The Family Circus is a comic strip, created by Bil Keane. It
debuted in newspapers in 1960, and has been in continuous production
ever since. Bil's son, Jeff, began helping him with with the series in 1981 and took over production in 2011, after his father passed
away.
In the Summer of 1978, the series followed "the family" (which consists of a
mom, a dad, and their four children) as they visited Disneyland, over a period of 27 consecutive days. I was 13 years old at the time, and my mom subscribed to two different newspapers, but I rarely ever read the comics section. It was my mom who alerted me to the fact that "The Family Circus" was doing a series at Disneyland. And she didn't realize it herself, until several days into the series. Once we realized that "Disneyland" was going to be a continuing theme, I went outside to our trash cans to dig out our old newspapers to see exactly when the series started, and how many I had missed.
I thought I had been able to find all of them back to the very first day, but it turns out that I had missed the very first one. Fortunately, "Meet The World" reader and commenter, "Kathy!", was able to locate that first panel and was nice enough to share it with us (thank you, Kathy!).
Monday, July 24, 1978:
This panel is the earliest one I found, when going through my family's trash cans!
Tuesday, July 25, 1978:
While searching online, I also found out that this series was republished in the Summer of 2015, apparently for Disneyland's 60th anniversary. Color was added to all of the panels by Bil Keane's son, along with some other minor changes to a few of them. This one was republished on July 17, 2015:
For some reason, I was also missing the panel for Wednesday, July 26, 1978, but again....thanks to "Kathy!", here it is:
Thursday, July 27, 1978:
The Mad Hatter shop used to be located in Fantasyland, between Mr.
Toad's Wild Ride and Peter Pan's Flight. I took this photo of the Mad Hatter shop, in early 1982. You can see how accurate Bil Keane was, at replicating the signage for the shop.
Friday, July 28, 1978:
Saturday, July 29, 1978:
Please check back each week, throughout the month of July. I plan to post a "week's worth" of The Family Circus' 1978 visit to Disneyland, every Friday this month!