Memorial Day: Twenty Years Ago

Twenty years ago, I worked for the Mouse. It was my first Disney job, and my first full-time employment living on my own and supporting myself. There was also a strange sense of surrealism to be surrounded by this make-believe world because the Gulf War was underway at the time.

I remember standing behind the desk at Guest Services of the Caribbean Beach Resort the night of January 17, and thinking how odd it was that I was explaining to newly arrived guests their dining options and booking reservations for them, and they had no idea yet that we had begun bombing Kuwait and were at war.

In resorts, back in the day there were always little things Disney would do as perks for the guests on various holidays. These things weren't worth anything to anyone other than a Disney collector, but they could be kind of cool in their own way.

If you were a Disney resort guest on Memorial Day in 1991, you got this: a 12-inch by 12-inch square poster close-up of Mickey saluting, and surrounding the image is the third stanza to America the Beautiful on heavy stock paper.

Of all the things like this I accumulated over the years I worked there, for some reason this one stuck with me and I hung on to it – even going so far as to have it professionally framed. I uncovered it recently while cleaning up the basement. Inexplicably, I again couldn't part with it, and it still resides in the "keep" pile.