Walking through Disneyland, you'll spot cast members dressed up as cowboys in Frontierland, jungle explorers in Adventureland, and small-town shopkeepers on Main Street. But, back when the park first opened in 1955, the employees weren't pretending. These were true-to-life characters, hand-picked for their amazing backgrounds. Now for the first time you can get to know these fascinating personalities in "The 55ers: The Pioneers Who Settled Disneyland" by David Koenig.You'll meet close to 700 Year One cast members from every department in the park, including:¿ Disneyland's notorious first general manager C.V. Wood and his "Texas mafia"¿ Vesey Walker, the bristly conductor of the Disneyland Band and the 16 often-crazy musicians who followed him,¿ The always-too-serious Marshal Lucky and his never-serious-enough nemesis, the villainous Black Bart,¿ The adorable sweeper Trinidad,¿ K7 the Kaiser Spaceman,¿ The original Jungle Cruise skippers,¿ The Merlin's Magic Shop magicians,¿ The Puffin's bakers,¿ The Hobbyland model airplane flyers¿ The Golden Horseshoe can-can dancers,¿ Plus the very first nurses, security officers, firemen, wranglers, ticket sellers, newsboys, switchboard operators, ride operators, and many, many more.The book features hundreds of never-before-published images, most of them provided by the original Disneylanders themselves.

The candid photos provide peeks inside a number of long-vanished areas of the park, including the Sunny-View Jams & Jellies shop, the Plantation House chicken restaurant, and the Adventureland Bazaar.