A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: First Families at Disney World

By Dave Shute

Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians and author of Jim’s Gems in The easy Guide, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

FIRST FAMILIES OF WALT DISNEY WORLD

By Jim Korkis

A tradition started at Disneyland on July 18, 1955 was to pick a “First Family” to be honored as the first official guests to enter a Disney theme park and to reward them with lifetime passes.

That same tradition continued at Walt Disney World when the Magic Kingdom opened on October 1, 1971.

The lucky sandy-haired father was William “Bill” Windsor Jr. from nearby Lakeland, Florida, who was accompanied by his pretty blue-eyed wife, Marty, and their sons Jay, who was 3 years old, and Lee, who was nearly 19 months old. It turned out they had arrived so early that the entire family had slept in their car overnight at the nearest roadside rest area in order to be among the first into the parking lot.

For the opening of Epcot on October 1, 1982, Richard Cason, his wife Paula, and their four children (Jennifer, 16; Chris, 15; Ricky, 14; and Jody, 13) were the first family. They were from Winter Park and got up at 4:30 a.m. to arrive at the park at six a.m. only to find the gates wouldn’t open to the parking lot until seven a.m.

Cason said he “drove around the loop” before finally making it into the parking lot. “I just told the kids to get out and run for the gate,” he told reporters at the Opening Ceremonies. They received a silver pass from Chairman and CEO of Walt Disney Productions, Card Walker.

Unfortunately, due to limited space, only the first family, Walker, the press and a handful of invited guests were allowed inside the gates to witness the opening ceremony. All the other guests that morning were kept outside and only saw the festivities on that evening’s newscasts.

For Disney MGM Studios that opened on May 1, 1989 (now Disney’s Hollywood Studios), the official “first family” was Allan and Mary Guiterrz (both 37) and their teen daughters Gina (16), Dawn (14) and Mary’s father Marshall Busser (61) from York, Pennsylvania. They had waited six hours to be the first ones.

Allan was a carpenter and Mary a postal worker and part-time belly dancer. They were greeted by Michael Eisner and Bob Hope who escorted them down Hollywood Boulevard. They commented that they were spending so much time with interviews that they worried they might not have time to see the park before they had to leave.

For the opening of Disney’s Animal Kingdom on April 22, 1998, by five a.m., 350 cars were waiting in the parking plaza. The park was scheduled to open at seven a.m. but there was such a crush of guests that Disney opened an hour earlier after a short ceremony that featured the song Circle of Life from the movie The Lion King (1994) and then had to close the park again seventy-five minutes later.

The first guests through the gate were Brenda Herr of St. Petersburg, Florida, her husband, Damon Chepren and their twenty-two month old son, Devon, who all napped for only two hours the night before cramped in a Mazda 626, to ensure a spot at the front.

“She was determined, and she let me know darn well we were going to make it happen,” Chepren said. “When we were waiting in the car, she looked me in the eyes and said, `You will run’.”

DAK also paid tribute to the first “Honorary First Family”, Michael Werikhe and his daughters, Acacia, 9, and Kora, 7, in a ceremony at the park’s Conservation Station. Werikhe was known throughout the world as “Rhino Man,” for his one-man crusade to boost public awareness of the plight of the black rhinoceros.

Roy E. Disney presented Werikhe with a giant “Key of Life,” in the shape of The Tree of Life, the park’s massive icon. In addition, Walt Disney World made a contribution in support of Werikhe’s conservation work.

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Thanks, Jim! And come back next Friday for even more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew, which reprints much material first written for this site, and The Vault of Walt: Volume 4, and his contributions to The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, all published by Theme Park Press.

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