Cape Canaveral/Orlando

A few nights ago we camped onthe water at Jetty Park, which is in Cape Canaveral. I loved watching the fishing boats and cruise ships pass by. The next day we decided to visit the Kennedy Space Center, since neither of us had been there before.

Included in the price of admission was a bus tour of the area, which was enhanced by the very knowledgeable bus driver. The bus paralleled the path an immense ATV used to transport the various spacecrafts such as the Apollo rockets and the space shuttles to the launch pad. The vehicle would straddle the median and, when loaded, would travel one mile an hour.

 

After the bus tour, there were quite a few buildings to explore. We were awed by the many artifacts of the space program and enjoyed the various films and displays. My dad worked for Martin Marietta (now Lockeed Martin), one of the general contractors for NASA. He worked on designing various spacecraft, in particular the Mercury Project. In fact, we lived in Orlando from 1957 to 1961, in a section called Pine Hills. My sisters Beth and Lisa were born in Orlando, and I attended first and second grades there. This was before Disney World was built.

Since I’m actively working on my family history, I wanted a picture of my childhood home. I knew it would look smaller than I remembered, but I was not prepared to see that it is now in a rundown, “sketchy” neighborhood. I found this history of the area online:

"The area that would become Pine Hills began in 1953 with the first subdivisions constructed along the newly completed Pine Hills Road north of Colonial Drive. It was one of the first suburbs of Orlando and grew as a bedroom community for the workers of Martin Marietta . At the time, it was an upper-middle class suburb with a country club named "Silver Pines".

Into the late 1980s and during the 1990s, Pine Hills fell into a state of decline. Silver Pines Country Club was closed, and apartment complexes were built on the property in the mid 1990s. The "Pine Hills Shopping Center" lost its long-time tenants and was eventually converted in the late 1990s into a strip mall with discount stores. Much of the housing became low rent and government subsidized. As of 2013, Pine Hills is perceived to be a high-crime area despite community-wide initiatives to solve the problem.”

This is how my childhood home looks now. Oh, well, at least I have some photos of it when it was a lovely place to live.