Gregory Copeland - Where Is Walt Disney World?

It was 1964, and someone was buying land in Central Floridaa lot of land, for cheap. Much of it was cow pastures or swamps. Land like this was nothing special and only cost about $180 an acre. Who would want so much of it? Maybe a big business was coming to Florida and bringing jobs. Rumors flew. Would it be Ford? General Electric? NASA?

On October 24, 1965, a local newspaper called the Orlando Sentinel solved the mystery. It blasted this headline: We Say: Mystery Industry Is Disney. This was great news. Everyone knew about the famous Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, on the West Coast of the United States. Walt Disney must be planning to build an East Coast Disneyland, too!

This turned out to be true, sort of. In fact, Walt Disney and his brother Roy had decided to build a bigger version of Disneyland in Florida. There would be lots of changes. The official name would end up as Walt Disney World Resort, commonly called Disney World for short.

Back in November of 1963, Walt had chosen Central Florida for the new theme park. The area had sunny weather, with average temperatures in the 60s in winter and 80s in summer. It was near the crossing of Interstate 4 and Floridas Turnpike, and there was a regional airport about a half hour away. Getting to Disney World would be an easy trip by car or airplane.

However, if anyone had guessed what Walt was up to, land prices would have soared sky-high. Many people knew what Walt looked like from the TV show he hosted on ABC. So he and Roy, who were business partners, had to be clever. They didnt personally contact landowners and ask to buy their property. They had other people do that. Besides the Disney brothers, only five others were let in on the plan, which they called Project X or the Florida Project.

Using made-up company names like Tomahawk Properties, they quietly began buying land. If Walt or Roy went to Florida during this time, they used fake names like Walt and Roy Davis. These initials (W. D. and R. D.) matched the ones that were monogrammed on their suitcases.

Such tricks workedfor a while. That was lucky, because after the news got out that Disney was the buyer, land prices in the area shot up to $1,000 an acre. In all, the company had bought about 27,440 acres (forty-three square miles) in Florida by then. Thats almost twice the size of Manhattan in New York City!

There was no doubt about it. Walt Disney was thinking big!

Where to Find Disney World

Disney World is located about twenty miles southwest of Orlando. Thats the closest big city, so youll often hear people say its in Orlando. Actually, Disney Worlds mailing address and some of its properties are in nearby Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Yet all four of its theme parks are in the city of Bay Lake, next door.

Walter Elias Disney was born more than one hundred years ago on December 5, 1901, in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up on a farm near Marceline, Missouri, with three older brothers and a younger sister.

Walt was a boy with imagination and talent. He would gaze up at the clouds and imagine them slowly changing from one animal shape into another. Once, he got in trouble for painting pictures all over the outside of the familys white house with black tar.

In Marceline, most people figured he would become an artist because he drew all the time.

He and his brother Roy, who was eight years older than Walt, were good friends. Their family didnt have much money, and their father was strict. Roy was almost like a second dad to Walt sometimes, making sure he got a toy or some candy on his birthday.

Growing up on a farm, the brothers learned the importance of hard work, and they never forgot it. Walt fell in love with trains when he got a summer job selling snacks and newspapers to passengers.

Much later on, Walt even built a small train in his backyard for his family. All his life, he remained a kid at heart.

As a boy, Walt was always drawingeven in the margins of his schoolbooks to turn them into flip-books. In high school, he took art classes at night. During World War I, Walt drove a Red Cross ambulance he decorated with cartoons.

He dreamed of making films and doing new things with animation. In 1923, he moved to Hollywood, where he and Roy began the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. Today, the official Disney Fan Club is called D23. D for Disney and 23