Deborah Gail Stone was a beautiful and talented California girl, an excellent student and star athlete in track and swimming at Santa Ana High School. In June 1974, she was poised to blossom into adulthood. She turned eighteen and graduated with top honors and that year’s Principal’s Award for academic excellence. In the fall, she’d travel seventeen hundred miles from home to begin her freshman year at Iowa State University. Until then, she’d be residing in “the Happiest Place on Earth,” because shortly before her birthday she’d landed a job in Disneyland.
Petite, blonde, and from a devout Christian family, Deborah was the perfect match for the squeaky-clean theme park. Soon after she arrived for training, her superiors saw her as ideal for the role of hostess for a brand-new attraction that was about to replace the Carousel of Progress located in Tomorrowland.
America Sings would feature a cast of audio animatronic animals warbling songs from America’s musical history. Although the show didn’t really fit into Tomorrowland’s theme, which was an optimistic look into the future, America Sings was designed in anticipation of America’s Bicentennial. The twenty-four-minute program featured the voices of Burl Ives as Eagle Sam and Sam Edwards (who voiced the adult Thumper in the Disney film Bambi) as Ollie Owl, and made use of the Carousel building’s unique layout.
The large circular structure contained an outer ring of six theaters, connected by divider walls that revolved mechanically around six fixed stages about every four minutes. Two of the theaters were used for loading and unloading the guests. The walls revolved clockwise for the Carousel of Progress. For America Sings, they’d turn in the opposite direction.
As the theaters rotated, each theater audience would experience each song in sequence. Between each act, the lights blacked out, and the theater was illuminated with flashing stars. During the rotations, Eagle Sam sang about the next era the audience was about to enter, reprising the chorus of “Yankee Doodle.”
America Sings opened to the public on Saturday, June 29, 1974. Debbie worked the prime evening shift, standing at the left of each stage, using a microphone to welcome and say goodbye to the guests during every turn.
On July 8, the ride had been in operation for just over a week, and the rotating theaters, animatronics, and hostesses were working in precision. This was also a very exciting and special day for Debbie Stone. Her boyfriend asked her to marry him, and before she began her shift, she called her parents to ask their permission. Permission was granted.
Deborah had so much to look forward to. Around 11:00 PM, at the end of the 10:30 show, and near closing time at the park, there was another forty-five-second period in which the audience cleared out and the stage moved into position for another cycle.
Then came the scream. It was described by a guest in an adjacent theater as “a blood-curdling scream,” and the sight he saw resembled a child being pulled between the moving walls and a stationary one.
That “child” was the five-foot, five-inch, one-hundred-pound Debbie Stone being pulled between two hard walls without enough space in which to fit. By the time the ride operators rushed over and the wall stopped moving, beautiful Debbie had been crushed into a bloody, shattered pulp and dismembered. No one was sure exactly how it happened—whether she was leaning in to the adjacent stage to talk to a fellow cast member, trying to jump from one stage to the other, or simply distracted.
Debbie’s parents got word of the tragedy a few hours later, in the middle of the night. “It was around two o’clock in the morning,” her father Bill told the Omaha City Weekly thirty years later. “It was somebody who lived in another street saying the deputy sheriffs were looking for us. Just about the time I hung up, they pulled up to the house.”
The memory was fresh as yesterday to Debbie Stone’s mother Marilyn. “I can picture the two guys that were here,” she told the Omaha reporter. “I can pretty well picture what they said and what I said. Of course, when you hear that, you go into shock. The feelings are there, but they’re dulled to a point that you really aren’t feeling anything.
“When the deputy left, my husband and I knelt down and thanked God he gave her to us for eighteen years.”
Bill Stone remembered his last conversation with Debbie. “The night of her death, she asked us if it would be okay if she got married. She really got engaged that night, so she was calling to ask our permission. I think the hardest thing that I had to do during that whole thing—other than go through it—was call her fiancé in the morning to tell him.”
The America Sings attraction was closed for two days after Debbie Stone’s death while sensor lights were installed to warn the operator if someone went too close to the walls. Later, breakaway walls were constructed, in case the sensors failed. The attraction remained in operation until 1988.
The Disney corporation never memorialized its first fallen cast member anywhere in Disneyland. Her high school renamed a pool, and her friends created a scholarship award, in her honor.
Although there have been more than a dozen deaths, including at least one homicide, in the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy (not to mention a number of suicide jumpers from the Disneyland Hotel and the more recent Mickey & Friends parking structure), Debbie Stone is, as of this writing, the only performing “cast member” (the term used to refer to all Disneyland employees) to have died while performing on the big stage called Disneyland in more than sixty years of operation.
Walt Disney World, the resort in Orlando, Florida, envisioned and designed by Uncle Walt, opened in 1971, five years after his death. The place encompasses four theme parks and 43 square miles, as opposed to Disneyland’s 500 acres and two parks (the Disneyland Resort also includes California Adventure theme park). As might be expected due to its size (and the addition of “Florida” to the equation), the Walt Disney World death toll (which includes drownings, ride mishaps, car accidents, suicides, and an alligator attack) is much greater than Disneyland’s. Yet, like its classic cousin in Anaheim, it has so far lost one performing cast member in the line of duty, in front of an adoring crowd. That tragedy occurred thirty years after the death of Debbie Stone.
Javier Cruz, a thirty-eight-year-old former park custodian, was divorced, the father of two children, and living with his mother at the Mystic Pointe apartments not far from the resort. On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 11, 2004, he was dressed as Mickey Mouse’s dog, Pluto, and participating in the Share a Dream Come True Parade, a spectacular display of moving floats, giant snow globes, and costumed characters that worked its way from Splash Mountain toward Main Street, USA.
Javier was passing through the backstage gate into view of the crowds that lined the road between Frontierland and Adventureland when he stumbled. Before he could raise his front paws and get out of the way, he was run over and crushed to death by a three-section, three-ton Princess float. Disney workers needed a forklift to raise the float and peel off Javier.
Megan Long, who played Winnie the Pooh at the park, said the bulky headpieces worn by the character actors made it difficult to navigate around the floats. “Sometimes, it’s tough to see when the sun is glaring right on you,” she told the Orlando Sentinel.
The Disney corporation paid dearly for the death of Javier Cruz. It was fined $6,300.