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We’re approaching the 64th anniversary of Disneyland’s opening, and the number of former cast members remaining from 1955 keeps getting smaller. Known as Club 55, this group saw the park at the beginning and have amazing stories about those experiences. Tom Nabbe was just 12 years old when he sold newspapers outside the park beginning in July of 1955. His career at Disney lasted all the way until 2003, and it included many important moments.
Nabbe is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his incredible journey working for Disney. Walt Disney hired him directly to play Tom Sawyer at Disneyland in 1956. Nabbe was the face of Tom Sawyer Island, where you could actually fish in the late ‘50s. Following his time as Tom Sawyer, Nabbe worked in ride operations for a wide range of attractions at the park. Amazingly, this was just the starting point for his career at Disney.
After time in the military, Nabbe returned to Disney and moved to Florida to manage the opening of the Monorail. He also closely worked on openings at Tomorrowland, the refresh of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the addition of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. He played a key role in the construction of EPCOT Center, managed warehousing and distribution services at Walt Disney World, and participated in the Disneyland Paris opening.
I loved the chance to speak with Nabbe on this episode and learn more about his background. We discuss some anecdotes that appear in his book, which is a must-read for any Disney fan. He was named a Disney Legend in 2005 and has so many great stories about his experiences.
Show Notes: Tom Nabbe
Learn more about Tom Nabbe and order a personalized copy of Tom’s book at his official website.
Order a copy of From Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer to Disney Legend: The Adventures of Tom Nabbe on paperback or Kindle through Amazon.
Note: Photos in this post are included with the permission of Tom Nabbe.
Transcript
Dan Heaton: Hey there. Today, I am speaking with Tom Sawyer himself, the great Tom Nabbe, about nearly 50 years working for the Disney Company, going back to the early days of Disneyland in 1955. You’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
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Dan Heaton: Thanks for joining me here on Episode 73 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. There are so many amazing stories from the history of the Disney Parks, but few of them go all the way back to the beginning. The Club 55-ers are a small but very distinguished group that worked at Disneyland all the way back to July of 1955 when the park opened. One member of that club is Tom Nabbe, who started out as a kid selling newspapers outside the park and ultimately was hired by Walt Disney himself. Think of how rarely we can hear that today to play Tom Sawyer on the new Tom Sawyer Island at Disneyland in 1956. That’s really just the start of Tom’s career. That right there would be enough for me to want to talk with him, but he has so much more.
He went and worked at Walt Disney World in managing the monorails when that park was opening. Then Tom Sawyer Island and Tomorrowland in the ‘70s, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, and then the big job of opening Epcot Center. He was closely involved with basically having so many of the items that were needed for that park shipped in with a really cool system, including Spaceship Earth and some of the other Future World pavilions that we love.
Then he went on and worked in warehousing a distribution at Walt Disney World, did some work at Disneyland Paris, and was ultimately named a Disney Legend in 2005. He also has a window on Main Street at Walt Disney World. If that wasn’t enough, you can also learn so much about Tom from his book, From Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer to Disney Legend, the Adventures of Tom Nabbe, which is available through Theme Park Press, and I highly recommend it.
It’s a quick read, but it’s filled with lots of really cool stories from Tom’s career. This was a really fun podcast to record. Tom is a super nice guy and also a great storyteller, and he had me cracking up. You’ll probably hear it on the show a bunch of times with some of his fun stories from so much time working for Disney in a lot of different capacities. Tom’s career in a sense tracked right along with the growth of the Company, which was also really exciting for me to hear. So let’s get to it. Let’s go talk to Tom Nabbe.
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Dan Heaton: Well, let’s start near the beginning. Even before you became Tom Sawyer, I know that you visited Disneyland or were outside on the opening press day. So what was that experience like being there at that day when you were young?
Tom Nabbe: Well, you really have to go back a little bit farther than that. It started with the Disneyland program. My mother was a sort of starlet wannabe, and she’s very much into Hollywood premieres, and she got very enamored with Walt on the Disneyland show, and my stepfather had been in the service, and so she decided to go down to Anaheim and see if they could find a house on the GI Bill. So Disneyland sort of took her to Anaheim.
The GI Bill got us a house and we were about seven tenths of a mile away from Disneyland. That was in December of 1954, so about eight months before the park opened. When I got to Anaheim, I had a newspaper route in Los Angeles. When I got to Anaheim, I wanted to get a newspaper route so I could earn some money. They basically told me it was a rural routes and you had to be at least 16 and have a driver’s license and a car.
