Funworld September 2011

Forty years ago, Marty Sklar stood just inside the gates of the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, waiting for the magic moment he and his Disney colleagues had worked six years to achieve: arrival of the new park’s very first guests.

The second Disney park (there are now 11 around the world) was about to take its first steps toward achieving Walt Disney’s vision for his 27,400 acres in Central Florida that is now the most popular theme park destination on the planet—named by Sklar “The Vacation Kingdom of the World.”

Sklar has been honored as a Disney Legend, inducted into the IAAPA Hall of Fame, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from TEA and the Award for Professional Achievement from his alma mater, UCLA. After retiring in 2009 as executive vice president and “Ambassador” for Walt Disney Imagineering, he formed Marty Sklar Creative Inc.

In honor of the Magic Kingdom’s 40th anniversary on Oct. 1, Funworld over the course of three issues this fall is pleased to present a chapter from Sklar’s forthcoming untitled memoir chronicling his 54-year Disney career. “They Left Me Behind—And Went Home!” is the legend’s own tale of the formative years of Walt Disney World, from the famous initial press conference on Nov. 15, 1965, officially unveiling “Project X,” through opening day nearly six years later.

‘They Left Me Behind— And Went Home!’ by Marty Sklar
At the Walt Disney Company in 1967, the year after Walt Disney’s death, it often seemed as though the whole company was literally dead in the water. Unfortunately, the water in the Florida swamp land Disney had acquired before Walt’s passing often seemed the most stagnant. In fact, there was a serious question whether the little Walt Disney Company would actually move ahead with the development of the big piece of property—“twice the size of Manhattan Island.” (Remember that just three years earlier, the New York World’s Fair had celebrated that city’s 300th anniversary. If you start with the first land acquisition in 1964, Walt Disney World was still in its infancy, not yet three years old, when I first saw it in 1967.)

While he was alive, Walt had made it abundantly clear that WED (Walter Elias Disney) Imagineering, despite the fact that it was no longer his personal family company, was still his personal “laughing place.” The executives at the Disney Studio got it: Although it was only three miles from their offices in Burbank, Roy O. Disney had visited WED’s building at 1401 Flower Street in Glendale once; Card Walker and Donn Tatum—the company’s next two senior executives—had never been inside Imagineering’s headquarters at the time of Walt’s death.

To the credit of Dick Irvine (WED’s design chief), John Hench (senior Imagineering designer) and Joe Fowler (vicepresident and general manager of Disneyland Park, but soon to become chairman of Imagineering), their almost daily lunches at the Studio with the corporate executives paid dividends. Through the early months of 1967, they worked their sales magic. Early in the summer, major earth-moving work began on the Walt Disney World site: a dirt road running east to west across the northern part of the property to a 100- acre clearing where the Magic Kingdom would be built; and the first drainage canals, ultimately to funnel rainwaters to the two natural waterways, Reedy Creek and Bonnet Creek, on the opposite sides of the site.

Although many of us, not fully understanding what was occurring in those Studio lunchtime discussions, had expressed our frustration to Dick Irvine about the lack of progress on “Project X” (the Florida project), we were all excited about the new attractions opening and in the works for Disneyland. Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion were destined to become the new standards for our industry—and literally to affect the planning for Walt Disney World itself.

In the film I wrote for Walt that was shown for the first time in Florida early in 1967, we referenced Disneyland’s attendance—6.7 million in 1965-66. That number was the basis of Imagineering’s early planning for the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. But sparked by the popularity of Pirates and Haunted Mansion, Disneyland’s attendance had increased to over 9 million by 1971. The dilemma for the Disney planners and designers was to commit to construction of attractions and facilities with no attendance track record; an infrastructure originally based on that 6 million attendance figure—the equivalent of Disneyland when our planning began; and expenditures that threatened to break even the Practical Pig’s piggy bank—and certainly Disney’s.

There was another issue adding to the planning questions: Disney had never built or owned a hotel. Walt’s friend and neighbor Welton Becket was called on again. Becket’s architectural firm had designed such Hollywood landmarks as the Cinerama Dome and the Capitol Records building, and was well underway on the Dorothy Chandler Performing Arts Center in downtown Los Angeles. This time, Becket said “yes” when Disney asked.

