Pat Burke - my 114th pick as a Disney Legend

John Patrick Burke began his career at Walt Disney Imagineering in 1972. Pat Burke worked on the four Big Thunder Mountains at Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland  and Disneyland Paris and he also worked on Indiana Jones Adventure, the different versions of Splash Mountain, on Tokyo Disney Sea Cape Cod and American Waterfront. He also worked on Hong Kong Disneyland and his last work for WDI was on Raging Spirits at Tokyo Disney Sea. He worked on three version of the Jungle Cruise. He also worked on the now defunct River Country attraction at WDW.

He worked on many projects through the years at the Disney theme parks. In the case of many of his projects, including Frontierland at Disneyland Paris, he would track down rare antique items across the United States, from oil cans to stamp mills, from ore carts to steam tractors. He then excelled at finding unique and interesting ways to arrange those artifacts in ways that would add authentic texture to an area at first glance and tell entire stories on a closer look.

There is a wooden name plate on the Big Thunder Railroad attraction that honors him - it reads Buckeroo Burke. He passed away in December of 2014.