I was only 12, so that wasn’t going to happen. But I did meet a gentleman from the Herald Examiner that said, you know, we’ll give you a Sunday paper route if you want to do that. I said, well, sure. The Sunday newspapers back in that time frame were big newspapers, 40, 50 sections in the paper, and they weighed a pound and a half to two pounds. So I established a Sunday paper route, and then the paper manager would give me any papers he had left over.
As soon as I finished my regular customers, then I’d ride my bicycle over to Disneyland to the gate and sell Sunday newspapers to the construction workers when they were going home and got that, that was no problem. That was sort of a slam dunk. Everybody wanted a paper. People actually read the paper back then when I was selling the newspapers at the gate, and they had the a concession on Main Street at Disneyland called the Castle News.
They were going to publish a newspaper called the Disneyland News. He basically told me, after the park opens, I’ll be out there every morning around seven o’clock, and if you want to sell newspapers, stop by and we’ll set you up with newspapers. If you sell a hundred newspapers outside the park, we’ll let you go inside and continue to sell. So that’s how I sort of got involved in the opening of Disneyland. Then, like I said earlier, my mother was going to all the premiere opening. She’s that lady standing behind the barricade with an autograph book. So on the press opening on July 17, guess who’s there with their autograph book? I’m there trying to get a sneak preview view of the Autopia cars. You could sort of see the garage through the Harbor Gate. Boy, I really wanted to drive those Autopia cars.
My mother was getting autographs and she got an autograph from Danny Thomas. And he said, have you been in the park? And she says, oh no, we weren’t invited. He says, well, I got a couple extra tickets. Would you like to have ’em? And boy, that made my mother’s day to be guests of Danny Thomas to go to the press opening of Disneyland. So we went into the park. By the time we got into the park, the first thing I want to do is beeline over to Tomorrowland to drive those Autopia cars. But boy, once we got in, oh, got everything was broke down, we got over to Tomorrowland, nothing was running. We did ride the carousel in Fantasyland. I would think it’s probably the trashiest I’ve ever seen the Disney Park in my entire 50-year career.
I think Walt saw the same thing, I think at that time, I think cleanliness went right to the top of his requirements. So it was show courtesy, capacity, and cleanliness was right there, and that’s where that developed. So I’m a newspaper boy on the 18th, my neighbor and I went over and stood in line and bought a ticket to go in the park. I think it was 60 cents, 50 cents, somewhere in that neighborhood.
That’s the only time I can ever remember buying a ticket to go to a Disney Park was on July 18th, 1955. So I went in as guest of Danny Thomas on the 17th, went in as a day guest on the 18th, went to work selling newspapers for Joe and Ray on the 19th of July, and selling a hundred papers outside was a slam dunk. God, it was great. Papers went for 10 cents a copy. They got seven. I got three and went and started my life out as a subcontractor.
Dan Heaton: So that’s crazy that you only paid that one time. So I know you were there selling newspapers for a while. How did it change where you were ultimately were able to become Disney’s Tom Sawyer for the park?
Tom Nabbe: Well, that summer sold papers through the summer. One of the advantages I had was I’ve always been very tenacious and a go-getter, and I used to, if you go to Disneyland or any of the other parks, the souvenir stand on the left hand side is called the news stand. Well, it was originally a news stand at Disneyland, so it carried all the newspapers, the locals and LA County and San Diego County.
One of the deals that Joan Ray would do would get newspapers for Eddie Meck. And Eddie Meck was the manager of publicity. Eddie, me, if he weighed a hundred pounds soaking wood, I’d be surprised. But I developed a relationship and Joe and Ray would clean out the newspaper with all the ads and stuff and only send up the heart of the paper, and I’d carry those up to Eddie’s office. So I got to know the publicity people quite well.
Anytime they had a publicity shot, Eddie, he’d say, hey, go get that redheaded kid. Go get that Nabbe guy. We’ll use him in this shot that all-American boy. So I was in a lot of publicity shots back in that timeframe. One of the shots that I don’t know if you went to my website or not, but was with Milton Berle and Jerry Lewis on, and that was August of 1955. So somewhere around September, somebody said to me and said, Walt’s made a decision.
He is going to build Tom Sawyer’s Island on the Rivers of America, and you look just like Tom Sawyer should ask him for a job. I thought that was one heck of an idea. Walt was in the park quite frequently. He’d come down on Fridays and spent Friday night, Saturday night in the apartment on Main Street above the fire station, and then go back up to the studio on Sunday so he could be there for Monday morning.
