Document details

Harrison A. Price said the success of Disneyland was primarily Walt Disney's total dedication to curiosity and the perseverance of sticking to an idea, until it became a reality. […] One of the most glittering successes in the leisure-time field in the past decade is the Disneyland amusement park at Anaheim, Calif. At a time when other amusement parks, most notably the world-famous one at Coney Island in New York, was going under, Disneyland's attendance figures and revenues have soared. Walt Disney himself, before he died in 1966, conceived and planned the layout, but one of the men who helped […] and actually selected the site was a young Stanford Research Institue consultant named Harrison A. Price. In the late fifties Price left SRI to found his own firm, Economics Research Associates which specializes in recreation economics and has figured much other projects as Disney's Mineral King development in California, Walt Disney World in Florida and the Six Flags overe Texas amusement area near Fort Worth. ERA now is a holly owned subsidiary of Los Angeles' Planning Research Corp. Since 1958, the firm has completed nearly 3,000 individual research projects as diverse as the backgrounds of the firm's 60 professional researchers. ERA's 1972 business volume totaled approximately $3 million, 40 percent of which resulted from studies in recreation and tourism development. The firm is called upon today more often than any other in the field of recreation economics. Mr. Price's entry into the research business was solidly based. Before establishing ERA, he served for five years as manager of Stanford Research Institute's Southern California Laboratories, in which capacity he was responsible for the site study which located Disneyland. Be sure to hear this speaker discuss his activities in a most unusual field of economics. […]