Not Just a Walk in the Park

Part Six: A Walt Disney World
 
I don’t know that we actually recovered from Walt’s death for several years. Maybe we never “recovered.” But we persevered.
 
As I’ve said, I stuck it out at Retlaw, and it was about a year and a half after Walt’s passing that I realized I had to move out, in order to move forward. Dick Nunis did take me back into Disneyland proper; as usual, he was no-nonsense—I certainly didn’t get a promotion going back to the park, but the lateral return as a full supervisor to Fantasyland attractions was actually more than I expected. I actually thought I’d have to start all over.
 
After a brief time in Fantasyland, and another brief stint in Adventureland/Frontierland, and then helping with the opening of the delayed Haunted Mansion attraction in 1969, Dick approached me about joining “The Florida Project.”
 
Looking Beyond the Berm
 
We’d heard rumors about a big “East Coast” project since the earliest days of the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair. The four major Disney attractions at that project, and the success and publicity surrounding them, really started the talk that we ought to take the Disneyland idea out into the world, to a wider audience. There was serious planning during the New York World’s Fair development phase about a project in St. Louis, too, in the riverfront area, which was undergoing a major redevelopment for the city’s bicentennial celebration. I found out later that they had begun toying with the idea of another location as early as 1959, when some studies Walt had commissioned showed that only 5 percent of Disneyland’s visitors came from east of the Mississippi River—where then 75 percent of the U.S. population resided.
 
Walt had said many times that whatever he did anywhere else wouldn’t be Disneyland; he professed lots of doubts about just copying his original park. “I’m not sure we should be doing that,” he’d said. “I’m not sure if it would work, and it takes away something from the uniqueness of Disneyland.”
 
But the success Disney registered in New York broke the ice. We could get outside of this Anaheim bubble and do other things. In fact, it was these “other” things that motivated Walt’s interest in Florida. He was unsure about taking that first step, but he wasn’t a coward. His hesitancy to just “replicate Disneyland” made him think in other directions. Bigger dreams. Bolder ideas.
 
At the 1963 Urban Design Conference, held at Harvard University, pioneering American real estate developer James W. Rouse said, “I hold a view that may be somewhat shocking to an audience as sophisticated as this: that the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland. If you think about Disneyland and think of its performance in relationship to its purpose, its meaning to people—more than that, its meaning to the process of development—you will find it the outstanding piece of urban design in the United States.”
 
What’s an EPCOT?
 
It seems Walt took Rouse very much to heart. Even though he had begun to move away from the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm toward the ideas of Lewis Mumford and Victor Gruen for his place-making inspiration, I think Walt was still motivated by a single larger idea: making places for people.
 
“The Florida Project,” as Walt saw it, would present a distinct and highly personal vision for him. Original plans called for the theme park as a somewhat secondary, but necessary attraction to draw attention and public and corporate interest in what his real pursuit was: an “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” (EPCOT), a planned community intended to serve as a testing ground for “new city” innovations in a “living laboratory.”
 
“We have done a lot of thinking on a model community,” Walt said, “and I would like to be a part of building one—a ‘city of tomorrow,’ as you might say. I don’t believe in going out to this extreme blue sky stuff that some of the architects do. I believe people still want to live like human beings. But there are a lot of things that could be done. I’m not against the automobile, but I just feel that you can design so that the automobile is there, but still put people back as pedestrians again. I’d love to work on a project like that.”
 
Walt picked a site for this endeavor near Orlando, Florida, in November 1963. Over the next eighteen months, vaguely named dummy corporations—such as the
 
“Ayefour Corporation,” “Latin-American Development and Management Corporation,” and “Reedy Creek Ranch Corporation”—quietly acquired a cumulative forty-eight square miles of property in Orange and Osceola counties. “Here in Florida,” Walt said, “we have something special we never enjoyed at Disneyland . . . the blessing of size. There’s enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans we can possibly imagine.”
 
Then on November 15, 1965, Walt and Florida governor Haydon Burns held a press conference in Orlando to announce the unveiling of a new “Disney World.” A little over a year later, Walt was gone, and a lot of people thought his Florida project would be gone, too. Was little Walt Disney Productions sitting on a white elephant of worthless swamp and scrub pine in Central Florida? Without a guiding vision and the prevalence of “committee think” in Burbank, whose would be the guiding hand for the future “Florida Project”?

Roy O. to the Rescue
 
The Florida Project had been Walt’s priority, and his brother Roy O. now made it his.
 