So he was a frequent visitor that was in the park and he was out. He talked to the guest and talked to the employees, and he was out amongst everybody until he got inundated with autograph hounds. Well, in turn, I tracked him down. I told him I heard he was going to build Tom Sawyer’s Island, and at that time I had fire red hair and not the strawberry blonde that you see today and freckles.
I told him that I looked just like Tom, sorry, you should hire me. Well, he didn’t, but he didn’t say no. He left the door open. He basically said, I’ll think about it. So for almost the next year, anytime I could get near Walt, I’d ask him if he was still thinking about hiring me to be Tom Sawyer. I don’t think originally that he had any intent of having a Tom Sawyer on Tom Sawyer’s Island.
I think it was going to be like Snow White’s Adventure that you are Snow White when you go on the adventure. So when you went to Tom Sawyer’s Island, you were going to be Tom Sawyer up the very fifth, but I think I convinced him, I think he probably had a soft spot for a newspaper boy. I did a pretty good sell job, and I was in the Penny Arcade one afternoon playing, playing. I love the baseball machine, playing the baseball machine, spending my hard-earned paper money and a gentleman by the name of Dick Nunis, I don’t know if that means anything to you.
Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, he’s a big one.
Tom Nabbe: Yeah, Dick was the supervisor of Frontierland, and he came and tapped me on the shoulder, and it had to be this time, 1956, so around May, June of 56, he tapped me on the shoulder and he says, come with me, Tom. When Dick says, come with me, you don’t argue with Dick, you go with Dick. So we went over to Frontierland and Walt and Bill Evans, the landscape architect, was coming back off the island. Walt said, Tom, you still want to be Tom Sawyer?
And I said, oh, absolutely, Mr. Disney, and understand that that Walt was real easy to talk to. He had a lot of kids stars. He got two teenage daughters. I think he was just a big kid. Anyway, so in turn, he knew what the rules were because he told me, he says, you need to get a work permit and a social security card and want you to do that. I’ll put you to work as Tom Sawyer on Top Sawyer Island.
Dan Heaton: Wow. So you mentioned that Walt had a way with kids. I mean, having interacted with him when you were younger, what do you think it was about him that just made it so easy? He was very, very famous at the time. Why was it so easy to talk with him? He didn’t seem so big.
Tom Nabbe: Well, first of all, we were in Disneyland, so the Happiest Place on Earth, and it was Walt’s big toy, and he was totally involved in the Tom Sawyer Island thing. And if you go back through Walt’s history, and I didn’t realize that until after I, I’ve read a lot about Walt that he was a newspaper boy, so I think he had a little empathy for newspaper boy. I was sort of persistent to get him to hire me. I think all that thing worked to my adv advantage. Walt was a listener and Walt was a storyteller, and he listened and he talked to me as I’m 12 years old now. You understand? Yeah, I’m 12. Okay. Just getting ready to turn 13, talking to Walt Disney and just carrying on a conversation about being hiring me and being Tom Sawyer.
Dan Heaton: Well, that’s incredible. I love hearing that. So when you’re Tom Sawyer, what did you do on the island as, because I went to Disneyland when I was young, but it was much later when there wasn’t a Tom Sawyer anymore. So what did you do when you were Tom Sawyer?
Tom Nabbe: Okay, so what did Tom Sawyer do? Well, Tom Sawyer posed for a whole lot of photographs. I think I was in everybody’s photo album for the next two, three years across the country. We had stocked the Rivers of America with blue gill catfish and sun perch, and we had fishing docks just opposite the Mark Twain landing and had 25 fishing poles on each of the docks and then had the cans nailed to the railings that said worms on it. And we did have worms.
My job was to maintain the fishing poles when we originally started, it was a catch and clean program, so I had a little area where I could clean the fish and put ’em in a plastic bag, but that didn’t last very long. That only lasted maybe a month if it lasted that long. Old dead smelly fish started showing up in places that you didn’t want old smelly fish showing up.
So in turn, we went through and barbed all the hooks and it became a catch and release program. So we didn’t clean any of the fish and put ’em in a bag anymore. I would respond to either Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry. I wouldn’t respond to Becky Thatcher and Injun Joe. Yeah, if you really go and look at the story, Huckleberry Finn was along with the fire, red hair and freckles. Tom was sort of a sandy blonde kid. So like I said, I’d be either one. I went for years with being called that by the ride operators and everybody called me Huck for years.
