On Oct. 1, 2017, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, a gunman opened fire from a room at the high-rise Mandalay Bay casino hotel in Las Vegas on a crowd of 22,000 fans at a country music concert below, causing 60 deaths and more than 850 injuries.
OCTOBER 01
2017: Las Vegas music festival shooting
1903: First modern World Series begins
1971: Walt Disney World opens
1975: Ali wins “Thrilla in Manila”
Walt died five years before the gates opened. His brother Roy finished the work and died eleven weeks later.
Image: The riverboat at the Magic Kingdom, summer 1972. Dada1960, CC BY-SA 4.0.
October 1, 1971, broke calm near Orlando, Florida. About ten thousand people came to the new gates of Walt Disney World. The company had deliberately set the opening for a weekday in the off season. Attendance stayed modest by design, which was the point. Staff handled the first guests without the crush a weekend would have brought. The grounds were ready, the ticket booths were taking money, and a project measured in years of preparation finally met its public.
Walt Disney was already five years gone. He had died on December 15, 1966, of lung cancer. The project he had set in motion continued without him. He never walked the finished streets or watched the first arrivals.
Securing the property had required silence. Starting in April 1964, Walt Disney Productions relied on dummy companies to purchase land. The goal was simple. Keep the true identity of the buyer hidden so Florida owners would not mark up their prices. Shell corporations signed the deeds and held the titles while the real purchaser stayed off the public record. Piece by piece the parcels came together. By June 1965 the holdings totaled about twenty seven thousand four hundred acres. Estimated purchase price reached five point one million dollars, or around a hundred and eighty six dollars an acre. It was an enormous amount of ground, and it stayed cheap for precisely as long as the buyer stayed invisible.
Roy O. Disney, Walt's older brother, had intended to retire. He set that intention aside to see the Florida venture completed. Through the final years of building he stayed on. When the name had to be locked in, Roy made his position plain. The resort would be called Walt Disney World. He wanted the credit fixed where it belonged. The decision was his, and it stuck.
Roy watched the opening unfold. Eleven weeks later he was gone. He died on December 20, 1971. The man who finished the work and fixed the name outlived the debut by less than three months.
Look up along Main Street USA in the Magic Kingdom today and the old shell names remain. They are painted on the windows above the street. The secret buying apparatus of 1964 and 1965 sits in plain sight for anyone who lifts their eyes.