Disneyland operates every day of the year, from 8:00 a.m. until midnight. The almost-always open gates are a point of pride for the theme park. It took a presidential assassination to force the park to close early for the first time in history in 1963. But the second instance was a bit more head-scratching. On August 6, 1970, Disneyland abruptly shut down about five hours early. Around 30,000 visitors were kicked out of the park, and it wasn’t due to a national crisis. The motivating factor was a group of about 300 young “Yippies,” who entered the park with grand plans of capturing Tom Sawyer Island, liberating Minnie Mouse, and cooking Porky Pig (who is not even a Disney character).
Yippies were not quite hippies, but definitely not yuppies, either. The nickname referred to members of the Youth International Party, a political organization started by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman in 1967. Rubin was a graduate student turned activist who had unsuccessfully run for mayor of Berkeley on a radical left platform. Hoffman was a psychologist turned activist who was involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Their Yippies were anti-war, anti-capitalism, and anti-establishment. They were known for their theatrical stunts, which generated tons of media coverage. There was the incident at the New York Stock Exchange, when Hoffman and roughly a dozen followers marched into the visitors’ gallery and began throwing dollar bills onto the trading floor. There was also the time they nominated Pigasus, a 145-pound pig, for president at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In many ways, a splashy demonstration at the number one destination for wholesome family fun made perfect sense for the Yippies. Except the Disneyland invasion didn’t exactly go according to plan.