Dan Heaton: It’s still crazy to me to think about that there were fish that were being caught, especially in the beginning with the smelly fish in the Rivers of America. It’s just such a different time. So it sounds from your book that eventually you got too old to play the character and they had another Tom Sawyer. But why do you think they ultimately just, why did they stop having a Tom Sawyer?
Tom Nabbe: First of all, you had to have somebody that wanted to show up to work. That was number one. Number two, they held a contest to replace me, and they replaced me with a kid by the name of Keith Murdoch. He came down for the summer and spent his family, and I think he worked for three summers after I had retired from being Tom Sawyer. Then after that, they didn’t replace me. Then eventually they did away with the fish, the fishing, I would say the fish probably lasted until the first time they drained the bigger river.
Dan Heaton: So I know after you did that, you did do some other jobs at Disneyland on some attractions and stuff. So what else did you do there after that?
Tom Nabbe: Okay, well, back in the sixties, fifties and sixties, Disneyland was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays and a lot of the attractions were just open on Saturday and Sunday. The major attractions were open Wednesday through Sunday. So Tom Sawyer Island was only open on the weekends, and I was the raft foreman during the week. I needed to work someplace else. I remember the first Monday and Tuesday that we were closed, my supervisor at that time was Jim, and he stopped by and handed me a spiel for the Jungle crew on Sunday.
He says, Tom, memorize this. You report to the Jungle Cruise at 10 o’clock on Wednesday morning. So I did a couple trips with a trainer and then I became a jungle bug. The two attractions that were very male dominant attractions were Jungle Cruise and the Subs. So you knew you were going to work one of those or other as you work your way up the seniority list.
Dan Heaton: What was it like being a skipper on the Jungle Cruise? What was that experience like for you?
Tom Nabbe: Oh, it was great. Everybody wanted to be a Jungle Cruise skipper, and everybody that you ran into wanted to talk to a Jungle Cruise skipper. I was all right, but wasn’t one of those guys that got the standing ovation on every trip. Every once in a while I’d get one of those, but there were guys that every trip that they took, they got the standing ovation and I couldn’t understand what did they do to add that. Several times I rode around and with them just to hear their spiel, and I didn’t hear anything totally unusual, but I enjoyed working Jungle Cruise, and it is not the place that you want to work in the wintertime.
In the rain, it gets a little cool when it’s warm out there loading the boats and that type of thing. The worst condition that would ever happen is you’d lose a kid, fall in the water or somebody or an adult would step wrong and step in the water and you had to make sure you had a hand on ’em so you could get ’em up into the boat back on the dock’s safe.
But I worked every ride and attraction at Disneyland with the exception of the Monorail and steam trains. The reason being that those two attractions were run by Retlaw. Retlaw is Walter spelled backwards, and it was a company that the Walt Disney family owned, and they sort of had a height, and you could do that stuff back then, but they had a height requirement to work on the Monorail. You had to be six foot, and I was never going to be six feet tall.
Dan Heaton: So I know you ultimately left for a while and were in the military and such, and then eventually made your way back to working for Disney. Can you talk about how that went and how you ended up ultimately working for Disney once again?
Tom Nabbe: Yeah. Well, I got an invite from my other uncle. Uncle Sam sent me an invite in the mid sixties and wanted me to participate in a little war that we had going on in Vietnam. I went down and went through the physical and got stamped 4A, and I said to myself, I was like, if I was going to go to Vietnam, I wanted to be the best trained.
I had worked at Disneyland with a lot of Marines and a lot of Navy personnel, more Marines than Navy. And I pretty much felt that if I was going to go, I wanted to be properly trained. I enlisted in the Marine Corps; I enlisted on a three-year hitch, which was sort of interesting. I took a three-year hitch so I wouldn’t have any reserve, active reserve time. It was three years active service, three years in active reserve.
What I didn’t realize is that by signing up for three years, I was eligible for school. Somehow. I ended up getting put in a radio repair school in San Diego. I went through, I was what they call a Hollywood Marine. So I went through MCRD, Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. Then I went back to, once I went through all the basic training, then I went back to school there at MCRD to be a radio repairman.
The advantage of being a, well, you didn’t want to fail being a radio repairman because the in turn would make you a radio operator and you didn’t really want to be a radio operator. Radio operator’s life expectancy was rather short. So that was a very strong incentive to study and pass. I had orders and was getting ready to ship out, had everything in car and was going home to drop it off at my mother’s house and a drunk hit me head on, tried to kill me, put me in a hospital for five months.
