July 9 - Joe Fowler

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On this day, in 1894, Joseph William Fowler was born in Lewiston, Maine. In 1917, Joe graduated from the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland almost at the top of his class (he was a close second). From there, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to become a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology learning the fine art of naval architecture. After earning his master’s degree in 1921, Joe traveled to Shanghai, China where he spent the rest of the decade designing and building gunboats. His later work involved designing and building aircraft carriers including the two biggest carriers used in World War II, the USS Lexington and the USS Saratoga. Actually during his second World War (he was already a veteran of the first one), Joe was in charge of all Navy construction activity in all the shipyards on the West Coast.

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Following the conclusion of the war, Joe stayed with the Navy for a while more, not retiring until he achieved the rank of Rear Admiral and hit 35 years of service in 1948. Four years later, as the Korean War was raging on, President Eisenhower entice him to return to service briefly in an attempt to reduce wasteful military spending. After a few months indulging an old friend, Joe walked away again and assumed his working days were over, for the most part anyways. Then he met a man with a dream.

Late in the summer of 1954, a mutual friend introduced Joe to Walt Disney. At the time, Joe was supervising the construction of some tract homes in San Francisco. Walt was looking for someone with naval expertise to consult on the building of a paddle steamer for his new theme park. The two men hit it off and, after a brief discussion, Joe was hired as a technical consultant on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and to oversee all of Disneyland’s construction. Once the job was finished in July 1955, he stayed on with the company as the park’s General Manager for the next decade. Pretty much anything Walt wanted done, Joe made it happen. One story is told about Walt looking at a stage in Adventureland with a waterfall next to it. He turned to Joe and said wouldn’t it be grand if, when actors came onto the stage, the waterfall parted like curtains and they came through it. Without blinking an eye, Joe said “We can do that” and then somehow worked his magic to actually make it reality. He was famous for doing stuff like that.

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In the mid Sixties, Joe was given the monumental task of bringing what was then known as the Florida Project out of Walt’s dreams and into swampy reality. When Joe visited Walt in the hospital just before his death, Walt was staring at the tiles of his hospital room’s ceiling and using them as an architectural grid to explain his plans for where everything in Disney World was to go. So it wasn’t like there was any pressure on Joe to get things right or anything. As construction progressed, he actually held three different positions, at one point all of them simultaneously: senior vice president, engineering and construction, for Walt Disney Productions; chairman of the board of WED Enterprises, now known as Walt Disney Imagineering; and director of construction for Disney’s Buena Vista Construction Company.

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In the end, Joe got things right. Walt Disney World, consisting of the Magic Kingdom and a few resorts, was built and opened. One of the two riverboats that plied the Rivers of America was named after him (until it was accidentally wrecked beyond repair while in dry dock in 1980). He continued doing various small projects for Disney until retiring a second time in 1978, after more than 24 more years of work. He did a little consulting work for the company after that but mostly actually enjoyed his retirement. In 1990, Joe was declared an official Disney Legend for shepherding the creation of not one but two incredible theme parks. On December 3, 1993, Joe passed away at his home in Orlando, Florida at the age of 99. He was posthumously given another honor. In 1999, the ferryboat that takes guests between the Magic Kingdom and the Transportation and Ticket Center that was formerly known as the Magic Kingdom I was rechristened the Admiral Joe Fowler. And astute Disneyland guests are aware that the dry dock area for the Mark Twain Riverboat has always been referred to as Joe's Ditch (if Walt was in a grumpy mood) or Fowler Harbor (as it is today).