Foreword

by Sam Gennawey

Jim Korkis. Kind of a legend for us Disney geeks. For example, sitting on my desk is a large stack of Disney related books written by the man.

The first thing that I notice is the number of Post-it notes that line the edge of the pages so I can find material on that page for future reference. There is a good reason for this. For years, Jim has been my go-to-guy for anything related to Disney. I’ve quoted him in my books. I can feel comfortable that the information is reliable and factual. After all, he created the job of Disney historian.

Jim has been a good friend for many years, and lately I sense that he is on a mission. He is the guy who first noticed that Disney historical knowledge is moving more toward myth and marketing than fact.

And he is here to stop that. Jim rightly believes that truth is stranger and more interesting than fiction and continues to prove he is right in all the stories he has produced over the years. I agree.

There are a lot of WDW trivia books out there, but this is a Jim Korkis WDW story book. Many of these stories are printed for the first time based on Jim’s vast network of contacts including Disney executives, front line cast members, Reedy Creek officials, Imagineers, and others who worked at the parks for decades and had access to information that most people did not.

Ever the historian, Jim spent countless hours scouring the many different departmental libraries at Walt Disney World that were only available to members of that particular department. Some of those libraries like the ones for Feature Animation, Entertainment, and Disney University, no longer exist at all, so no one else will ever be able to use the resources Jim found there.

Because he wrote behind-the-scenes tours for guests and convention groups as part of one of his roles with Walt Disney World, Jim was given special permission to use those libraries to obtain the correct information, and we all benefit from what he discovered and now so generously shares.

All of this fact-finding is one thing. More importantly, Jim weaves together this knowledge in a way that does not destroy the magic, but enhances the understanding and appreciation of Walt Disney World. It certainly does so for me.

But this is nothing new. As I said before, Jim’s research has become a central part of my Disney library, and I am sure that is the case for many of you as well. This book will be yet another welcome and valuable addition to my personal Disney collection.

Okay, so now that I have finished this foreword, I think it is time to pack my bags, hop on a plane, visit Walt Disney World, and see things through a new perspective, thanks to these eye-opening stories that were new to me and probably for the rest of you as well.

Many thanks, Jim.

Introduction

“You should write a book!”

Whenever I am with friends and family visiting Walt Disney World, I can’t help pointing out some of the interesting stories and details. Without fail, they usually ask if there is some sort of book that recounts this information, and I have to tell them that no such book exists.

Besides my own personal research and interest in Walt Disney World, I used to work there writing tours for guests, convention groups, internal cast member groups, and different departments as an instructor for Disney Adult Discoveries and Disney Institute. I not only facilitated those tours, but also trained others to give them.

I always had to make sure I had more information than what was shared during the tour in case someone had particular questions. I put together big binders with that additional information to help those who gave the tours. Once I was laid off five years ago, those binders disappeared almost immediately as having no value, despite them being filled with short interviews I had done with Imagineers and executives intimately connected to Walt Disney World.

I always went to primary sources, cross-checked the information with the Disney Archives and the multiple department libraries on property, and even then had to be constantly alert in case something changed.

I always hoped someone would indeed write a book about all the stories and details, because they were fascinating. I tried to actively encourage several others to do so with no success.

However, over the years, while there have been multiple books about Disneyland, most of the books that have appeared about Walt Disney World are usually trivia books.

Since most of these authors never worked at Walt Disney World nor had access to the information that I did, too often the material is out of date, misleading, incomplete, or outright false.

The same “secrets” seem to be cut-and-pasted to different books and websites over and over in the belief that since they appeared in print somewhere, they must be true.

At a high profile Disney event at the Contemporary Resort, I was served by a waiter who had worked at WDW for forty years. He confidently told me that Dick Nunis, the former chairman of Walt Disney Attractions, had told him that the primary reason Walt Disney built in Florida was that Walt once worked as a postman in Kissimmee.

That was not true, and I am sure that Dick Nunis never said anything to that effect. Walt’s father, Elias, who lived briefly in the central Florida area during the late 1800s, held various jobs there, including hotel manager and rural postman on a buckboard in Kissimmee, but Walt himself never worked as a postman in Florida. Nunis may have been referring to Walt’s father, if indeed he said anything at all.

