Background
Holland grew up during the Great Depression and his parents died before his eighteenth birthday, leaving him to care for his younger sister.
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Glenn Holland
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Career
In 1953, Holland proposed after reading a Saturday Evening Post story about a similar project called North Pole in New New York Holland set up a corporation that funded the amusement park, and leased the land from the family of the general contractor J. Putnam Henck. In the early 1950s, Holland sketched his idea of a Christmas fairyland filled with enormous candy canes, animals and gingerbread houses.
Holland developed this idea into a working plan and sought investors for his project
He traveled the country selling his concept and $45 stock shares, and eventually listed his company, Corporation, on the California Stock Exchange. Around the same time, Walt Disney was building Disneyland.
Holland contacted Disney, and the two men reportedly corresponded for a time. While Disney was already wealthy from his films, Holland was an unknown.
The McDonald brothers told him about their business idea with Ray Kroc for a chain of fast-food restaurants.
The story inspired Holland to franchise his parks. The first opened Memorial Day in 1955, six weeks before Disneyland, in Skyforest near Lake Arrowhead in San Bernardino County, California. lieutenant closed in 1998. A second opened in 1957 near Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County, California, staying open until 1979.
The last was opened in 1959 in the Chicago suburb of East Dundee and closed in 2006.
Holland had planned for the Dundee park to be the hub of a nationwide chain of son The other two, in Richmond, Virginia and Cherry Hill, New Jersey, were never built.
Despite the park"s early popularity, Holland had not planned for the freezing weather in Illinois. While his West Coast parks stayed open year-round, with best attendance in the weeks before Christmas, the Chicago area was too cold.
Eventually, in East Dundee was in the odd position of being closed on Christmas.
The miscalculation helped lead to the collapse of the company. Finances were stretched thin. By 1965, investors rebelled.
Holland left the company, and the parks were sold.
"Where he made the error was going on and doing the final one in Illinois. "But he knew he had touched people with the parks.
lieutenant was the most special thing he felt he had ever done."
Holland later became a real estate developer, and died in 2002 at 84.
