Indian" was a very vivid one, as was the tobacco shop, based on smell. She grew to understand why that wasn't a good scene, all around, and I miss her. I can't believe I am watching a video that talks about one of Mom's memories. That was very unknowingly kind of you. Great work on the video.

People forget that Walt’s dream wasn’t just a place built for kids. it was built for adults to bring their families.

It was the late 50's and my dad was a two pack a day guy. I can remember we always went in the tobacco shop when visiting Disneyland. My dad once bought a couple of corn cob pipes there, one for him and one for me (I was 7 or 8). I still have that pipe.

Just wanna add as a tobacco pipe smoker. Mildly aromatic doesnt mean it doesnt smell, just that it smells mildly pleasant.

That "no smoking" short was probably the best anti smoking ad I've ever seen and it came out in 1951 it's crazy that Disney would try to hide that

It's crazy how much the attitude toward smoking has changed. When I was a kid, almost everywhere was a smoking area. Grocery stores didn't have end caps full of the stuff they were paid most to promote, they had ash trays at the end of every aisle. Some (but not all) restaurants had no-smoking sections, airplanes had nonsmoking rows at the front, and most people didn't smoke while pumping their leaded gas.

This video brought back memories. Dad smoked Chesterfields and died in 1969 at age 40 from cancer. My first visit to Disneyland in 1972 featured the tobacconist shop. I've been in four Disney parks worldwide--the Florida parks, Disneyland Paris and Tokyo Disneyland. I observed the changes from "smoke anywhere" when outdoors to the smoker exile colonies to no smoking at all. Now alcoholic beverages have replaced tobacco! I admit it--the Memory Hole treatment to older Disney shorts and features bothers me. That's despite my anti-smoking creds--lying about the past bothers me more because how can we learn from history when history has been falsified?

The Tobacco shop at DL was briefly a hobby shop before becoming a sports store. Also, in 1955 to be a lessee on Main St your business had to have existed in 1900 (my great uncle visited the park on opening day as a rep for Wurlitzer and figured the park would survive about 6 months).

I confess, I loved real tobacconist shops. Lovely colourful labels, the rich smell of the humidor and the jars of various blends of pipe tobacco. The leather pouches, the neat little pipe tools and lighters, and the arcane delight of the peculiar names for all the different shapes of pipes: Dublin, billiard, apple, bent, Canadian, the fish-tailed bulldog all the way up to the Oom Paul. I knew a one man business in north London, where the proprietor would show me how to shape the bowl and polish the stem on his lathes. At some point you have to say it may shorten my life, but it is worthwhile. When my (not smoking related) cancer comes back to finish me off, I'm going to buy a large stock of Dunhill Nightcap and go out in a haze of fragrant blue smoke. Mmm, latakia!

I used to love visiting the tobacco shop on Main Street. Smelled wonderful.

I worked at Disneyland and we had the stupid "Disney finger point" which used two fingers. We were told during our "Magic training" that it was because pointing with two fingers was more polite, but the reality was that's how Walt pointed. Because he always had a cigarette in his hand.

I must say that this was the most balanced sociological examination of smoking of that period I've seen. And Iger overseeing the "removal," Winston Smith style, of all references to smoking in past archival images should have been a warning of the mind-control mentality the company was heading for.

This was a neat look at the past. Was expecting more about the shop. Wish it wasn’t a psa against tobacco.