I love this photograph of the Main Street Confectionery glowing at sunset—but today we’re zeroing in on the window above it, “General Joe’s Building Permits”.
William E. “Joe” Potter was an engineering and logistical planning genius and one of the first key figures in the construction of Walt Disney World in Central Florida. Potter met Walt Disney at the New York World’s Fair, then retired after a long and decorated career as a Major General in the United States Army, and hired him to oversee the early construction of the Walt Disney World site. Potter undertook the Herculean task of transforming 300 acres of Florida swampland into the Magic Kingdom, helping to build much of the site’s underground utilities and other infrastructure, and managed to preserve the area’s ecology and beauty in the process.
Dick Nunis, former chairman of Walt Disney Attractions, once said that “without Joe Potter there would be no Walt Disney World today.” After he passed in 1988, one of the ferries that transports guests across the Seven Seas Lagoon to Magic Kingdom was rechristened The General Joe Potter in his honor.
I read stories like this and I’m reminded that Walt wasn’t just a genius in his own right—but also brilliant in knowing where he needed help and tracking down and securing the right people for the job. It was a one-in-a-million person who could look at the isolated swamp that was Central Florida in the 1960s and see through what seemed like an impossible task to the potential that was there if only the right people could be brought in to oversee it. It’s a level of brilliance, vision, and humility that needed to come together, in the form of Walt himself and the people that he surrounded himself with, to make Walt Disney World a reality.
Seemed like the perfect way to end the week.
Taken at 70mm, 1/100 second, f/2.5, ISO 100.