Biography | Donn Tatum — The Empty-Lot Window Above Crystal Arts

Above Crystal Arts on Main Street, U.S.A., a gold window names a company that never sold a house.

M.T. Lott Co., Real Estate Investments.

Say it aloud: empty lot.

Donn Tatum is listed as president.

The subsidiaries painted beside him were the shell names Disney used to buy central Florida in silence in the mid-1960s: Tomahawk Properties, Latin American Development, Ayefour Corporation, Bay Lake Properties, Reedy Creek Ranch Lands, Compass East Corporation.

Ayefour is Interstate 4.

The Orlando Sentinel, writing for the resort's fiftieth year, placed the pane at a jaunty angle above Crystal Arts and called the joke by its right name.

The window's motto reads "A Friend in Deeds is a Friend Indeed."

Tatum was not president of those dummy firms.

He was president of Walt Disney World Co., and later chairman of Walt Disney Productions.

The window treats the land purchase as his honor anyway.

Main Street windows are a retirement gift.

Imagineering and park management both have to agree.

Tatum stepped down as chairman on 3 June 1980 and remained on the board as executive-committee chair, then director, then director emeritus in 1992.

He died of cancer on 31 May 1993 at his home in Pacific Palisades.

That house is a private residence and is not pinned here.

The public marker is this pane.

In 1993 the company named him a Disney Legend.

D23 records the citation under Administration.

Michael Eisner and Frank Wells, then chairman and president, said in a statement published by the Los Angeles Times that the company had lost a friend, a scholar and an exemplary leader.

The window does quieter work.

It keeps a lawyer's name on the street he opened, in the typeface of a joke about vacant land.

Photo: Main Street, U.S.A. at Magic Kingdom, Jedi94, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons