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Topix: Entertainment and News. Seven Days And Nights In The World's Largest, Rowdiest Retirement Community. Seventy miles northwest of Orlando International Airport, amid the sprawling, flat central Florida nothingness — past all of those billboards for Jesus and unborn fetuses and boiled peanuts and gator meat — springs up a town called Wildwood. Storefront churches. O’Shucks Oyster Bar. Family Dollar. Nordic Gun & Pawn. A community center with a playground overgrown by weeds. Vast swaths of tree- dotted pastureland. Sound Bars; Projectors & Screens;. Topics in this Projector Buying Guide: Choosing the Right Projector;. HDMI ports for easy hookup to your home theater;. This area used to be the very center of Florida’s now fast- disappearing cattle industry. The houses are low- slung, pale stucco. One has a weight bench in the yard. There’s a rail yard crowded with static freight trains. The owners of a dingy single- wide proudly fly the stars and bars. And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Wildwood’s drabness explodes into green Southern splendor: majestic oaks bearing spindly fronds of Spanish moss that hang down almost to the ground. What was once rolling pasture land has been leveled with clay and sand. Acres of palmetto, hummock, and pine forest clear- cut and covered with vivid sod. All around me, old men drive golf carts styled to look like German luxury automobiles or that have tinted windows and enclosures to guard against the morning chill, along a wide, paved cart path. It's a bizarre sensation, like happening upon a geriatric man’s vision of heaven itself. I have just entered The Villages. This is one of the fastest- growing small cities in America, a place so intoxicating that weekend visitors frequently impulse- purchase $2. The community real estate office sells about 2. The grass is always a deep Pakistan green. The sunrises and sunsets are so intensely pink and orange and red they look computer- enhanced. The water in the public pools is always the perfect temperature. Residents can play golf on one of 4. Happy hour begins at 1. Musical entertainment can be found in three town squares 3. It’s landlocked but somehow still feels coastal. There’s no (visible) poverty or suffering. Free, consensual, noncommittal sex with a new partner every night is an option. There’s zero litter or dog shit on the sidewalks and hardly any crime and the laws governing the outside world don’t seem to apply here. You can be the you you’ve always dreamed of. One hundred thousand souls over the age of 5. Manhattan. Increasingly, this is how Americans are spending their golden years — not in the cities and towns where they established their roots, but in communities with people their own age, with similar interests and values. Trailer parks are popping up outside the gates; my aunt and uncle spend the summer months in western Pennsylvania in a gated 5. Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel / MCT / Getty Images. Mitt Romney speaks at a community center in The Villages during one of his many campaign swings during the 2. There are people, younger than 5. They — we — point to the elusive, all- powerful billionaire developer who lords over, and profits from, every aspect of his residents’ lives; or the ersatz approximation of some never- realized Main Street USA idyll — so white, so safe — exemplified by Mitt Romney's tone- deaf rendition of "God Bless America," performed at one of his many campaign swings through The Villages. But those who live and will likely die here and who feel they've earned the right to indulge themselves aren't anguishing over it. I am living here for a week to figure out if The Villages is a supersize, reinvigorated vision of the American dream, or a caricature, or if there's even a difference. The question I’m here to try to answer is a scary one: How do we want to finish our lives? For the first few days of my visit I’m crashing with some family friends, recent retirees Bob and Georgann Ozbolt. Bob had told Georgann that I was planning on staying at the Waterfront Inn, the community’s upscale hotel, and so she emails me: “Why don't you start off by staying with us to 'immerse' yourself. There should be plenty of Erectile fun and swimming, too!” For a beat I consider keeping my hotel reservations — the sexual mythology surrounding The Villages is terrifying. Turns out, though, that it was nothing more than an autocorrect gaffe that Georgann apologizes for later. Residents live in subdivisions with names announced with baroque stone signage. There’s Village de la Vista and the Village of Zamora and Harmeswood of Belle Aire. Village del Mar is located in close proximity to two retention ponds. The houses are packed in so close together that you can hear your neighbor flush. All the roads are county roads, anybody can pass in and out of The Villages, but there are security checkpoints at the entrance of every subdivision that provide a sense of exclusivity. The guard stations are attended by retirees in golf shirts upon my initial entrance, but