“The process slowed down following the initial shock of Walt’s passing,” Jack Lindquist remembered. “Nothing happened because nobody would pick up the gauntlet and move forward. From December 15 [1966] for almost a year, there was doubt whether there would be a project. They went forward and secured the legislation, and some of the legal work was done. But nothing as far as the design and what the project would be.”
 
Roy O. then did something else, seemingly trivial in the grand scheme of the juggernaut project we were facing, but deeply meaningful to those of us who had known and worked with Walt. “Everyone has heard of Ford cars,” Roy said. “But have they all heard of Henry Ford, who started it all? Walt Disney World is in memory of the man who started it all, so people will know his name as long as Walt Disney World is here.”
 
So in 1969, as drainage canals and roadways were constructed—and recreational waterways, and a theme park, and resort hotels, and golf courses were wrought from the Central Florida swamps—Dick Nunis and a large group of executives began the gargantuan task of staffing and readying this unfinished behemoth to receive visitors for a scheduled opening on October 1, 1971.
 
Bob Matheison
 
Bob Matheison had come into Disneyland when we were preparing staff to work on Walt Disney World. He had already been named director of operations after getting his start in the entertainment division. (In fact, Bob was the announcer for the Anaheim Angels for some years at Angels Stadium, just across town from Disneyland.) He was an entertainment guy no doubt, but I thought he was an even better director of operations. He asked me, because I had started that program called the Qualified Trainer, to take young supervisors and create uniform classes for all supervisors. So Van France and I put together a program called STP, the Supervisor Training Program. We began sessions consisting of eight to ten people per session. (I think the first program ran anywhere from seven to ten days.)
 
I was then asked to do an evaluation on each participant, what I thought they could do, and what they would be good at. These were mostly operations people, because Operations was going to run Walt Disney World. Some of those guys went on to become directors or vice presidents, and did a good job. But it was Bob Matheison who taught me how to be organized in training, instruction, recognizing one’s talents, mentoring, and moving people along.
 
Roots and Shoots
 
At this point it seemed as if I was stepping into a stable new career path, advancing in the Disneyland hierarchy, and sinking some professional roots. It was time to do the same at home.
 
With the change of employment, and a growing family, we moved from the Cinderella House in Garden Grove to another Orange County locale, Mission Viejo (using the money I received from the Retlaw profit-share payout I received when I left). Our new home was a 1,600-squarefoot Spanish-style house in a new development, with a terrific view. (True, we would regularly hear air traffic from El Toro Marine base; “sounds of freedom,” we would say.) This house felt like a mansion to me, especially after living in a fairy-tale cottage. But in spite of that, it was pretty “bare bones”—no yard to speak of, and no fences or walls. I put those things in, as well as a sprinkler system, and landscaping. I added one other thing as well: before we left Garden Grove, we cut off more clippings from Sitte’s grape vine. I replanted them, and they grew at our new home.
 
Discovering a New World Dick Nunis approached me about heading down to Florida to lend a hand with the Florida Project. He said, “You’ll be there for two or three months prior to opening.” I was there for nine months.
 
Like most major projects, everyone did whatever was needed. There were a lot of operational people pulled in to interview potential employees, because HR simply couldn’t handle the demand and the volume of applicants. They were coming from all over the country. People were driving in from New York, and from all over the East. We had circus performers who weren’t sure what Walt Disney World was going to be—they thought it might be a circus. We had tattooed ladies, contortionists, strong men, sideshow performers—it was quite a volume and assortment of people.
 
There were lots of people desperate for a job. People who wanted to break into show business. Some people also came from California; they’d worked at Disneyland, and they wanted to be there for the opening of Walt Disney World. (Those people were hired pretty quickly, because they had the background and the training and the experience.) Heck, they came from all over the country. They also came from Orlando, too, but not in great numbers.
 
The Disney Way of Leadership
 
My years with Van France had, naturally, identified and “typecast” me as a trainer. Van had written a book called The Disney Way of Leadership, and I taught from that. That was my lesson plan.
 
We were hiring people from hotels, other tourist destinations, and other amusement parks, so these people had to be brought together and brought into the “Disney Way.” It wasn’t the Marriott way, and it wasn’t what you learned working at AstroWorld (an amusement park adjacent to the Astrodome in Houston), or Colonial Williamsburg, or Busch Gardens. It had to be the Disney Way!
 