Once I got out of the hospital, I went back to school, finished up, and my right knee got pretty much banged up on the dashboard in the car, and they made some repairs and the repairs fell apart. Eventually I got moved out in the Marine Corps on a medical after about two, two and a half years. So I didn’t have to do the whole three years hitch. Now at the timeframe, I was very disappointed, but now that I look at it, I think somebody up there was looking out for me. Unfortunately when I was in the Marine Corps, that was during the time of the New York World’s Fair. Then right after that Walt passed, and I was in San Diego in the Marine Corps when Walt passed.
Dan Heaton: That’s such an interesting story. I mean, I know spending five months in the hospital does not sound pleasant and everything happening, but it does, like you mentioned, it does kind of seem like, especially given where your life went from there. That’s really interesting how that happens. So then obviously it was after Walt was gone, but I know you ultimately went back to Disney and got involved with Walt Disney World. So how did that come together?
Tom Nabbe: When I got out of the Marine Corps, I had dreams of being an electrical engineer, and I went back to school at Cal State Fullerton on the GI Bill, and about a year into that whole process, they started interviewing people to come to Walt Disney World. I sort of looked at it and realized I wasn’t going to be a fantastic electronic engineer.
So I in turn get my resume in and went through some interviews and ended up getting a job offer to come to Florida to open up the Monorail system. So guess what I got to do? I got to go train on the Monorail and the steam trains and work with Retlaw for almost nine months in that timeframe. They did alter the costume to fit me, and it wasn’t the black and gray with a white Ascot one. It was what we called the Captain America one.
It was a red, white, and blue. And very definitely, I know why they had a six foot height because I looked like a little blue barrel with a cap. But in turn, I went through training with them and then had the opportunity to come to Florida. I had one of my mentors who wanted me to work for ’em and to open the Monorail at Walt Disney World. So we packed up the car in January of 1971, and I drove the Volkswagen. My wife had put a sign in the back of the Volkswagen that we’re towing, which was a yellow bug, and we did get a lot of hoots and hollers and waves from the truck drivers and the other people, and it took us about six days drive past country.
Dan Heaton: When you led the Monorails, how challenging was that to open the Monorails, given that it was so different from the Monorails at Disneyland, it was a much larger system. What was that like?
Tom Nabbe: The difference was the train would run in either direction where the trains that at Disneyland could only move at four or five miles an hour in reverse. The Monorail system was a little behind. The trains were actually assembled, and right off of the beeline in Orlando and the trains that Bob Gurr designed a combination of General Electric parts that ran diesel, electric motor locomotives, truck parts for most of the drive.
Then the whole skin and body of the Monorail was aviation aircraft construction of sandwiched aluminum and fiberglass. The Monorail was very challenging. When we opened, I was supposed to have six Monorails and I only had four with frequent breakdowns. Sometimes there’s so many switches that made the train not go, okay, safety switches and that type thing. I remember on a few occasions we couldn’t drive the train from the front cab, so we drove it from the rear cab and drove through the, there’s a periscope that you could look. So you drove the train backwards all day until the shop could get in and fix the problem.
Dan Heaton: That’s crazy. I mean, just to think about driving that type of massive machine with a periscope to be able to do that. Eventually you figured out how to operate it and with the capacity, I know the crowds really ramped up that year in the holidays. Was that helpful to make everything work in a trial by fire maybe?
Tom Nabbe: Well, but yeah, anytime there’s a major opening, you go through that transition and it takes a period of time with breakdowns and working the bugs out on that. We finally got up to six trains. We got ’em to the point where they were running pretty efficient and the shop people got trained and kept everything going. Yeah, we had some problems that occurred. One of ’em was with the air conditioning units. They had a fan in them that was mounted horizontal, and anytime you came into the three stations that had a trough, Contemporary Hotel, main entrance complex, and Magic Kingdom, the Polynesian was open.
But any place that there was a trough, what you would do is you get back pressure and it would cause the blades on the fans to flex. After many trips in and out of the hotels, all of a sudden we started throwing fans blades. So that took a little while, and they jumped in there and they developed a squirrel cage van for the monorail. So that flexing problem went away. The trains overall were pretty effective. That first year we went from six to 10, so I moved off the Monorail in early ‘72 because we were going to build Tom Sawyer’s Island. So I ended up transferring from Monorail to Frontierland and Liberty Square.
Dan Heaton: So what was that like when you went to Tom Sawyer’s Island, the new version, given your history? What was that experience like?