When Dick Irvine called this time, it was to tell me that I was on the travel roster for what was to become one of the most important trips contributing to the initial development of the Walt Disney World property. Boarding the company Gulfstream I in Burbank early in October 1967 were Irvine, chief of design at WED, and three of WED’s key designers and master planners—Marvin Davis, Bill Martin and John Hench; Card Walker, Disney corporate vice –president, then responsible for marketing and communications; Dick Nunis, in charge of Disneyland operations and, soon, both Disneyland and Walt Disney World; Welton Becket himself and two of his senior architects; and “the two Joes”: retired admiral Joseph W. Fowler, chairman of the Disneyland operating committee; and William E. (“Joe”) Potter, retired general, hired from Robert Moses’ staff at the New York World’s Fair to head Disney’s Florida staff. (Once, watching Fowler and Potter carry presentation boards across Lexington Avenue in New York to a meeting at the old General Electric headquarters, Walt marveled that he had an admiral and a general who were “privates” following his marching orders!)

Our itinerary was reflective of the planning and design work still to be done. We stopped in Atlanta to see a new John Portman designed hotel, visited new resorts in Miami and on Grand Bahama Island, and headed for Orlando. This was the first trip to Florida for any of this group since Walt’s death in December 1966 . . . and my first ever. On the Walt Disney World site, we caught up with Bill Evans, the company’s master landscaper, who had already established the first tree farm, north of the Magic Kingdom site, and would soon begin teaching us about Florida flora and fauna (“No, Mr. Becket, we can’t grow that kind of palm around the Polynesian!”). And that was only one of the discussions that would change my weekend plans.

Fortunately for my memory bank, the photo of Dick Irvine, Welton Becket and me standing on a big yellow “X” in the middle of a 100-acre cleared site still exists. The clearing was the scraped site for the Magic Kingdom, and the yellow “X” marked the location where the Castle would be built. We all agreed on that, but there were so many other disagreements that a quick decision was made: Marty would be left behind with a photographer to map the property from the air . . . and provide the accurate research for the planners and designers of the hotels, campground, parking lots, roads and other Phase One developments.

So here’s my 3-day-weekend memory of late October 1967: We rented two helicopters—a big, empty military transport, and a 3-passenger Bell job—and photographer Carl Frith shot movie footage (remember, this is1967) from the big helicopter and stills from the little chopper . . . often as I held the belt around his waist while he leaned out “for a better shot”!

This film and all the still photos are not only an amazing record of the World property as it was “before Disney” (there was that one “built road,” the dirt pathway that became Vista Boulevard): The pictures also became the early planning tool for so much that has become “The Vacation Kingdom of the World,” as I defined it for our early marketing materials. Every October, I make a point to look at that photo of the yellow “X” and blink. Fifty years later, on a peak day, there are over 300,000 people on the Walt Disney World property. That’s more people than the population of the Orlando area in 1967!

As I recall that weekend, I have no regrets that “they left me behind—and went home!” And, I think, millions and millions of guests would agree wholeheartedly.

***

• Annual Passengers: 35,100,000
  
• Daily Passengers: 95,157
  
• Annual Flights: 309,000
  
• Daily Flights: 878
  
• International Passengers (2009): 2,977,920

In her 1966 interview with Walt for the Chicago Tribune, Norma Lee Browning asked why he chose Florida, and especially Orlando, for Disney World. “Florida and Southern California are the only two places where you can count on the tourists,” Walt replied. “I don’t like ocean sites because of the beach crowd, and also the ocean limits the approach. If you’ll notice Disneyland at Anaheim is like a hub with freeways converging on it from all sides. I like it better inland. That’s why we chose Orlando.”

The search had actually begun in the early 1960s. In his book, “Walt’s Revolution,” Buzz Price wrote: “In 1961, after rejecting some other alternatives, Walt asked us to look at the rest of Florida and figure out where the park should be. Late in 1963, we studied in depth a location in central Florida. The key conclusion was that central Florida (not Miami as most people expected it would be) was the main point of maximum interception of Florida tourism, and that Orlando, centrally located, was the point of maximum access to the southerly flow of Florida tourism from both the east and west shores of the state.”

There were many challenges to creating Walt Disney World that had to be overcome long before the first guest was welcomed on October 1, 1971. Central Florida in the early 60s was still “deep South.” As our various staffs began traveling to the area early in 1964 (negotiations for the property began in April), they found many vestiges of the old ways. You didn’t drive far from the Walt Disney World site before you found “white only” entrances to a restaurant, or separate restrooms and drinking fountains for African-Americans and Caucasians. In my view, helping to make central Florida “color blind,” and create employment opportunities for African- Americans and Latinos, especially, is one of the most significant contributions Walt Disney World has made as a good citizen of the state of Florida. (In fact, the company’s financial support and cast members’ volunteerism today probably has no equal in the Orlando area and the entire state.)

