WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS…

PLASTICVILLE-USA

WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS MAKE LEMONADE

-BUT-

WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU A BIG FAT DEFINED-BENEFIT PENSION CHECK…MAKE WHINE.

What is now TV began as a solution to a problem that old Harold Schwartz had. Back in the 1960’s Harold was making a living from buying up cheap scrub land in Arizona and Florida and selling off parcels by mail. While there was never any evidence that old Harold was doing anything the Brits would call “dodgy” there were lots of others out there who were selling chunks of ground where “water front” property would be defined as land that’s covered in 18 inches of water in some fetid Florida swamp. Now why any half-sane person would buy land sight-unseen by mail from somebody you don’t know is beyond me, but Harold was making a go of it.

In the late 60’s the Feds had had enough of dealing with people who had been taken by the Fast and/or Crazy Eddies of the mail order property business that they put the brakes on that sort of land sale.

Now Harold was stuck with a whole lot of land, mainly in Florida that he needed to get rid of. He hit upon the idea of building a small attractive retirement trailer park on land he owned in central Florida. He would set the place up with a swimming pool, a small golf course and some other minor amenities and sell his land off to people of generally lower-middle class means who would like a nice place to get out of the snow in the winter. These folks were not people with bulging bank accounts but rather people who had worked hard all their lives and had lived carefully and could now afford a modest retirement. The proverbial salt of the earth. The behemoth that would become TV was at that time not even a gleam in old Harold’s eye.

There’s a great myth that has sprung up about Harold over time, and like so many myths there’s a small thread or two of truth mixed in, but mostly its embellishment. The myth sort of equals the same myths of Ben “Bugsy” Siegel “discovering” modern Las Vegas, or how Ray Kroc “invented” McDonalds. Neither is true, but it makes for good story telling.

The myths of Bugsy, Ray & Harold all run along the same vein. One day God zapped them with a lightning bolt and gave them complete and total clarity of an idea. They downloaded all the designs and plans directly from the Almighty himself and their success was forever sealed. Great story!

In the case of TV what did happen was Harold’s son, the recently deceased Gary Morse. We’ve discussed the differences between Gary and Harold before, but suffice it to say that Harold was the consummate “outside” man while Gary was the consummate “inside” man.

There were a lot of talents and abilities Gary brought to his dad’s business table, but arguably the biggest idea was Gary’s ability to see the changing scene of adult retirement. Harold’s outlook was based on people who were born somewhere between 1900-1910. They were the first generation where an actual retirement was a real possibility for many. They were people who had survived WW-1, The Great Depression and WW-2 and lived to tell about it. They were the first generation to actually benefit from defined-benefit pensions that would carry people into their so-called golden years with a level of comfort and dignity, and they were the first generation to benefit from both Social Security and Medicare.

They had learned to save and deny themselves instant gratification for a longer term goal. For a male born in 1905 he could likely expect to live to make it to about 1972. Which means he would live just over 67 years and be retired for only two. So for the people Harold was originally selling his land to they could expect somewhere on average of 2-3 good retirement years before Father Time ticked his last tock.

These people enjoyed modest company pensions for the rest of their lives, as well as Social Security payments and starting in 1966..Medicare. It was this group of people that Harold targeted to sell his land to.

Unlike Harold, Gary was able to look ahead and foresee the huge explosion in the defined-benefit pension, the large uptick in salaries, and the rise of public sector employees who could retire with good pensions based more on age than of years worked.

Gary was also able to understand that this would be a consumer-based group as opposed to their parent’s generation who were diehard savers. He understood that there were many of these people who based their lives on showing off what they had accumulated, and they were going to be demanding of every conceivable amenity.

It was Gary’s understanding of all these things that drove the incredible expansion of TV. Gary correctly read the need to make a place where the most ostentatious, shallow, self-absorbed, self-important denizens of the so-called “Greatest” generation and Baby Boomers would want to spend their retirements. This was NOT going to be your father’s or even Harold’s Oldsmobile. It was going to be a colossus for those who thought of themselves as colossal.

Harold’s and then Gary’s dreams and plans succeeded pretty much beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. There’s no way to explain TV to people who haven’t seen it, because there just isn’t anything you can point to and say..”well..it’s like this..” For better or worse it has no equal.

For the most part the people who come to TV are all rather very defensive of their choice to live here. Whenever somebody raises the slightest doubt as to why anyone would want to live here in adult Disneyland you can expect a sharp and nasty answer if you are a doubter. As we have mentioned before, to a great many of its inhabitants TV is practically a religion. And the truly religious are some of the most zealous defenders of the place.

The majority of people who live in TV are in almost any measureable terms VERY well off. They have pretty much anything you could ever ask for or want, and yet they are some of the most unhappy, angry, unpleasant people you could meet on God’s creation.

They complain about virtually anything and everything, and up until his death almost everything they didn’t like was blamed on “that damned greedy Gary Morse”.

As mentioned above, Harold and Gary were two vastly different people. Where Harold was the old-fashioned glad-handing stereotypical salesman, Gary was the boring bean counter, and many thought of him as sort of a creepy presence. Where Harold was recommended for sainthood, Gary was vilified. In his book Leisureville..Andrew Blechman makes a number of points about the differences between Harold and Gary. And unlike his father, Gary was NOT a glad-hander. He preferred to work back behind the curtain, which is perfectly fine since TV resembles the land of Oz.

For all the ugly words spoken about Gary, TV simply would not have gone off without him. It was his mind for detail, efficiency and order that made TV what it is today. Hmm..Come to think about it, maybe Gary WAS evil after all.

The constant carping about how every slight, inconvenience and pot hole just HAD to be the fault of “that damned greedy Gary Morse” came to a screeching halt when Gary died on October 30^th 2014 at the age of 77. Unlike the death of his father Harold, Gary’s family kept a tight lid on the cause of death, and there were no public memorial services for him as there had been for Harold. He lived behind the scenes and he died behind the scenes.

As supposedly happy and well off as they claim to be..Villagers will complain about virtually anything. They will complain if they have to wait 10 minutes to be served in a restaurant. 10 minutes isn’t bad in many sit-down restaurants, but having to wait 10 minutes for service during the height of TV snowbird season is like getting placed at the head of the table as an honored guest!

There is no end to what they won’t gripe about. Pets, neighbors, golf carts, local doctors & lawyers, seats for the FREE nightly entertainment at the town squares and on and on and ON.

While dealing with Villagers and their continual arrogance and stupidity can test the patience of Job, it is truly sad that there are so many, who have so much, who are so unhappy and angry about it right here in America’s FRIENDLIEST Hometown.