Tom Nabbe: Oh, it was deja vu. No question about it. We did the same thing at World that we did at Disneyland and we invited the winners of the Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher contest from Hannibal to come out to the opening. I want to say we opened the island on May the 20th of 1973. If you go back to the opening at Disneyland, that was on the 16th of June of 1956, and all the publicity shots that you see there is the Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher from Hannibal, Missouri.
I didn’t start working as Tom Sawyer until June 18th. Now I missed those publicity shots. I did get in a lot of the publicity shots through the opening of Tom Sawyer’s Island at Walt Disney World. Charlie Ridgeway was the manager of publicity. Anytime he’d show up, he’d have a straw hat and he’d want me to wear that straw hat. So he could tell everybody that I was Tom Sawyer at Disneyland and Walt hired me.
Dan Heaton: How did you feel about that? Were you pretty much done with it at a certain point?
Tom Nabbe: Yeah, there was a period of time where I wanted recognition for what I was doing, not what I had done. It was real hard that anytime you got introduced, you didn’t get introduced as Tom Nabbe the manager of the Monorail system, or Tom Nabbe who works on Tomorrowland attractions. Well, this is Tom Nabbe that Walt hired to be Tom Sawyer.
Dan Heaton: So you mentioned Tomorrowland. I know that you were very closely involved with a lot of the attractions that opened there a little bit after the opening of Disney World. So what was that like working on all those amazing attractions there?
Tom Nabbe: Yeah, well, I got sort of tagged as a nuts and bolts guy because I went through the opening of Monorail and then went through the opening of Tom Sawyer’s Island and the Richard F. Irvine. Then right after that I got a job offer to work for Norm Burgess and Ron Heminger in Tomorrowland, and that’s when we built the Wedway, Star Jets, Carousel of Progress, and Space Mountain. There wasn’t a whole lot in Tomorrowland then when we first opened Walt Disney World.
So that was a real expansion in that area. So I went there in ‘73 and we opened, I want to say Space Mountain in January of ‘75. Then right after that, then I had the opportunity to go to Fantasyland when we rebuilt 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And when the 20,000 Leagues first opened, all the art directors had come down to Florida and gone to Silver Springs and were very impressed with the water clarity and everything.
So the decision was not to filter it like we did at Disneyland, but to pump the water into 20,000 Leagues right out of the aquifer. The water from 20,000 Leagues went into the moat, and from the moat it went into the Jungle Cruise and from the Jungle Cruise, it went into the Rivers of America and the Rivers of America went down the Light Boat channel, the Seven Seas Lagoon, and into Bay Lake and got distributed across property in the 55 miles of drainage canals that we built prior to opening.
So in turn, that had to change, and the decision was made to do an entire rehab on the Submarines and close and chlorinate the water and fill filtration. We got that going, and then I got promoted to the manager of Frontierland and Liberty Square rides and attractions, and we built Big Thunder and Disneyland built Big Thunder first. So I had the opportunity to go out to Disneyland and work and train on Big Thunder. So I had a lot of firsthand ride operations experience on that, and it was probably one of the smoothest openings of a new attraction that we ever did with the Big Thunder.
The minute that was there, there was this little project down the road called Epcot, and I got an invite to go on that project, and I thought I was going to be a pavilion coordinator, but my boss at the timeframe, wanted me to run a warehouse operation for what we call OFI, owner furnished items. So anything that was bought or manufactured for show installation for Epcot came through a system that we developed, which we call the item tracking system. If it wasn’t sent straight to the site to be installed, then it went into a warehouse to be stored, to be issued out at a later time. I had a crew of folks that ran the warehouse and I had a couple guys on site would meet and greet any trucks that were doing direct deliveries.
Dan Heaton: I went to EPCOT Center as a kid in the eighties and it’s still one of my favorite parks. So it’s amazing to me that you were able to work so directly there. I know you mentioned in the book about Spaceship Earth and having all these items shipped from California, which was astounding to me. So how did that work where you got all the items and then they had to be stored and then they eventually got into the attraction? How did all that work?
Tom Nabbe: There’s Plan A and then there’s Plan B, and then there’s Plan C and turn, the shows were built in Tujunga in California, and the art directors would go out and go through the entire show, and then the show would be disassembled all the parts numbered now under the, this is one of a kind. Now you can’t go to Home Depot and buy a staple.
So in turn, they would pack things up and put ’em on a truck. Now, if they were for direct installation and they would get shipped to the site and we would meet and greet and get the freight bills and everything straight and have the product delivered to the construction site. If it was for show installation at a later time, then it came to the warehouse and every day was sort of like Christmas. First of all, you’d open the back of the truck and you’d go, oh my God, how did they get that on there?