That first trip to central Florida was chock full of new experiences for me. Arrangements had been made to take us by boat into the deepest, darkest part of the Reedy Creek swamp, about 10 miles from the site of the Magic Kingdom. Watching all the gators, sunning themselves on the shore, dive into the waters we were navigating as the boat’s noise stirred them awake was a thrill—and scary!

From a rickety wooden dock near the site of today’s Contemporary Resort, we were taken by speedboat to Riles Island in the middle of Bay Lake, where we saw our first armadillos, and several snake skins apparently left by the hunters whose shack on the island was used during hunting expeditions for deer, wild boar and wild turkey—a kind of private preserve on private property they “owned” only by illegal poaching.

Of course the land was often very wet. To me, this could be quite spectacular, especially as I looked down from the helicopters on the cypress trees standing off shore in Bay Lake, entirely surrounded by water. Yet the engineers, with their soil borings, were finding all the challenges of building in wetlands. Near that yellow “X” in the middle of the Magic Kingdom to be, John Hench dug a hole about one foot deep. When we returned the next morning, the hole was filled with water—a visual demonstration that impressed all of us desertdwelling Californians.

Almost immediately, the WED designers began to wield their influence:

• The Corps of Engineers had dug 50 yards or so of the first wide drainage canal, following the basic premise that a straight line is the most direct path—perhaps related to retired Major General Potter’s six years as governor general of the Panama Canal Zone. John Hench immediately drew an overlay on the plans, creating a curving channel that looked on paper like a slithering snake.
  
  
• Bill Martin, who was to become the overall art director for the Magic Kingdom, suggested the key idea for dealing with the wetlands between the Ticket and Transportation Center and the Magic Kingdom: Create a “lake,” later named the Seven Seas Lagoon, and use the earthen material removed as fill to raise the level of the Magic Kingdom 14 feet. By creating higher ground for the Park, this not only made the Magic Kingdom an iconic visual destination, it enabled one of Walt’s Epcot ideas: the creation of “Utilidors” under the Magic Kingdom. These 12- foot wide, 10-foot high corridors became the location for underground utilities, and the opportunity for an amazing backstage staging area, housing a whole world of cast member services and facilities: costuming, cafeterias, maintenance, audio-visual and other electronics, etc.
  
  
• Bill Evans, by then one of the most respected landscape authorities in the country after his pioneering accomplishments at Disneyland, had already established a tree farm when we arrived that October. He was experimenting with a variety of tree and plant materials not native to Florida, including California redwoods (did not do well) and several varieties of eucalyptus. “There are over 500 varieties of eucalyptus in Australia,” Bill lectured us. “We should be able to find some that do well here.” And he did, for use as windbreaks and background screening.
  
  
• The “two Joes,” Fowler and Potter, responded to a major challenge concerning the water quality of Bay Lake, the natural body of water that was to become the site of the Contemporary Resort. The issue: All those beautiful cypress tree roots, on and off the Walt Disney World property, stained the water to a dark brown. The solution: Drain the entire lake and control the water running into it! And they did. A bonus that resulted was the discovery, at the bottom of the drained lake, of the sugar white sand that now lines the beautiful beaches at the Contemporary Resort and around Bay Lake. Like so much of Florida, the ocean had receded from this land eons ago, leaving its hidden treasures.

Even though we were dealing initially with only a fraction of the 27,400 acres Disney originally acquired, this area alone was almost five times the size of Disneyland. Nearly all of it was flat—after all, the highest point in the whole state of Florida, in Walton County, is only 345 feet above sea level. With nothing on the land, distances were hard to judge, and the relationships of objects, i.e. structures, was very difficult to relate.

To aid the designers, on two different occasions, helium-filled balloons were raised at key locations at and around the Magic Kingdom. They marked the location of the entrance to the Park, the Castle, the Contemporary and Polynesian Resorts, and the Ticket and Transportation Center (TTC). At that location, where guests would arrive to park their cars and board Disney transit systems—monorails, ferryboats and trams—the designers and Disney executives could be elevated 15 or 20 feet in high reach construction equipment and begin to appraise the visual distance between key attractions and locations. It was extremely informative—and sometimes frightening. Often the distances appeared beyond connection and relationship.

The challenges became obvious. For example, Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle, 77 feet tall, would totally disappear when viewed from one mile away— the distance from the TTC to the Castle in the Magic Kingdom. The solution: Design a Castle reaching skyward 189 feet, just short of the 200 foot height that requires a red light to warn aircraft of a tall object.

The opinions expressed in this piece are solely those of the author.

© by Marty Sklar. All rights reserved. No reproduction without written permission of the author.

Look for Part Two of this excerpt in the October issue of Funworld, in which Sklar details the creation of the iconic Disney attraction “Space Mountain.”