I checked Snopes, About.com and even Yogi-Berra.com and couldn’t come up with anything about this, but it’s too “cute” to be real, I think.
My husband was telling some story at dinner the other night about how when Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Billy Martin and someone else (I forget) were all pals on the Yankees they bought up a bunch of land in Florida where they were going to retire. Years go by and they’re offered a large sum of money for the land, and they all sell but Berra. Just to be obnoxious, Berra demands something like 10x the offer. They agree, because of course they need it to build… DISNEYWORLD!
Our dinner companions of course ohh’d and ahhh’d about how fascinating it was, while I rolled my eyes. Any Disney or Yankee enthusiasts care to enlighten?
I’m neither a sports fan or a particular fan of Disneyworld, but wasn’t it built on a swamp? I seem to recall a story about Walt Disney in a helicopter surveying the land around Orlando, he saw the swamp and said “Drain that sucker!” or something to that effect.
In which case, it would hardly seem to be a retirement community for baseball players. Plus, Orlando is in the middle of FL, and if I was Berra, rich and looking for a passle of land, I’d buy up some coastal area.
I’m betting on this being a UL. In “Walt Disney : An American Original” Bob Thomas list a few of the more major property holders that Disney bought land from, but none of them are anybody famous. Other books I referenced neglect to mention Berra, Martin, or DiMaggio, which I would assume at least one of them would. It would make a neat piece of Disney trivia if it were true.
Another point against it is that Disney was not offering large sums of money for the land. In order to grab as much land as possible in a short time, Disney kept their identity completely secret. They gobbled up a large amount of land for only $183 per acre. It was only after The Orlando Sentinel announced that it was Disney buying the land that the price went up to about $1000 per acre.
According to my favorite book, “Since the World Began,” by Jeff Kurtti, Hyperion, 1996, Walt Disney World was built on land that varied from swamp to lake to pasture to forest to scrub land. As an interesting aside, many of the parcels of land had been sold by mail order in 1910, and the present (present at the time of the purchase, that is) had inherited them and didn’t even know they owned them.
[Disney apologist hat: ON]
Many people have tried to find something terribly sinister in the way Disney went about purchasing the land for Disneyworld. However, I maintain that the secrecy was necessary, at least from a business standpoint. I mean, let’s look at this realistically: If Walt had strolled into Orlando and said, “I’m Walt Disney and I’m here to buy your land for a theme park!” the price would have skyrocketed.
As for the OP: Unless Yogi Berra & Co. had a jones for sitting around in oppressive heat in the middle of nowhere, 20 miles from a dippy little citrus farming town (Orlando), then it’s highly unlikely that they owned any of the land that became Walt Disney World. Unless they had inherited it (the mail-order thing) or had invested in citrus groves.
That, and Disney was bothered with what had happened with Disneyland in California. After it became a success, a number of hotels, motels, restaurants, souvenir stands and whatnot sprung up around the main gates. Disney hated it and wanted his new park to have enough of a buffer zone around the entrances that the visual clutter would be reduced as much as possible.
Thanks for all your help. My husband is being no less stubborn (“It must be true! I heard it on the radio!”) so I took the liberty of writing to yogi-berra.com which is run by the Berra family. They confirmed that the story was bunk. I was hoping they would be able to give some insight into how the story may have started (I did find info that DiMaggio has/had property in Miami Beach) but they seemed flabbergasted, lol. “We thought we’d heard them all…What a whopper!”