Walt Disney never saw the inside of Disney World. Walt Disney World opened in 1971. Walt Disney died in 1966, months after his last polo season.
Walt Disney World is the amazing work from the mind of one amazing man. Always the businessman, in 1959 Disney himself learned that only 5% of the people who visited Disneyland in Anaheim, CA came from east of the Mississippi River, where 75% of the population of the United States lived east of the Mississippi. So he decided to search for plots of land that had easy access to interstate highways and were east of or at least close to the Mississippi. Interestingly he originally decided on St. Louis, Missouri. It was actually 99% signed sealed and delivered, Disney World in St. Louis, until the Disney was so turned off by an encounter with August Busch Jr. See Disney wanted a place where families could visit without being disturbed by alcohol. Busch Jr., who had a bit of skin in the whole alcohol game, was holding court at a cocktail party meant to celebrate the impending business deal that would bring Disney World to the city. Disney was there, Busch didn’t know, and he loudly proclaimed that no such place could be successful without booze. Disney canceled the deal and flew home the next day.
Walt Disney loved family and especially children, so much so that he hid his intense smoking habit from ever being seen by kids. He was an incredible chain smoker, incredible in the sense that he was never photographed, videoed, or otherwise seen smoking by the public or children even though he smoked almost constantly. While medical science can’t 100% prove it I think it can be easily deduced that smoking at least contributed to the tumor that engulfed his entire left lung. Lung cancer killed him in December, a few months after another polo season had finished, and 5 years before his family opened the greatest place on Earth.
There is little to dispute the amazing that was everything Walt Disney created, exemplified by the place that bears his name that gives 52 million people a year memories of a lifetime. He made amazing. When people told him full length animated movies couldn’t be made, he made them. When he suggested a mouse as the face of the franchise people laughed, so he laughed and made film after film about a mouse. That mouse now has a solid crew. He called that mouse “family”. Everything he did was to build a legacy, yet before the greatest accomplishment of his existence could even begin being created he died.
“Shit Happens” goes the popular saying, leading us to believe that bad things happen just because they happen. If this was the case then Walt Disney, possibly the smartest and greatest businessman to ever live, died just because death happens. Since every action must have an opposite and equal reaction to keep the order of the energy of the world, then the amazing things Disney created were actually not his creations but simply things that happened. Like shit.
The most difficult thing to accept in life is that we are ultimately the controllers of our fate for better and for worse, but once we do we are on the road to creating amazing things. Like magic.
FRIDAY
WOD: “Tommy V”
21 Thrusters 115/80
12 Rope Climbs, 15′
15 Thrusters
9 Rope Climbs
9 Thrusters
6 Rope Climbs
SkWAT Team: 4×3 Front Squat with 5 second pause at bottom, heaviest possible