And then the next question is, oh my God, how are we going to get it off and not break it? So we went through those processes. One of the situations about Spaceship Earth, and the reason I sort of used that one was that everything Plan A was to install and show sequence. So the first set was going to be installed and then the second set and so on all the way up to the top.
So if you look at Spaceship Earth, it’s a big helix and you go all the way up to the top, and then that’s when you was looking up at the galaxies and everything. Okay, well, what happened was it was running behind. I don’t know how we do that, but it was running behind and they needed to get the skin attached to Spaceship Earth. So what we did is we loaded all the sets in reverse sequence.
So the first set they got loaded in was set 30, 40, not sure exactly what the number was. The last set they got loaded in was set number one, and we stored everything up at the top, and then they were able to close it and then in turn brought all the set pieces down. And in proper sequence, we handled somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million worth of items that we talked a little bit about tornadoes and that.
I know we had one of the trucks coming across with what they call an IDA four projector that was in the pre-show area for Spaceship Earth and a tornado picked that truck up, turned it 180 degrees, set it back down on the ground and didn’t damage one part of it. So Walt was up there looking out again for us to make sure that we got everything there. In the stall, my guys did one hell of a job. We did have a couple sound breakout boxes that got dislocated, but we were eventually able to find those and get ’em out to the site and get ’em installed.
Dan Heaton: That’s a crazy story. And I think about too, how hectic Epcot was in summer of ‘82 and all that with just trying to get everything built to have to install it that way. Spaceship Earth is pretty narrow. I mean, how tight was that to try and move those sets from the top down, basically the helix?
Tom Nabbe: Yeah, that one wasn’t too bad, but Mexico was a little higher on it that they were still building sets in California as they were trying to install ’em in Florida. But yeah, there was no question, and I think any of the folks that work in Pico. Pico is an acronym for Project Installation Coordination Office that Orlando Ferrante set up to build the New York World’s Fair and had carried over through.
You take people out of the operating side, you get ’em involved in the construction, and then you get ’em involved in the training of the new people, and then they are the folks that operate the attraction when it opens up to the guests. That’s the whole Pico cycle. I don’t think any question in our mind that Dick Nunis said we were going to open October one. We’re going to open October one. Okay, come hell or high water, we were going to do it.
Dan Heaton: Yeah. And I know you worked on, after it opened, I believe you worked on some attractions that opened in ‘83 and such. So what did you work on there in that early time? I know Horizons and Imagination opened late and stuff. Were you involved in some of those?
Tom Nabbe: Yeah, Imagination took quite a while to open up. It had some bugs that, and they really had trouble working those bugs out. Then that’s just about the time of when the green mail and the storming of the Magic Kingdom and all the problems that were happening there and understand that Epcot come pretty close to bankrupting the company. That’s when Frank and Michael came on board in ‘84. Anything was evolved in overhead and Pico was an overhead, was sort of eliminated rather quickly.
I had the opportunity to stay in warehousing. I really enjoyed warehousing. It was a whole new occupation for me. When we restructured after Frank and Michael came on board, I went into Walt Disney World support and didn’t go back into rides and attractions and got involved very heavily into general supplies, what I call good junk storage. We don’t throw anything away.
We store it and project storage. The manager of the warehouse operation went on vacation Christmas time of ‘84, and I don’t know if it was an alien of abduction or what, but he didn’t come back from his vacation. So six of us interviewed for the job and I ended up getting the job as the Manager of Distribution Services for Walt Disney World. We went through some real interesting growth things that happened there.
Most of it was internal development, but in turn, we had warehouses in, I think every city in Orange and Osceola County had at least 15 to 25 small remote warehouse operations. We moved them back on property and got out of the lease dollar scenario with that, and we end up getting a real time inventory system. The original system was written in-house, pretty good system, but it just couldn’t keep up with the volume and needs of the business as we went forward.
That clicked along quite well, got that installed, and the decision was to use that same system in Europe. So the distribution director for Paris came here for almost a year, and he went back and I got a call and the first week of January of ‘92, and my boss at that timeframe was Howard Roland. And he says, oh, Tom, I want you to want to have breakfast with you in Paris on Sunday morning. So I ended up staying through the end of April, went through opening, pretty much did everything at Paris that we did for Epcot. So that clicked along and then came back and I had the opportunity to show a lot of people from Material Handling Magazine on what we did in the warehouse. That was right around World’s 25th anniversary, the birthday cake castle, and got everything clicked.
