The story of Walt Disney World mostly begins with Walt Disney and Disneyland, the theme park which he built in Anaheim California and opened on July 17th, 1955. After some brief uncertainty it proved to be a massive hit, capturing the imagination of the entire world, defining what it meant to be a theme park, revolutionizing the concept of rides, elevating customer service, creating a new set of cast member (employee) standards from the ground up and much more. It's still growing today and, as Disney himself said, will never be completed. I'm not recapping Disneyland's history because the world doesn't need more accounts of something so well-documented from someone who wasn't even alive when the place opened, but a few of my favorite Disneyland images have to be posted.
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| Emily Bavar & Walt Disney, 1965 |
By mid-1964, the exact location and plots of land that Disney would purchase (using fake company names and operatives with CIA and/or extensive legal backgrounds, chief among them William Donovan, Bob Foster, Paul Helliwell and Phil Smith) had been decided upon, with the center of the site being about 15 miles southwest of Orlando. Three major parcels for the site were tied down by August and a year later there were less than 300 acres left to secure out of the final count of 27,443. Walt made at least one trip to his land once it had been purchased and met with his associates, having flown to kind-of-nearby Kissimmee under the pseudonym Bill Davis (a name that would be associated 50 years later with Orlando tourism in the form of Universal Orlando's president). Walt was almost recognized once or twice but not enough for word to travel. Very few people in Central Florida besides Disney's own operatives knew who was buying the land. A couple, such as Orlando Sentinel publisher Martin Andersen and Sun Bank president William "Billy" Dial, had been clued in and sworn to secrecy. Orlando had been a quiet citrus and cattle town for most of its history, with some tourism activity related to its location through which people headed south toward Miami, southwest toward Cypress Gardens, northwest toward Silver Springs or, at its own doorstep, Gatorland. But now it was ablaze with rumors regarding who was purchasing all that property. The names and theories thrown out for consideration ranged from the Hercules Powder Company, Ford Motor Company and Boeing. Why so much land, and why the secrecy? The guessing game was intense and often zany, with Orlando Sentinel columnist Charlie Wadsworth hot on the trail of any lead or source that might reveal the identity of his "mystery industry." Disney did make the list of potential buyers in the mix, but was not a prime suspect. Not until Emily Bavar got involved.
Paul Helliwell (1915-1976) was a US Colonel, OSS Officer, CIA Operative and Miami Attorney who helped Walt Disney Productions negotitate with Florida property owners in order to secure parcels for Walt Disney World when the company's identity was still being kept secret from the public and all but a handful of businesspeople, namely those involved with the land acquisitions. Prior to assisting Disney Helliwell had been instrumental in setting up offshore banks and shell companies to help the CIA with various projects deemed by his employers to be in the interest of national security. For Helliwell this also meant dealing with organized crime figures and foreign operatives that could advance US programs without an appearance of having been underwritten by the US government. His experience was key in Disney's secret land purchase operation and also the principles behind WDP setting up its own municipalities within the Reedy Creek Improvement District.
On October 17th, 1965, Bavar, an Orlando Sentinel editor and reporter, printed her firm belief that Walt Disney Productions had purchased the land. She and other reporters from across the country had been invited to visit Disneyland on the occasion of that park's tenth anniversary. During a Q&A session with Walt, she asked if he was behind the Florida land purchases. She said he was shocked by the question and that his answer belied a detailed knowledge of the region's details such as annual rainfall and tourist visitation even as he told her Central Florida was not the kind of place he'd want to locate an attraction. Bavar, referring back to Walt's response years later, said "he wasn't a very good liar." Although few took her story seriously at first glance, within a couple days her editors decided to make her educated guess a front page headline. On October 24th, Florida Governor Haydon Burns confirmed in a public announcement that he'd received official word from Walt Disney: his company was in fact the owner of 43 square miles (27,443 acres) of land near Orlando.
Emily Bavar Kelly (1915-2003) was born in El Paso, Texas and earned a Journalism degree from Texas Women's University in Denton. She joined the Orlando Sentinel writing staff in the 1950s and stayed with the paper until retiring in the 1980s. She continued to write for the Chicago Tribune after her retirement.
Walt Disney might have chosen Central Florida not entirely as the result of research and intuition, but also out of a bit of sentimentality. His parents, Flora and Elias, had been married in Kismet, Florida in 1888. Kismet no longer exists but was located in north Lake County, in the Paisley area. Although their parents moved to Chicago before Walt and his brother Roy were born (respectively in 1901 and 1893), both sons visited relatives just north of Orlando periodically... before Disneyland itself was even built.
