The REAL Story About the Kid Who Lost a Tooth at Disneyland

There are lot of stories online about small children who lost teeth while visiting Disneyland or Disney World and how the Disney Cast Members made that adorable rite of passage into something special for the young visiting child. There are even Disney blogs that coach parents on what do if their family is about to visit one of the Disney properties when one of their kids is likely to lose a tooth. That’s all lovely, and go ahead and follow all the sweet advice you can glean. But to my mind, there is really only one lost Disney tooth story, and it’s the only one I’ve encountered in a Disney-related book.

Lee Cockerell is the former Executive VP of Operations for Walt Disney World, Florida. For 16 years, he was the man who taught Disney Cast Members how to lead, and how to deliver exceptional customer service. Since retiring from the firm in 2006, he’s made a late-life career for himself writing books on leadership and customer service, teaching courses, and consulting with other firms.

A while back I worked on a ghostwriting project with an editor at Random House who acquired and edited Mr. Cockerell’s book, Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney (affiliate link).

If you are in the corporate world AND you love Disney, this is a great resource if you are in a leadership role. Mr. Cockerell shares the lessons he learned in business before he arrived at Disney in 1990, and how he helped transform their corporate culture for today’s demanding customers. When I was reading the book, I welled up with tears often because he tells so many wonderful stories that I can’t imagine ever happening in any corporation other than Disney.

In the book, which hit bookstores back in 2008, he shares the following story about the time a child lost his tooth at one of the parks. To my mind, it’s the best Disney lost tooth story I ever heard:

Here’s another story about a time the Cast at Disney showed true character.
At a place as big as Disney World, it’s inevitable that Guests will lose things—whether a cap, an autograph book, a camera, or a cash-filled wallet. Well, on this particular occasion, at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, the lost item was a tooth.
When a little boy’s tooth fell out while he was in the park, his mother washed it off in the nearest water fountain. But she dropped it, and it slid down the drain. The child was distraught because the tooth fairy would not be visiting his pillow that night.
But then, a Cast Member who had witnessed the scene called the maintenance department, and someone came and opened the drain. Still, the tooth was not to be found. So the Cast Members on the maintenance staff told the family to meet them at five at Guest Services, near the park exit.
At the appointed time, they presented the tooth in a beautifully wrapped box and told the child that Tinker Bell had found it.
In actuality, the maintenance team had made a fake tooth in their shop, but it looked real enough to fool the euphoric child.
Needless to say, making fake teeth to please young children was not in the team’s job description. But going the extra mile is what people with character do. They are fully committed, meaning they’re prepared to go all the way.

The story appears in Chapter 12 of Mr. Cockerell’s book. I have shared the story so many times with other Disney-heads that I thought I should finally do myself a favor and post the story here on my blog so I can find it easily in the future.

I hope you’ll check out Mr. Cockerell’s book.

Whenever I do one of these posts, I always try to mention one of my own books. As it happens, I have written one Disney-ish short story. It is set in central Florida during the early 1960s, when a mysterious out-of-towner begins buying up swamp land and citrus groves for some unknown real estate development project.

Well, you can probably guess the subtext of the story. But let me warn you: it’s a dark murder mystery, which is my style. You can grab a copy of Major Bluecastle as a standalone ebook, or you can buy it in Daggyland #3, my most recent short story collection. Bluecastle is in there with 9 other stories.