We had training managers for every division teach the same class. We picked a manager from Fantasyland, merchandise, marketing, entertainment—all of them. Many of them had come from Disneyland, so that was an advantage: we needed to be consistent in all of our training. Thus, we used Van’s The Disney Way of Leadership as text. The hardest part was getting everyone all together, so that I could train them and teach them that class. They were all working such long days and nights just trying to get that Florida Project open. To get participants into a class was tough. In turn, they understood the difficulties they would be facing as well, but they realized that training/developing was as important to the project as the floors and doors. They all came, and we had an almost 100 percent turnout before we opened.
 
And then almost suddenly, opening day was around the corner. I was moved to Fantasyland to work with Orlando Ferrante’s group, which was called PICO (the Project Installation Coordinating Office). During the day, we would work with construction people, wearing hard hats and construction clothes, making sure the shows went to the right place. I was the operational representative for “it’s a small world” and some of the rest of Fantasyland. At night, we would go back to the still-being-finished Contemporary Resort hotel, use the shower (if the water was working), put shirts and ties on, and go back out and start training Cast Members. Those were long days,
 
being active/on the move/teaching for sixteen, sometimes twenty hours a day. (Now, this is a famous tale that may be written about in other places—but before opening, we couldn’t get all the landscape in. Dick Nunis called out all hands to get sod planted in front of the Contemporary Resort. The exterior lighting wasn’t installed yet, and we were planting sod—at night, in the dark. Someone yelled out, “I don’t know how to plant sod! How in the hell do you plant sod?” Dick yelled back, “Green side up!”)
 
A Grand Opening?
 
But, as promised, we opened the park on October 1, 1971. Not surprisingly, Fantasyland was my job—I was responsible for all the operational stuff. We were ready for the deluge, the sweeping hordes of expectant Guests. But there weren’t that many. Certainly not what we expected. We were all carrying two-way radios, and heard that there was no backup at the gate.
 
I was trying to get Fantasyland open, but I was also working out of Dick Nunis’s trailer. Suddenly he said, “Cora, take my car, go down the road, and see how far back the lines are to get into the gates.” So I took his car—and headed out. But soon after I tentatively radioed back to tell him there was nobody out there. “What do you mean there’s nobody out there? Maybe you didn’t go out far enough! The cops are probably holding up traffic!” So I kept driving, and as I went further out I saw a few cars here and there, but no big buildup, no traffic jams! Down the highway I drove; there were police helicopters overhead, but there was nobody on the roads. That day we only had about twelve thousand people. We were expecting to be so busy that we’d have to close—turn people away! Instead, it was people who stayed away by the thousands, because they thought it was going to be so busy and chaotic. Luckily, this was a temporary condition, but it offered a great opportunity for a huge new employee base to get familiar with their new jobs without the burden of those expected crowds.
 
(I remember a woman running toward me at “it’s a small world” with several children in tow, waving her “E Coupon” at me, and shouting, “What do I do with this?” I guided her to the attraction entrance, and suddenly realized I had forgotten to place an order to build ticket boxes for all of the Fantasyland attractions. So for the first few hours, we put the torn tickets in pockets and trash can  until the boxes could be fabricated. God bless our backstage support, especially the Mill.)
 
On opening day, we had about five thousand Cast Members placed at the Magic Kingdom. There were probably another 1,500 for the two hotels. And at the campgrounds there were another five hundred ready to help Guests. That’s a lot of folks. But they all worked well together. Bringing people in from a variety of geographic locations made a big difference, and it was a great boon for Orlando, because their apartments filled up, as did their hotels/motels. It was great all around for the local economy.
 
Unfortunately, and this happens with all of our big projects, after personnel have experienced an opening—and the thrill of opening day—they start to leave. And so you’ve got to be prepared to start replacing those people with other folks.
 
A lot of people who had worked “above and beyond” for a long sustained period of time got really sick in the weeks after Walt Disney World’s opening. It was a long, hard project, and we were building this thing in the middle of nowhere, really. There is a kind of PTSD I saw that sets in, that I would see again on all my later projects; there’s just so much work and dedication that you see people get sick. I remember a fellow who I was working with, a good guy named Jim Murphy, manager of Fantasyland. He dropped out right at the opening with a severe case of bronchitis, and didn’t recover in time, and missed everything.
 
Behind the whole giant machine and rolling out of the project was Roy O. He was so committed to seeing through his brother’s dream, so loyal and so passionate about his responsibility to Walt. He was there to dedicate the Magic Kingdom, and for all of the festivities and events tied to the opening. But it was clear that he was weary, he was tired. When Walt passed, Roy O. had cancelled his planned retirement. Just weeks after fulfilling his promise to Walt, Roy O. Disney died at age seventy-eight on December 20, 1971.