And I had hired a financial advisor a few years earlier, Mike Wickson, and I was getting ready to turn 60, and I sort of looked at Mike and said, and we were getting ready to go through another major restructure and then said, can I retire? He sort of looked over thing and came back and says, Tom, if you like your lifestyle right now, you can pretty much retire. And I said, well, you got a challenge.
You need to convince Mrs. Nabbe. So he sat down with Janice and convinced her that I could retire. So I did in 2003, I think you mentioned that earlier, my boss at that timeframe sort of asked me what would I really like to have as a retirement gift? I don’t know if they do that anymore. But back then I got asked and I told ’em that I would really love to have a window on Main Street, and I was shooting for both Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
Well, Disneyland didn’t make it, but Walt Disney World did. So I ended up with a window on Main Street above the cinema on the right hand side of the cinema called Sawyer Fence Painting Company Proprietor Tom Nabbe, Lake Buena Vista and Anaheim, California. So I did get mentioned for Anaheim, and that happened about two months after I retired in 2003. I’ve gone back to Disneyland and my goal is to be on Main Street on the 17th of July. And couple times the mouse paid for it, but most of the time Tom paid for the trips back there and we were there for the 50th Anniversary and the Disneyland Alumni Club had a dinner dance. So we went to the dinner dance and a gentleman by the name of Jim Cora, who was Disney International president, he says, Tom, I’ll see you in September.
And I’m going, this is in July. I’m going, no, maybe in five years from now you’ll see me out here, but I don’t plan on coming back out in September. He says, oh, by the way, we’re going to be inducted as Disney Legends, and this is in 2005. Jim’s the type of guy that he’ll throw that hook out there, and if you jump on it, boy he’ll really head real good. So I started, yeah, okay, super Jim, that type of thing. But when we got back to the hotel, my sister was house sitting for me, and I said, hey, is there a letter there from the studio?
She said, oh, yes. And I said, okay, would you do me a favor and open it? Sure enough, that was the invite to come back out to Disneyland the September of 2005 to be inducted as a Disney Legend. And oh boy, got goosebumps talking about the window was I thought the cream on the top of the strawberries. But being a Disney Legend is just fantastic. The advantage of being a living legend is really nice too.
Dan Heaton: Well, I can’t imagine that’s an incredible story. I mean well deserved given all the openings that you presided over and I’m sure plenty of chaos and everything and doing so. Well. Kind of a last big question. What do you think it was about you were able to be involved in all these openings and all these fast-paced jobs and still become a legend? How did that happen?
Tom Nabbe: I think it boils down to, I, yeah, I hate to say it is being at the right place at the right time and being extremely flexible, and I was willing to make changes and try things new. I had learned a whole lot in my early years and the people and the mentors that had trained me, and I love every minute of it. I think you could tell a little bit from this interview, but I do this talk maybe once or twice a month, sometimes more, but minimum a couple times a month.
And I really enjoy sharing my Disney heritage. I do a challenge when I do it with the company folks, if they have the opportunity to share their heritage as they’re going forward. I’ve got a couple things coming up. I’m going to be in Dayton, Ohio at a Disney show, and we’ll pretty much go through the Tom Nabbe story during that, and I’ll probably do some roundtable discussions.
Then I don’t know if you’re familiar with Give Kids to the World? But Bill Sullivan and myself are going to do a roundtable Disney Heritage discussion for them on July 17th, the anniversary of the 64th anniversary for Disneyland here. So if you have any interest, if you go to their website, they’re selling tickets to that, and the book, it’s is available on Amazon. If you’re into Kindle, you can get Kindle a copy on Amazon, or if you want a personalized autograph copy, then you can go to my website tomnabbe.com and order it there. I’ll definitely personalize a copy for you.
Dan Heaton: Great. Well, I will look up all those events and I will post links to them when this goes out. And also your, of course, your website and the book. I read the book and it’s great. It’s a really good story and it expands a lot of what we talked about. So it’s definitely worth reading because this podcast was just like a small portion of it. Tom, thanks so much for talking with me. This has been amazing.
Tom Nabbe: Sounds super. I hope your folks enjoy it as much as I enjoyed it and going forward. If you want more detail, then read the book. It’s a short story by a short author.
Dan Heaton: Well, it’s definitely has a lot of good details. It’s worth reading. I can’t recommend it highly enough. And thanks for talking with me.
Tom Nabbe: Okay, Dan, see you later.
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