they’re intimidating just the same. The Ozbolts settled here two years ago after a lifetime of moving in service of Bob’s career. He was an Army Ranger and later became an Army pilot before retiring to a cushy gig with Gulfstream flying movie stars and foreign royalty. He’s 6 feet 5 inches and recently slim from the Wheat Belly Diet, the sort of guy who un- self- consciously wears a Santa hat out to dinner during the holidays. I really can’t overstate how much I like Bob Ozbolt. He's deeply knowledgeable on everything from meteorology to economic theory. He occasionally attends tea party meetings but is still eager to listen patiently to what even the most liberal of pinkos has to say. And Georgann is sweeter than a sun- ripened tangelo. She’s gorgeous, with straight blonde hair and bangs that accentuate a set of gargantuan cornflower- blue eyes. And she’s force of nature: informed, opinionated, principled, an expert people watcher and virtuosic gossip. They raised kind and well- rounded kids too — both wildly successful banker types — who do things like go into a K- Mart around the holidays and anonymously pay for some less fortunate family’s entire layaway order. Bob and Georgann dwell in a smartly decorated three- bedroom that backs up to the ninth hole of one of The Villages’ 3. They looked at retirement communities all over the country. They considered Sun City, Arizona; Georgann's parents retired there. They considered a place in Miami, not far from their grandbabies, and another in Hilton Head, South Carolina. We were out at dinner by one of the communities in South Carolina and there was a woman out to dinner all alone and I could just see the sadness in her eyes," Georgann tells me out on the lanai. That’s when I knew we had to move here.”Bob suggests we go for a tour. As we get driving, Georgann speculates that I'll be spending a handsome amount of time pulled over consulting a map. This place is huge and shapeless like a growing crude spill; the golf courses are laid out first and then the roads and neighborhoods are built around them, Bob tells me. There are two primary thoroughfares — Buena Vista Boulevard and Morse Boulevard — running north and south through the development. A broad road called El Camino Real cuts through the center. Farther south, Route 4. Route 4. 41 cuts The Villages at a sloppy diagonal. We drive through a mess of roundabouts, clear across campus, to the gates of Orange Blossom Gardens (OBG). Bob refers to OBG as the "historical district." The homes are mostly double- wides and prefabs that were built in the mid- '7. Georgann comments that people around The Villages talk about OBG like it's the ghetto. But the homes here have real character — neat and white with bright aqua trim and white slat awnings over the windows, plastic flamingos and garden gnomes and ornate birdbaths on the lawns, old Cutlasses and sun- battered Plymouth minivans in the driveways. They call to mind simpler times: Gerald Ford, orange juice from concentrate, smoking on airplanes, pubic hair. The homes call to mind simpler times: Gerald Ford, orange juice from concentrate, smoking on airplanes, pubic hair. Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel. A statue of Harold Schwartz, founder of The Villages retirement community, stands in a fountain in Orange Blossom Gardens. The father of Orange Blossom Gardens was Harold Schwartz. As detailed by Andrew D. Blechman in his 2. Leisureville, Schwartz made his fortune selling vitamins, cuckoo clocks, and wallets with zippers through the mail. By the early '6. 0s he was into real estate; in the late '6. Lady Lake (not far from where we are now), chopped that land into quarter- acre parcels, and sold it off — undeveloped and sight unseen — for $2. When the Florida legislature nixed mail- order land sales in the early ‘7. Schwartz left his partner, Albert Tarrson, in charge of the land. Tarrson decided to build a trailer park but only managed to sell fewer than 4. In 1. 98. 3, when Schwartz bought the land from him outright, it was just trailers, a clubhouse, shuffleboard courts, and a nine- hole golf course. During a visit with his sister Ethel in Sun City, the retirement community opened by Del Webb in 1. Sun City's success stemmed from the lifestyle it offered, not its location. Inspired, Schwartz called on his son H. Gary Morse (most Villages residents call him simply "The Developer") to help him get his new community off the ground. The Developer, a college dropout — he allegedly adopted his stepfather's name because his mother was afraid Nazis were going to invade and kill all the Jews — nurtured his business acumen managing his mother’s steakhouse in northern Michigan. Once he arrived in Florida, he and his father renovated and expanded OBG's golf course. Schwartz's stated goal from the beginning to was to offer a “millionaire’s lifestyle on a retirement budget” and “free” golf was part of that vision. By 1. 98. 7 OBG had $4. They added pools, a country club, another recreation center with its own restaurant, and 1.
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