October 1, 1971: Walt Disney World Opens

October 1, 1971: Walt Disney World opens in Bay Lake, Florida, 15 miles southwest of Orlando. It had been 16 years since Disneyland opened outside Los Angeles in Anahein, California.

Why a 2nd park? Was "Uncle Walt" simply greedy? No: By 1959, he was seeing figures showing that, at the time, 75 percent of America's population lived east of the Mississippi River, but only 5 percent of Disneyland's visitors came from there. And he didn't like some of the businesses that were sprouting up near Disneyland. So he wanted a place convenient to the East, but with more land, so he could control what went up around it.

He had an idea he called "EPCOT": Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow. In other words, while there would be a Main Street, U.S.A., a Fantasyland and a Frontierland as with Anaheim, the place would be more about tomorrow than yesterday.

The project was barely in the planning stage when Disney died from cancer on December 15, 1966. His brother Roy Disney saw it through, but only the original part of the park, known as the Magic Kingdom, opened in 1971.

"The Most Magical Place On Earth" was built over a series of tunnels that allowed employees or guests to move through the park out of sight. As with its California counterpart, the centerpiece is a castle, this one named Cinderella Castle, and reaching a higher peak, 189 feet.

All the water in the park is kept moving. Not having standing water nearly -- but not completely, as nothing is 100 percent effective -- eliminates one of the biggest problems with being in Florida: Disney World has hardly any mosquitoes.

Disney's Contemporary Resort also opened on the Magic Kingdom's opening day. It is a hotel, and a terminus for the park's monorail system.

November 17, 1973: On vacation, trying to get away from the troubles of the Watergate scandal, and staying at the Contemporary Resort, President Richard Nixon decides to hold a press conference. He gets mad at the questions about his integrity, and finally says, "I welcome this sort of examination, because people have gotta know whether or not their President is a crook! Well, I'm not a crook! I've earned everything I've got!"

The line becomes remembered as "I am not a crook." And, technically speaking, he wasn't a "crook." He was an arch-criminal. His recently-resigned Vice President, Spiro Agnew, forced out over charges of bribery and tax evasion? He met the definition of a crook.

October 1, 1982: Epcot, as Walt imagined it, finally opened, crowned by a "Spaceship Earth." It included several sections devoted to various countries around the world, inspired by the Busch Gardens theme parks in nearby Tampa and in Williamsburg, Virginia.

March 8, 1983: Another Republican President took time off to go to Orlando -- although the speech in question was not given at the Disney World complex. Addressing the National Association of Evangelicals, 28 years after the former actor had helped open Disneyland, Ronald Reagan gave a speech appealing to the anti-atheist, and therefore anti-Communist, views of the attendees, attacking the Soviet Union -- not with bombs, but with words:

I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.

Uncle Walt would have approved.

November 4, 1986: I visited Disney World with my family. My parents had wanted to go for a long time, and could now afford it. I wasn't crazy about the idea, but my sister was then 7 years old, so it was more for her than for anything else.

It quickly grew on me, and, despite the distaste I eventually developed for Disney the man, it was a great experience. At one point, I lost my wallet, and it was found and returned within 2 hours. At the time, I was relieved. As time went by, I become very impressed with the efficiency of the place.

My parents noticed just how much of it had been bought by Disney from the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. My grandmother was with us, and, remembering the 1939-40 edition, kept saying, "That wasn't the real World's Fair." But she enjoyed it, too. (We also visited nearby Sea World, the John F. Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral -- my father and I, both science fiction fans, insisted -- and, at the other end of Florida, a cousin of my father's outside Tampa.)

January 26, 1987: The day after the New York Giants won Super Bowl XXI, a commercial began airing. To the tune of "When You Wish Upon a Star," from the 1940 Disney cartoon Pinocchio, highlights of the game were shown, mostly of the game's Most Valuable Player, Giant quarterback Phil Simms.

Halfway through, an unseen announcer said, "Phil Simms: You've just won the Super Bowl! Now, what are you going to do?" And Simms looked into the camera and said, "I'm going to Disney World!" Sure enough, Simms and his teammates attended a parade in their honor at Disney World, and a tradition was born: Not just for Super Bowl MVPs, but for other sports stars. (Mark McGwire did it after breaking * Roger Maris' home run record in 1998.)

What I didn't know for several years was that 2 versions had been filmed, one for the East, and one for the West, in which Simms said, "I'm going to Disneyland!" Since the game was played at the Rose Bowl, on the other side of Los Angeles, they went to Disneyland first.

May 1, 1989: Disney's Hollywood Studios opens on Disney World land, to compete with the nearby Universal Studios theme park.

June 1, 1989: Disney's Typhoon Lagoon, a water park, opens.

November 4, 1989: Orlando becomes a major league sports city, with the debut of an NBA team. It is named in honor of the Magic Kingdom: The Orlando Magic. The team has made the Playoffs 16 times in its 1st 32 seasons, including 2 trips to the NBA Finals. But it has never explained what "one Magic" is called. Then again, neither have their Florida arch-rivals, the Miami Heat.

April 1, 1995: Disney's Blizzard Beach, a water park with a contradictory name, opens.

April 22, 1998: Disney's Animal Kingdom opens, based on the safari at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey and the nearby Busch Gardens park in Tampa.

*

October 1, 1971, the day that Walt Disney World opened, was a Friday, and fell between the end of baseball's regular season and the start of its Playoffs, in an NFL midweek, and a little bit before the start of the 1971-72 basketball and hockey seasons. So there were no scores on this historic day.