Remembrance

A well established description of Walt was that he had one foot in the past and one foot in the future. He was always worried about Tomorrowland b/c he knew that tomorrow would be in the past soon enough. Time does fly and before you know it, the future IS the past.

Walt died 41 years ago yesterday, Dec 15th, 1966. It's interesting how people remember the day Walt died very vividly. It was a shock to everyone. He'd only learned he had cancer 8 weeks earlier. I was born 4 years after his death and yet I can remember watching Wonderful World of Disney and not realizing this man on tv (the tv that sat on the red shag carpet with the three channel tuner) was not alive. Walt died of lung cancer..from smoking. He picked up the habit while driving an ambulance in France during the end of World War I, enlisting by faking his birthday. His employees could hear him coming down the hallway. He had that cough, ya know. Because he seemed to know it was a bad habit, he always tried to keep it hidden from the cameras. There are few shots of him with a cigarette. His daughter Diane actually gave him "filtered" cigarettes for Christmas one year, to try and get him weaned of the non-filtered ones. With an obsessive personality like his, I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for him to try and quit. Yet, it probably took 10 years off his life. He had much planned...WDW, Epcot. More on Epcot in the future. It ended up being a compromise on Walt's dream.

When Disneyland opened, Tomorrowland was supposed to be 1986. I believe this was how long Walt hoped to live. He would have been 85.