Happy Wednesday, readers! Today’s post is likened to one of those days in elementary school when your beloved teacher briefly left the classroom and returned with that glorious, wheeled television cart. Rather than punching through a couple episodes of Mathnet, we’ll be feasting our eyes upon a lil’ fragment of Disney history that is nestled in one of my favorite eras: the mid-century days of postwar optimism and retro-futurism design.
But first, let’s get into some history.
It’s June 1956 and President Dwight D. Eisenhower just signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act into law, which authorized a whoppin’ $25 billion (almost $289 billion today) for the construction of roughly forty-one thousand miles of interstate highway across the United States. Inspired by Germany’s impressive network of four-lane superhighways (also known as the autobahn) that he saw during his World War II days, Eisenhower envisioned a similar but far larger network that would - among other things - connect American motorists from sea to shining sea.
Ever the pragmatist, Walt Disney understood that Americans could only continue to construct and utilize a traditional highway system for so long. At some point, we had to get a lil’ more creative in the ways in which we move.
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