If I could sit down with any historical figure, I think I’d choose Walt Disney. I’ve admired him for as long as I can remember—maybe because I got to step into the Magic Kingdom before it ever officially opened. I didn’t know it then, but I was walking through the still-wet paint of someone’s dream. And from the first time I remember seeing Mary Poppins in a theater—probably around 1973—I’ve been hooked on the kind of storytelling Walt believed in: joyful, imaginative, hopeful, and created with an almost stubborn sense of wonder.
Walt had a kind of vision that didn’t settle. My stepdad once told me a story about him that fits perfectly with everything we know about the construction of Walt Disney World. When Walt was touring the prospective site in Florida, he looked at the natural lakes and asked why the water looked so dirty. The man giving the tour explained matter-of-factly that Florida lakes had a layer of muck on the bottom—that’s just how they were. Walt’s response? “Not in my park.”
And because he said it, the engineers drained the lakes, dug out the muck, and lined the bottoms with white sand so the refilled water would sparkle. Who even thinks like that? Who looks at something everyone accepts as “just the way it is” and says, “We can do better”? That was Walt. He wanted guests to feel the magic before they ever set foot on Main Street, U.S.A., and he was willing to move literal tons of earth to make it happen.
I’d love to talk to him about that kind of vision—the kind that refuses to settle for “good enough,” the kind that can see a kingdom in a swamp. I’d ask him what fueled that optimism, how he kept his imagination alive through setbacks, failures, bankruptcies, and armies of doubters. And I’d want to know how he handled the weight of building something that mattered, something meant to delight generations he’d never meet.
Honestly, I think he’d be stunned by how expensive it is to visit the Magic Kingdom today. But he’d be thrilled—maybe even humbled—that the experience he imagined is still intact. That people still feel something when they walk under the railroad station and see that first glimpse of Main Street. That the dream he drew on paper became a place that millions still call magical.
And maybe that’s why I’d want to meet him. Because Walt reminds me that imagination isn’t childish—it’s courageous. And sometimes the most powerful thing a person can say is: “Not in my park.”
Copyright © 2025 Doug DeBolt.
