Once upon a time, the world-famous (and well-named) animation mogul Walter "Walt" Disney had a dream: to build a tourist trap for children that would drain their parent's bank accounts. That dream came true on July 17, 1955.

It was not an easy road from dream to reality. Disney pushed to open his-land exactly one year and one day after construction began, but legend has it that the new park wasn't quite ready for the spotlight. Among Disney fans, the event has long been called "Black Sunday."

What was supposed to be an invitation-only affair was crashed by thousands of guests with counterfeit $1 tickets. Fresh asphalt melted in the blistering heat, rides broke down, the park ran out of food and water, and the riverboat started to sink. (It's probably a good thing that audio-animatronic figures weren't added to the park until 1963 or Disney may have been looking at a real Westworld scenario.)

Disney's authorized ABC broadcast from the day's events did its best to hide the flaws from the historical record, so to really separate truth from legend, you probably had to be there to see for yourself.

While that photo from the Los Angeles Examiner makes the new park look, um, mickey mouse, it definitely could have been worse. According to yesterland.com, that "boat" was the not-yet-open Chicken of the Sea® Pirate Ship Restaurant attraction. By August, it would be selling tuna salads, tuna sandwiches, and tunaburgers. One can only imagine the smell of tuna wafting over the spinning tea cups in the adjacent Mad Tea Party during a long, hot Fantasyland summer.

Definitely not everything was better in the good ol' days.

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The following entry was originally posted on the Boosterrific! Blog as the very first in the series of "secret history" posts on July 2, 2013, when a youthfully naive USA was preparing to celebrate her 237th birthday and you could still trust everything you saw on the Internet.

On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed Virginian Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence from Great Britain, and thus was born the United States of America.

The adoption of the declaration of that new-found independence two days later is what we now celebrate, but the real secret of America's independence is the role that Booster Gold played in ensuring it ever happened.

What really happened in Independence Hall in the summer of 1776? The world may never know.

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At 11:30 AM on this day in 1931, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a ceremonial button in the White House in Washington D.C. to symbolically turn on the lights inside the newly dedicated tallest building in the world, the Empire State Building.

Meanwhile, in New York City, a crowd of New York's finest gathered on the building's eighty-sixth floor observation deck for a radio address by the former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith and his successor, current Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. In conclusion to his speech, Roosevelt requested the building's owners reserve an office for him "so that when I leave Albany I will have some place to go."

The future would have other plans for F.D.R., who, having been paralyzed from the waist down by polio in 1921, only stood on the 86th floor that day with the assistance of leg braces.

Or maybe he had a little extra help from someone who knew just how important he would be to history....

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Over 3000 different keywords/phrases have been used over the years here on the Boosterrific! Blog, some obviously more often than others. Some of them are recurring categories, perhaps first and foremost among them being "solicitations" and "new releases," which alert Booster boosters to upcoming and new Booster Gold appearances in comic books.

Select few recurring items over the years have earned their own banner images. Click on any of the following banners to see their associated posts.

And one more for a series that should have a banner but doesn't...

Thanks for reading!

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It has become an annual tradition for the President of the United States to "pardon" a turkey for Thanksgiving. Technically, a pardon is a legal forgiveness for having committing a crime, so the word really shouldn't apply to turkeys. We should say that they were granted clemency because they didn't do anything illegal prior to the imposition of their death sentence.

But what if they did?

Although Abraham Lincoln often gets the credit, the truth is that in November 1963, John Kennedy was the first president to pardon an unnamed turkey. "The turkey will probably live a long and happy life as a result of his presidential pardon," reported the Associated Press. Only, as we now know, it didn't.

As it turns out, The Turkey With No Name would soon be given a name: Patient Zero. After the turkey returned to its home in California, it was discovered the turkey was a carrier of the virus then known as "fowl plague." Today we recognize it as influenza A, more commonly called bird flu.

Bird flu is highly contagious and has been responsible for crossing species and killing millions of human beings around the world. In 1963, there was no treatment for the disease, and the only way to prevent the spread was to take swift and decisive action and cull entire flocks of birds... and anyone else who had contact with the infected fowl, including the popular President of the United States. (To prevent public panic over a potential pandemic, such extreme actions were undertaken surreptitiously with suspicion cast on convenient scapegoats.)

Any well-intentioned time travelers aware of this terrible and sordid chain of events might be tempted to take it upon themselves to "improve" history by going back in time and killing the turkey before it could trigger such a tragic spiral. However, as we all know, changing history can have dire unintended consequences. Ensuring that history plays out the way it must is the lonely but necessary job of a Time Cop, preferably one with a force field impenetrable to disease.

Thanks for performing your thankless job, Booster Gold!

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