As far as history has recorded, however, the first and only time that Walt Disney actually set foot in the city of Orlando was November 16, 1965, when he, Roy and Burns held a press conference in the Egyptian Room of the Cherry Plaza Hotel on the western shore of Lake Eola. While it seems from the standpoint of revelations that Walt and Roy hadn't expected to be attending this type of event at such an early date in the project's lifespan, Walt did make mention of plans to equal or top the amount of investment that he had made in California. But he also stressed that he had too many possible ideas for what might materialize in Florida for him to list them off, and that all of the prospects were preliminary. Between Governor Burns and the reporters, you can see in videos of the event that everyone just wanted to hear Walt say he was going to build another Disneyland (something they could wrap their heads around in terms of scope, size and concept), but Walt didn't cave to the pressure. No concept art was presented at the time and the best verbal indicator for what the thousands of interested parties could hope to see Walt Disney Productions develop in Florida was a unique, family attraction that might include a model community or city of the future.
Try to imagine being the governor of Florida when all of this was
happening and, immediately afterward, when the announcement has passed and Walt
has returned to California to begin the long process of assigning form to what
he will build in Florida, when all the heated speculation as to the owner of the
land has concluded and when your entire state is recovering from the biggest
announcement to be made there since the advent of television. And now, time for
peaceful reflection? Nope, because now you're being deluged with all sorts of
inquiries about every single possible aspect of Disney coming to Florida from
every conceivable governmental or business interest from all corners of the
state, wanting connections, influence, assurances or special insights when you
are in fact in possession of not much more information on Walt Disney's plans
than the average reporter was during that press conference. Inquiries ranging
from the mundane to the borderline insane. That was probably maddening. Anyway,
among the images here you'll find some correspondence that speaks to exactly
what Governor Burns was contending with during that time period (the one about
legalized bullfights is something else).
Meanwhile, Walt Disney, fresh
off A) giving the world a consciously vague introduction to the biggest and most
expensive project his company has ever planned to tackle and B) the 1964-1965
New York World's Fair... for which he had produced four original shows... coming
to a close, had a lot on his mind regarding what would come next.
Of
course there were ideas Walt had for Florida by November 1965 that he just
wasn't ready to share with anyone outside his organization. Plenty of concepts
that he had overseen for the development of not only Disneyland and the World's
Fair, but also Riverboat Square in St. Louis and a proposed Mineral King ski
resort in Sequoia Valley, California provided him with more than enough content
to build two entire theme parks if he so desired without the need for a single
"new" proposal. He had already made mention, however, in the Orlando press
conference how his team was incredibly capable of coming up with concepts and
executing them quickly (he cited It's A Small World, designed for Pepsi-Cola's
and UNICEF's World's Fair presence, as an example of something that went from
rough ideas to opening for the public in a mere eleven months). Some of
the concepts that Disney animator Marc Davis devised, in his then-recent
reassignment to the position of Imagineer with WED Enterprises (Walt's
self-acronymical theme park design firm), for Mineral King and Riverboat Square
would find themselves marked for Florida quickly, most notably a musical show
with animatronic bears.
As a practical matter, Walt had clear notions about creating a
self-contained destination resort that existed apart from everything around it
but would be served by nearby major highways already in existence. One of the
reasons he wanted 43 square miles was to ensure that when his guests were on
Disney property, their eyes and ears would not be distracted by the sights and
sounds of the outside world as they were for guests of Disneyland in Anaheim...
where the freeways and billboards and high-rise hotels encroached upon the
borders of his kingdom and worked against the illusory qualities inherent to the
park's appeal. In Florida this would be entirely avoidable and every component
of the project would complement the others. "Twice the size as the island of
Manhattan," in Walt's words, and all of it to be orchestrated in full-scale
harmony. There would be a theme park comparable to Disneyland, without
question. It would contain attractions familiar to Disneyland guests and also
some unique to Florida. Themed resorts connected to the park and other features
of the resort by Alweg Monorail, Peoplemover lines or boat, golf courses,
artificial waterways adjoining Bay Lake (with more islands added to them), water
activities such as swimming, skiing, nightly cruises and a "swamp ride." An
industrial park, an entrance complex and day guest parking area, and an
airport.
The number of things his company could do to entertain
people was essentially limitless with that much acreage in their hands. By
1965, however, Walt was thinking about something more than entertainment -
something much bigger than rides, hotels or even theme parks - for his Florida
land. He was thinking about a city.
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