It was obvious that the waiter had misheard or misremembered the information, and now shared it with great authority without verifying the facts. A little knowledge is often a very dangerous thing for Disney fans.

Walt had many reasons for choosing to build Walt Disney World in Orlando, from the weather to tourist patterns to inexpensive land. His dad’s job as a postman in Kissimmee was not one of those reasons, nor was the fact that his parents got married in the area.

The waiter refused to be dissuaded by this information. He knew what he had heard and no one had ever corrected him. If anything, he had great pity for my ignorance and lack of common sense to accept the truth.

Just this last year, I was on a tour where a Magic Kingdom Guest Relations guide proudly pointed to the upper window of the train station to tell our group that it was there where Walt Disney used to sit to observe the park. After the tour, I privately pointed out that Walt had died in 1966 and that the Walt Disney World’s train station had not opened until 1971.

Once again, the person just smiled condescendingly. Since currently I did not work at Walt Disney World, she thought I was just too stupid to know the real story. Of course, she didn’t want to embarrass a guest by telling him that he was stupid, but felt that the information in the script she had been given must have been checked by higher-ups somewhere, and was true.

Walt Disney World cast members are constantly changing Disney history, and not necessarily for the better. Cast members at the Haunted Mansion created the names for the hitchhiking ghosts that seem to be accepted by everyone as canon. But Imagineer Marc Davis, who designed the ghosts, told me that they never had names, nor was there ever any intention to give them names beyond “hitchhiking ghosts”.

WDW cast members also created the myth that Gracey is the master of the mansion. That isn’t true, according to Imagineer X. Atencio who wrote the epitaphs on the tombstones in the graveyard, including the one for “Master Gracey”. Atencio told me that the tombstone was supposed to be an in-joke about the boyish nature of Imagineer Yale Gracey. “Master” was a term used for a young boy who was not old enough to be called “mister”.

Cast members also insist on rearranging three of the plates on the table at the banquet so they form a “Hidden Mickey”, despite Imagineers’ constant efforts to change it back to the original configuration. Even though the Imagineers physically marked the table to indicate where the plates should go, the Hidden Mickey continually returns.

Other WDW cast members have fabricated stories that are told over and over to their peers and guests with an air of authority. Guests have been entertained by all sorts of falsehoods by bus drivers and accept the information as true because it is being shared by a cast member. Often these stories end up on Wikipedia or Google, which gives them an added sense of veracity to some people because they appear in print or on the internet.

So, I finally decided I should indeed write a book and get into print the actual stories, and have them available for people who want to verify what they’ve heard, with a reliable source.

These stories are only “secret” because they were often never told to the guests or even the cast members in most cases. That’s one of the reasons some cast members made up their own versions to fill that unknown void.

This book contains just a small sample of the many stories about Walt Disney World. They are self-contained so can be read in any order, but that means there may be occasional repetition of some facts. There are several stories that relate to things that no longer exist, but might be of interest to long-time visitors who once experienced them or who enjoy history.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to make up their own facts, especially when they conflict with the actual facts. Preserving the truth about Walt Disney World has become a greater and greater challenge as the years pass, people who know the truth die or their memories start to get confused, and the Disney company does not aggressively share the real stories with cast members and guests.

Sometimes even the Disney company itself no longer knows the real stories. In the rush to complete a project on an impossible deadline, there was often no time to properly document the project or make any last-minute changes in a document if they occurred. As soon as one challenge was completed, it was immediately off to a new project.

The philosophy was always “we’ll do that later”, but “later” never came. I saw it happen many times on WDW projects in which I was involved.

This book is intended to be a foundation to help others do further research and to enrich their understanding of the most magical place on earth.

Please feel free to share these true stories with your friends and family. Everyone will think you are the Disney expert, and not one of them will ask if you heard the story from Jim Korkis, but they may ask if you checked it first with a WDW bus driver, waiter, or tour guide who had told them something quite different.