By now, you have probably seen the amazing news story on Bored Panda, which is a blog site that posts about pretty much everything, on a man called Dave MacPherson. According to the articles author Judita Kusaitytė, Dave was the very first non-Disney employee person to purchase a ticket to Disneyland on opening day, waiting in line for about 8 hours. For this honor, Disney gifted him a lifetime pass to the Happiest Place on Earth! Pretty cool! Reading the article, it sounds very much like Judita was lucky enough to score an interview with Mr. MacPherson, and got some pretty neat details on his experience at Disneyland.
Only, she didn't.
This story has spread so far, that other Disney fan websites are picking it up and doing what they do best - re-writing articles as if they were the ones who broke the story. No research done, no fact-checking attempted. Real fly-by-night stuff. So at first blush, you'd think that not only does Dave still go to the park, but he is actively granting interviews with lots of news outlets. "News".
He's not.
Dave MacPherson, the man who bought the first ticket to Disneyland in 1955, passed away in 2018 at the age of 85. His obituary makes no mention of his small historical footnote, but looking at his image and the photos from the original article, they are too similar not to be the same guy. Dave, who was living in Long Beach in 1955, moved to Kansas, which is where the obituary was published. So unless there are two guys of the same age living in Kansas with the same name who both lived in Long Beach and who were both born in upstate New York and both had Scottish heritage ...
1932-2018
He's been gone for just under a year now, and yet, if you read any Disney-related news in the last 24 hours, he's an active man who still travels to Disneyland. Every time I see another one of these articles pop up on my feed, I feel bad for Dave's family.
The world of Disney news has enough to worry about with regards to fake reporting and rumors. Let's just slow down next time and do some checking, eh?
