A: You have contacted the right people. The fact is that only a very small percentage of the thousands of people who worked for Disney ever had their photos taken at work. Sorry you were unsuccessful.

A: Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom had a Surprise Celebration Parade for the park’s 20th anniversary in 1991. It was based on a Party Gras parade at Disneyland; the parade performers threw out beads and coins to the audience.

A: The original version of the show that ran at the New York World’s Fair is the one that was brought to Disneyland, where it opened in July 1965. It was a duplicate Audio-Animatronics® Lincoln because the original one was still running at the fair. The show continued until it was replaced by The Walt Disney Story in 1973. It returned in 1975 as The Walt Disney Story Featuring Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. A new Lincoln slide show and animation was added in 1984, and in 2001 the show was changed to focus on the Civil War, with Lincoln reciting the Gettysburg Address. The show closed from 2005 to 2009, for a Disneyland 50th-anniversary attraction, but when Lincoln returned, a shortened version of the original speech was featured.

A: This has been suggested many times; perhaps someday we shall see it.

A: There were several structures and interesting items found throughout the property that would later become Walt Disney World. On my Spring 1971 trip to the construction site, I was shown perhaps the most unusual item discovered: the “lawnmower tree,” still located at Fort Wilderness near the Wilderness Trading Post and Marina. A manual lawnmower was left by someone at the base of a tree, which eventually grew around and through it. Nearby, on Riles Island (later Discovery Island), Bob Foster and others working on the land acquisition discovered an abandoned house (along with a dock and an operating solar water heater), which Bob describes as “a strange assemblage of rambling rooms” that had belonged to former resident “Radio Nick” Nicholson. Aside from an abandoned packing house along Bay Lake near today’s Fort Wilderness Resort—and a “not-too-well constructed house” located along the Orange and Osceola County line—another structure on the property was a “fairly newly-built house” located near an airstrip and what would become the Lake Buena Vista Club. The house, formerly owned by a relative of state senator Irlo Bronson, was visited by Walt Disney on his 1965 visit to the property and later inhabited by Phil Smith, legal counsel and the first Walt Disney World cast member, and his family until 1968. Their stories of living in the house and on the property are told in the Summer 2010 issue of Disney twenty-three magazine.