Magic treasure
A collection of Walt Disney World history can be found in the downtown Orlando library archives.
Up in the downtown Orlando library’s fourth floor, if you know where to look, there is a collection of Walt Disney World history that’s enough to make a Disney fanatic’s head spin.
In the 1960s, when the secret was out that Disney was building the Magic Kingdom, the librarians began amassing their historical archive.
“From the beginning, the librarians knew Disney was important,” said librarian Jane Tracy.
They cut out newspaper articles. They saved original press releases and speeches. They stored away black-and-white photographs of the early days and of rides that no longer exist today.
Now in 2018, in an era where most everything seems to be digital and viewable from a screen, some of the library’s Disney Collection is only available in a row of filing cabinets. The yellowing newspaper clippings and other artifacts you can hold in your hand feel particularly unique.
The librarians also recently began displaying more of their Disney books — everything from a guide on drawing Disney princesses to Epcot’s 1993 plumbing code.
The collection helps preserve the story of Walt Disney World for researchers, Disney fans and the general public, said Matthew David, the library’s learning central manager.
“(Disney) is something that really defines Orlando and Central Florida,” David said. “We as librarians, we’re very interested in preserving things that are important to people.”
Occasionally, a scholar writing a book on the history of Walt Disney World researches in the library.
Or a family stumbles onto the fourth floor, which also holds a computer lab and other reference material, and discovers the Disney archive.
In the filing cabinets are snapshots of a different time.
A 1968 book that says it’s private property of Walt Disney Co. shows early drawings of the Magic Kingdom — dubbed the “New Disneyland Park” — and the “Asian Resort,” which was never actually built.
“For many years, from Walt on down, we thought there should be only one Disneyland,” said Roy Disney at a 1969 press conference in Orlando, according to a transcript of the speech that’s part of the library’s collection. “But as time passed, experience told us that there were about 100 million people in the east and Midwest and South who would never get out West, and therefore would never have the opportunity to see Disneyland.”
The library, which received many of the documents from Walt Disney Co., keeps glossy black-and-white photographs of the Monorail under construction in 1971.
Many of the theme park’s rides, long since faded away and built over with new attractions, are also remembered in the archive, such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
There’s a cheerful pop-up book featuring a rainbow and swimmers to advertise River Country, Disney’s first water park that’s been closed for more than a decade.
A trip to the park was cheaper back then too, the archive reminds us.
A juicy New York cut sirloin steak and a baked potato cost $15.25, according to a 1983 Contemporary Resort room service menu. Nowadays, a grilled beef tenderloin runs for about $40 for the Contemporary’s room service.
The library also doesn’t gloss over the tragic news that happened over the years.
Newspaper clippings and court documents kept in the filing cabinets tell stories about death and lawsuits and the moments that changed people’s lives.
While a night parade went on at the Magic Kingdom, a 4-year-old boy drowned in the moat surrounding Cinderella Castle in 1977. His family was awarded $1.5 million following a wrongful death lawsuit, an appeals judge ruled in a 1986 opinion — which is placed in the archives and can be viewed at the library but not checked out.
Retired Rollins College professor Richard Foglesong spent about a month researching the Disney Collection in the mid-1990s for his book “Married to the Mouse.”
“I had the feeling I was the only person using them at the time. Libraries are like that,” Foglesong said.
Reading Disney press releases and planning reports and looking at pictures gave him a basic understanding of Disney’s timeline and how the company characterized its projects back then, Foglesong said.
The collection helped. The library got a shout out high up in Foglesong’s acknowledgments at the end of his book.