I went to Belmont today with Dad, Burgoyne and Pervy Sage. None of us had any BIG winners but Burgoyne did get on the board early with a $2 bet on a horse named Golden Weekend. The season at Belmont ends tomorrow before the horses (and many of the track employees) head to Saratoga.

I love the infrastructure in and around New York. The LIRR operates a spur line with a terminus at Belmont. I tried to find a photograph on Flickr but only found this. Next time I will remember to bring my camera.

On the way home Dad pointed to the property where the Freedomland U.S.A. amusement park used to be. The park opened in 1960 but filed for bankruptcy just a couple of years later. The park is connected to Walt Disney. According to Wikipedia:

Freedomland was conceived by Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood (1922-1992), a young Texan, who had previously worked in the planning, construction and management of Disneyland. Hired by Walt Disney in 1953, Wood was the person who selected the orange grove site in Anaheim, California where Disneyland was eventually built.

Wood became very close to Disney during the next two years, but eventually the two men had a falling out. Reasons for this are unclear, but three theories exist: Wood was embezzling money from the park; Wood was taking too much public credit for Disneyland or Wood betrayed Disney by planning his own amusement parks, effectively stealing Disney's original concept.

By January 1956, Wood had been fired from Disneyland. To this day, The Walt Disney Company refuses to acknowledge any role played by him in the creation of the Magic Kingdom.

I remember Wood's name from the Gabler book and checked it this evening to see if there was anything specific about Freedomland. Sure enough on page 539 there is an asterisk with the following note:

This was not the last confrontation between Walt and C.V. Wood. Not long after leaving, Wood began luring away Disneyland employees for a new amusement park project called Magic Mountain in Golden, Colorado. When that failed to materialize, Wood, calling himself the "Designer-Builder of Disneyland," resurfaced at the head of another amusement park venture, this one in New York called Freedomland. Walt, furious at the presumptuousness, decided to sue him.

Labels: disney, weekend