No Disney World without General Joe
ORLANDO, Fla. — The tourists at Disney World are too preoccupied with the majestic Cinderella Castle ahead and the marching band playing “Let It Go” to notice the words in the secondfloor window above the candy store.
“General Joe’s Building Permits, Licensed In Florida since ’66,” it says over the fake business on the Magic Kingdom’s Main Street USA.
“If you ask anybody that goes to Walt Disney World, who is Joe Potter? ... They won’t know much about him,” said Disney author and historian Christopher Lucas. ”Without him, there’d be no Disney World.”
Missing Walt Disney’s star name recognition, Gen. William “Joe” Potter was the force that turned a swampy Florida wetland into the Magic Kingdom. Potter was the architect of Disney World’s government, the mastermind behind the hidden tunnel system at the park and the reason why Disney has no mosquito problem today, Lucas said.
Potter died at age 83 in 1988 after remaining in Central Florida for the rest of his life post-Disney retirement, but the memories still run deep with his daughter and grandson who live in Orlando today.
Potter’s daughter, Jo Ann Heine, tells stories of how Walt and the general, two good friends, made bets with each other to stop smoking and how Potter once shared a golf cart ride with Dolly Parton at Epcot’s grand opening.
Attorney Kent Hipp, the general’s grandson, displays a photograph of Walt Disney holding him as an baby in his downtown Orlando office. Hipp discovered a handwritten budget for the Magic Kingdom drawn up by the general when going through Potter’s belongings years after his death.
Taming the swamp
In his early 60s, the graying retired U.S. Army general led the massive construction project to get Disney’s land ready to build a theme park. The bulldozers tore through, uprooting trees, and crews tamed what was an alligator- and snake-infested swamp of Central Florida in the late 1960s.
This was an old Florida back then, more rugged, wild and so far away from the well-manicured Disney grounds known today. On a boat ride through the canal, Potter and his team brought a gun because snakes hung from the trees, his daughter recounted.
To make Disney World, something had to be done about Bay Lake.
The water was “a dark-brown color which would not be used for swimming because it would turn bleached blond hair
brown and white swimming suits would be grey,” Potter recalled in his oral history recorded by the U.S. Corps of Engineers.
His men pumped out 5 million cubic yards of the sand, added well water and cleaned the lake’s bottom to turn into a pristine lake.
Potter’s team also built the 200acre lagoon by the Polynesian Hotel.
Like a good military man, Potter had listened to his commander, Walt Disney. He complained how hard it was to maintain the fantasy in Disneyland when realities like garbage dumpsters or employee areas couldn’t be completely hidden away, Lucas said.
Potter’s workaround: Build an underground tunnel system at Florida’s Magic Kingdom.