Ted put his knowledge of ships and his SCUBA diving skills to good use during the months prior to the opening of the Magic Kingdom.

When we arrived in Florida, Disney put us up in an apartment until we could find our own housing. I think we had to move in and out of apartments about five times. It was sort of a pain, but it all worked out. The last move that we made was in with Kevin Donnelly and his wife. He owned a house on Wauseon Bay on the Windermere chain lakes. He said he had a bedroom that he wasn’t using and offered it to us. We were planning to have a house built in Windermere, a quaint, quiet community, on a corner lot that we had admired. I didn’t have enough money to buy the lot outright and my parents couldn’t help us, so I had to borrow $2,500 from one of my dad’s close friends. The lot was $5,000. The lot was on Third and Oakdale and it was the first house on that block of 10 lots. Once I had obtained the lot, I was able to finance the house through the bank.

My dad, who was in home construction, had given me drawings for the house and we found a contractor in Florida and had the house built from those drawings. It was nice of Kevin Donnelly and his wife Joan to give us the opportunity to live in Windermere. It was a short drive to work, about eight miles on the back roads. Windermere was peaceful, with beautiful lakes to enjoy and hardly any crime…and it’s pretty much stayed the same to this day.

There were about 26 of us who came out to work in operations from California. We all had specific jobs. We still get together from time to time. We’ve remained close friends and we love to meet up for Christmas, Mexican food, and meatloaf.

At work, I settled in with Pete Crimmings. There were three of us—Steve Baker, who was in charge of the parking lots; Tom Nabbe had the monorail system; and I had the watercraft. In talking to Pete, I asked him whether he had any special way he wanted things done. “No, you just get in there and learn everything you can about the boats. Get to know those boats backwards and forwards and learn how to drive them.” So I went to the dry dock area, where the Osceola-class side wheelers were docked. They were 200-passenger, walking I-beam steam engines, and I was in amazement. Holy crud, I said to myself. How does this thing work?

There were some maintenance people there who were the best. They started walking me through all the specs of the boat, and they gave me books to read, all the proper procedures. I took lots of notes and spent a lot of time walking in the engine room, around the side-wheeler. They weren’t very fast, maybe 5 or 6 knots. You couldn’t put one paddle wheel in forward and one in reverse. They were either both forward or both in reverse. My job was to learn how to drive them, then train other people to do it.

While the boats were being finished, there was a 34-foot, aluminum hull sport fishing boat, The Striker, that Disney had in the dry dock area. Often, I would take Disney officials and their guests on The Striker through Bay Lake and the Seven Seas Lagoon. I’d explain to them what they were looking at and what was going to be there. As the side-wheelers got completed and we were able to go out and train, Disney was also hiring new employees. When certain people with boating backgrounds were hired, they would be sent my way and I would talk to them, and if they seemed to have a little bit of knowledge about boats, I would hire them, and if they turned out to have a little more potential, I would make them my foremen.

It took quite awhile learning how to operate those steam vessels, the launches, and the Osceola-class boats. We quickly discovered that if you lost steam or fire while you were out on Bay Lake, you needed a pontoon boat nearby with a big generator. You’d call them on the radio and they’d run out and would pull up alongside, to make sure you didn’t drift too far. All the boats had 90-pound anchors and we would literally have to anchor up out on the lakes until we could fix the problem. Sometimes you’d have passengers on board that we would have to transfer to another boat. I finally got a good crew of watercraft personnel trained and got ready for opening day in October 1971.

All the boats on Seven Seas Lagoon are free-floating, with no guide rails. When high winds or a thunderstorm blew in, it could be quite harrowing. Very often, there was little or no warning to indicate bad weather was coming, so I went to Bob Matheison and suggested that Disney get radar equipment and install it in Security to warn us about approaching storms and what the intensity might be and what direction they were headed. Sure enough, the request was approved and they put in excellent equipment.

Before the park opened, anyone who knew a special skill was asked to help out wherever they could. One day, the call went out for certified SCUBA divers. I was certified, so I applied. I had some free time because my boats were still being worked on in dry dock.

They took me over to the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attraction in Fantasyland. They had filled the lagoon with water and needed to have the “fish” installed. You were given a drawing and you’d work on a certain section of the attraction at a time.

