Upside of Disney's Now Defunct E-Ticket

When I was a kid you needed tickets to ride individual attractions at Disneyland. None of this business about one ticket to get in the gate and you can ride everything as many times as you want. Thirty years ago when you went to Disneyland you got a book of tickets and each ticket was marked with a letter, beginning with A-tickets, all the way up to the coveted E-ticket. The better the ride the higher the letter ticket required. For example, the carousel was an A-ticket. The tea cups were probably a B-ticket, maybe a C - I can't remember because they always made me dizzy. The canoes around the island were a D-ticket and the Haunted Mansion and the Matterhorn Bobsleds were definitely E-tickets. Of course each book of tickets had a lot more A-tickets than they had E-tickets so you could only ride one or two of the really great rides before you ran out of E-tickets. One of the best parts of the ticket books however, was you could put multiple A-tickets together to make a B-ticket, and multiple B-tickets together to make a C-ticket and so on.

Confusing you say? Hardly. Everyone knew how to work their ticket books. Everyone knew they couldn't get everything they wanted. As a result, people actually planned. Kids actually learned how to budget and spend their tickets wisely. Ingenuity reigned as kids as young as four or five were doing mathematical equations to get the most out of their ticket books. Everyone knew that when the tickets were gone the tickets were gone. They made the most of their day by prioritizing their fun and accepting that some rides may have to wait until the next visit.

There was no whining about wanting more. Okay, maybe just a little. But there was definitely no sense of entitlement, as if Disneyland somehow owed us more tickets, or more rides, or more fun than we still managed to have. Try explaining that to the microwave generation.- Stephanie Tallman Smith