That Bright Mecca

Anne Hull, circa 1999: In the early 1960s, Walter Elias Disney took a plane ride over Florida. When he passed the vast area of scrub land south of Orlando, he pointed and said, "There."

Disney quietly paid $5.5-million for 27,000 acres, and the bulldozers and the hammers set to work.

As a native child of Central Florida, I grew up in the advancing shadow of the mouse ears. What did we do before Walt Disney World opened, replacing our perceptions of joy? We lived inside our own kingdom.

Our childhoods were barefoot. We rode ponies into the orange groves, past the NO TRESPASSING SIGNS on barbed wire fences. The sweet evidence lingered in our hair, on our clothes, but we risked punishment every…