My parents moved from New York to Florida while I was in college. This was not an attempt to abandon me; they did send me their new address after a while and a court order. My father, who worked for an airline, had been transferred. I fondly remember hanging out with him in a small apartment in Coconut Grove before they got settled, and some holidays in another apartment up in Hollywood right at the edge of a golf course where it was pretty likely you would get beaned if you ventured out the back door during the daytime. The temperature was always in the mid-seventies at Christmastime. They eventually settled in a house near Fort Lauderdale. At one point around this time my father took me and my cousin Denise to Disneyland for no apparent reason. A fine time was had by all.
After what could only be considered the conquest of the New York World’s Fair, Disney was next looking for an east coast site for a new park. The fair had proven that there was a market for his entertainment on the right side of the country, and it was pretty obvious that the location needed to be warm for year-round attendance. (Disneyland Paris later changed this paradigm.) The corporation began clandestinely buying up land in Florida until enough was assembled to announce not just a land but a world. Disneyworld. Part of Walt’s dream was a city of the future as part of his world. There’s wonderful sketches of what this city might look like. Walt was quite the urbanist, and his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was pretty much the last great gasp of godlike city planning. In real life, people prefer organic cities mixing old and new (see the battles of Jacobs and Moses in New York); the antiseptic planned city, which was a mainstay of futurists through much of the twentieth century, was a doomed idea in the long run. As it turned out, Walt died before he would learn that. He passed away with his company poised to develop what would become Walt Disney World (his brother Roy saw to that name change, and the building of WDW), before EPCOT was finally sorted out. In 1971, the Magic Kingdom opened.
And, lo and behold, my parents had moved to Florida just in time. It was a serious but doable-in-a-day trip from their house to Orlando and back again. The Disney in my soul was salved. For a short while I visited probably once a year, which is far from a season pass but, still, an enjoyable day trip while staying with the Aged Ps. The whole idea of one’s family moving from New York to Florida while the family was still in a family mode, i.e., not in a retiring-to-early-bird-special-dinners mode, while I was still in college, was rather entertaining. All of a sudden seeing the folks meant not going back home but going on a vacation to Florida, easily accomplished with passes (first class) that my father acquired as part of his job. In a way it was like having one’s own resort to escape to whenever one wanted. This was the next link in the chain. We had started with the childhood indoctrination followed by the adolescent crush, and now we had the young adult hip-pocket family-run resort down south that included the Magic Kingdom.
The clarity of the narrative is pristine.
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