Exploring Disney World With My Father

Daddy and I went to Disney World for the first time in March of 1986. I was 31, and he was 67, but we could easily have been 5 and 10 years old.

After 30 years of working on engines at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, Daddy was very happy to be going on a plane, as he had never done that before. I was an old pro, having been on a plane the previous year.

Air travel was so easy then...you just gave your ticket to the agent at the desk, he stamped it, gave you back your boarding pass, and took your luggage. You did not even have to show ID. Imagine doing that today!

Boarding the plane, Daddy asked the pilot (in those days they greeted boarding passengers at the door) what type of engine the plane had. The pilot answered, then looked impressed when Daddy responded, “Good engine” and gave some information about the engine which was meaningless to me. Clearly, though, the pilot understood, and smiled as Daddy concluded, “That's one of mine. I worked at Pratt & Whitney, and we built them to stay in the sky.”

After a flight that found both of us chattering away happily to nearby fellow travelers, both on the plane and later on the bus, from the airport, we finally got to our resort. Daddy's choice was The Polynesian, and it's been my favorite resort ever since that first trip.

Once we had checked in, I think it began to dawn on both of us that we were finally there, after months of looking forward to it, and we exclaimed, “We're going to have a ball!” We took our luggage to our room by ourselves. Our “longhouse” was just around the corner from the side door of the Great Ceremonial House, where the check-in desk was located, so dragging our wheeled-luggage along behind us presented no hardship.

Once in the room, we quickly got into our shorts, and that was when we discovered the three-sided mirror above the vanity table (a center mirror with two smaller mirrors set in the wall at 90 degree angles to it). Yes, Daddy and I played with the mirror. We swore never to tell Ma what clowns we acted like, waving our fingers in front of the mirror, and watching hundreds of reflections bouncing back and forth on the side mirrors, but of course we told her. She was not as amused as we were; I guess you had to be there.

We had many delicious meals in Disney World, but there are a few that I have to mention because they made for such great memories, and Daddy and I talked about them long afterwards.

We'll start with Captain Cook's, which was, and probably still is, located on the first floor of the Great Ceremonial House. It was still on our first day there, and we had really worked up an appetite playing with that crazy mirror! I grabbed a booth for us, while Daddy ordered our cheeseburgers, fries and sodas. He came to the booth, chuckling because the fries and burgers did not come together; everything was separate. He joked that the milk and sugar for coffee the next morning would probably show up as separate charges.

We were speechless for a few seconds when the counter guy brought our meals over to us. The burgers looked like two meatloaves on the plates, and I think they fried a whole bag of shoestring potatoes just for us! My father deadpanned, “I'm glad I ordered us the double cheeseburgers”, but I think I laughed for a full minute. It took a long time to eat all that food, but we were up to the task.

Lite Bite was a little take-out place in the Village; it's long gone now, and the Village Marketplace is now Downtown Disney, but it was wonderful then. I can still see Daddy and I on our first night in Disney World sitting there by the water, burgers and hot coffee in our hands, watching the fog roll in over the water. We could see the Empress Lily, now Fulton's Crab House, in the distance, and we watched until all we could make out were the lights from the ship. It was so peaceful, and made both of us so happy, that it became a memory we revisited many times.

Another often-revisited memory was of the man we saw in every eatery we visited one day. He was a big man, and sat on two chairs; he had three of everything he ordered that particular day. Daddy pointed out that, if he was eating three pastries in the morning, three sandwiches at Aunt Polly's at noon, and three burgers at the Coral Isle Cafe at night, he might be getting his stomach in shape to eat us! Again, he delivered the line with the straight face of a hangman, while I laughed like a fool.

Probably not a lot of people were amused by the swarms of seagulls that appeared, as if by magic, every time food and people appeared together. My father and I often joked that we could laugh at a funeral; we took our humor when it was there to take, no matter what the circumstances. Having said that, it was not any great surprise that we found one particular “walking and eating at the same time” experience hysterical.

We were eating hot dogs at the Magic Kingdom, when a man walking slowly ahead of us, hot dog in hand, got swarmed by the gulls just seconds before we did. Instead of holding his lunch closer against his body, the way Daddy and I did when the gulls surrounded us, this guy held the food up in the air...think “Hail Mary” pass, and you have a pretty accurate visual. A seagull grabbed his hot dog right out of the bun, and probably flew a mile before the guy reacted. At that point, clearly surprised still, he turned around to Daddy and I and asked, “Did you see which one took it?” Not surprisingly, at least not to me, Daddy, replied, “Why, are you going to fly after him?”

Another memory of Disney World that I treasure, is of a little boy who called himself Pennsylvania Frank. As it happened, he and his parents were also staying at The Polynesian Resort, so we saw them there often, and chatted easily together when waiting in the same line at one of the parks.

The “Speed Pass” did not exist back then, and it was easy to spend half an hour waiting in line; it could have been longer, but I never gave it much thought, to be honest. Anyway, Pennsylvania Frank took a real shine to my father, and the two of them would talk for the entire time we were in line. His parents thanked Daddy once for being such a nice man; they joked that they had a hard time putting up with Frank sometimes, and his patience put them to shame. Daddy just smiled, and said, “I've been a father for a lot of years, and now I'm a grandfather. This is what I do.”