Walt Disney World
In probably November of 1971, my life changed. To be fair, it might have been October or December, or maybe even January of 1972, but the point is that it was right at 50 years ago, before I turned five and before my oldest sister Bonnie left home. While attending some convention in Miami, our parents saw a newspaper article about the newly-opened Walt Disney World in nearby Orlando. Dad called our grandmother back in Pine Bluff, Arkansas (a feat of its own because the very concept of long-distance rates was ridiculous to him) and said, “Put the kids on a plane.”
My dad felt a connection to Mickey Mouse, because the first Steamboat Willie cartoon debuted on the day of Dad’s birth, in 1928. He and Mickey Mouse were born on the same day. But, most importantly, Dad loved ideas, imagination, invention, and creativity. He had one of the very first car phones. Not the 1980s version of mobile phones in bags. This was a 1970s desk phone with a rotary dial, sitting on the hump of his VW Beetle. I remember that the horn would honk like crazy whenever there was an incoming call. My sister Bonnie got in trouble for calling all her friends on the businessmen’s party line. We also had one of the very first microwaves, the Amana Radarange. (Sideline, how safe do you think THAT was? Maybe my having my 5-year-old face up against the door watching stuff get radiated actually explains a lot.) Yep, my dad was a tech-head for his time. He loved gadgets, and the creative genius that put them together and made them work. So, the idea of a place like Walt Disney World and its actual working monorail captured his imagination. Enough so that he had his three minor children (did I mention I was four?) fly unattended from Arkansas to Florida to join him in his adventure.The rest, as they say, is history.
I don’t remember much about that trip. You got the part about my being only four, right? I do remember that we couldn’t sit together, and somehow I got the exit-row seat. Some sharp stewardess (they weren’t yet called “flight attendants”) saw the danger in a four-year-old like me having access to a portal to the wild blue yonder, and moved me to another seat. I remember getting stuck in the onboard restroom and screaming like a banshee. I remember being in a stroller in the Magic Kingdom and having some woman tell Mom that I was going to be an actress because I had so many vivid facial expressions. Those specific memories themselves are not important. What is important is that my lifelong love of Disney World and my lifelong love of spontaneous, all-in adventure got their seeds planted some fifty years ago right here where I am today. I miss you every day, Dad, but I miss your spirit of adventure more so in this physical place. Happy fiftieth anniversary, Walt Disney World!
