Epcot Groundbreaking Question

[kj_gameroom]

Does anyone here know how many people attended the 1979 Groundbreaking ceremony of EPCOT?

 

[ScrapIron]

Charlie Ridgeway's book says they put up bleachers for 100, but doesn't give a figure for actual attendance. It was still basically a swamp and a quickly built access road with those bleachers and a couple of cranes holding up a mockup of SSE.

A bientot.

 

[WED]

I was at the 1979 Epcot groundbreaking ceremony as a member of the media. To say there were 100 people there would be somewhat of a generous estimation. My best guess (a lot of years have passed) would be no more than 60-70 people attended.

The people attending the ceremony were loaded onto a bus and took a very bumpy ride over a makeshift dirt road through the Florida pine scrub. The destination was a small clearing in the woods where then-CEO Card Walker turned over a shovel of dirt as other WDW execs looked on. I still have the commemorative plastic hard-hat emblazoned with "EPCOT Groundbreaking" and the date, that was given to attendees.

When I returned for the opening-day ceremony of EPCOT Center (what it was called back then) in 1982, it was hard to comprehend what I was looking at once was wilderness.

Great memories, for sure.

 

[wdwjmp239]

The first time I was there, I was 7 years old. My family and I went to Epcot two weeks after it opened. Everything was so new.