You’d go down and install the fish by putting air in a hole in the bottom of the fish and that would hold it upright. You’d then attach the monofilament lines to small eye screws on the bottom of the fish. Then you’d have to drill two small holes into the tank floor, twist in anchors, and attach the monofilament line from the fish to the anchors and set it at the proper height.

This project went on for about a week. Getting all the fish in there was really nice, but there was one problem: some of the underwater rocks and coral displays were made of fiberglass and there were lots of tiny fiberglass particles floating in the water. You’d get water in your wetsuit and you’d start to itch. I must have itched for a week after that job. In the end, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was one of the most popular attractions during Walt Disney World’s early years.

Continued in "Passport to Pixie Dust"!

One of Ted's most harrowing adventures happened not on the Jungle Cruise, not on the Rivers of America, but on the open ocean, during a killer tempest.

We began the journey back home to California, with the plywood on the windows. We rounded the Cabo rocks headed up to Cedro’s Island to get fuel. Along the way, we broke out the shotguns and we were shooting flying fish and whatever else. Just a nice, leisurely three days to Cedro’s. No incidents and the water was calm. We pulled into Cedro’s, gave everybody their booze, and topped off the fuel tanks. It was about noon when we left Cedro’s. The fueling dock was at the southeastern end of the island, which is about 15 miles long and sort of runs north to south. I was heading north when I came across a tuna boat that was anchored. Then I came across another tuna boat, then another. There’s four of them anchored. I’m asking myself, ‘Why are they anchored there? Do they know something that I don’t know?’ There were no reports of bad weather. We were pretty much on our own.

I told my dad and Gus that we were going to run for about four or five hours and if the weather changes within that time, I could come back and we’d find a place to anchor at Cedro’s, but if it happens after that time, we would be at the point of no return and would have to continue north. Everybody agreed that that would be the thing to do. So I kicked it up a little from 10 knots to 12 knots, trying to make better time. We got to our point of no return and the ocean was still very calm, but there were big 15-foot swells about 600 feet apart, and out a little farther they were growing to about 20-feet high. If any wind kicked up and we got caught up in these swells, it was not going be good.

We traveled about another four hours, well past our point of no return, and the wind started to pick up. Then it really started to pick up. Now we have whitecaps and I have to slow the boat down. The waves got bigger and they started to break. I slowed the boat down even more, to maybe five knots. I was going up these swells and then down the swells, and as I’m going down each swell, the bow would dip. And that water coming over the bows would hit the salon windows and I said, “Thank God I found that plywood. The water would have broken the windows or I would have had to turn around.” I was afraid to turn around because you couldn’t see anything.

We were in the dark, but we just wanted to make sure we stayed on course. It was about 1 o’clock in the morning when I lost all electrical power. I lost my radar, my depth finder, and all but one channel on my radio. The generator had quit working. So I switched everything over to batteries, because the engines would charge the batteries. In the aft part of the boat, there was a sealed compartment below decks, where the generator was located. I pulled the hatch off and it was filled with water right to the top. Not good. No wonder the boat was acting so funny.

Inside of this compartment in the bilge were two diaphragm par pumps, one in each corner to pump out the water in this section, but occasionally, since it’s a diaphragm pump and not a centrifugal pump, you’d get particles of debris or wood in it and it doesn’t pump efficiently, it only pumps at maybe 10 percent. I figured that when the water leaked in from the deck and started sloshing around, and since it was a new boat, some sawdust got in the pumps and messed them up. I took off my jacket and my shoes and stripped down to my underwear and jumped down into the hole with a five-gallon bucket and my dad said, “What are you doing, Bud?”—he always called me Bud—and I said if we don’t get this fucking water out of here, we’re going down. I’ve got to get this water out of here. I told Jesus what course to stay on and told him to do the best he can. I started bailing with a five-gallon bucket and I soon realized that wasn’t working.

I knew I had to fix those pumps, but they were under water. I asked Gus to get me a Phillips head screwdriver because I knew that the screws on the power pump were Phillips head machine screws and there were two on each side that held it together. I told my dad that I was going to go down and somehow take these pumps apart under water, get ’em cleaned, and put ’em back together. I knew if I dropped a screw or something, we’d be doomed. And my dad said, “You’ll never be able to do that,” and I tell my dad we don’t have much choice; I’ve got to give it a try. So I held my breath, went down, and found the pumps.

Continued in "Passport to Pixie Dust"!