| | Tony de la Cruz From Tony de la Cruz
for Orlandoescape.com
Being asked to write your own bio is like being asked to do your own root canal. Where do I start and how can I see myself looking from the inside.
I guess the answer is: I was born in Quebec, Canada on December 16, 1963. When I was a year old I adopted a kindly couple from Puerto Rico and moved there. My parents owned a jewelry store.
 In 1971 my parents bought a travel agency. As luck would have it, a month later, in October 1st, Walt Disney World opened. My dad and I went to check it out in November and by the next Christmas we had the first guided group from Puerto Rico to visit the Magic Kingdom.
From that first year my mom, sister Irmarie and I, would move to Orlando from June to August and spent the whole summer accompanying professional tour guides and learning from them. My dad would travel back and forth between our offices in PR and Orlando. By the time I was 13 I soloed as a tour guide and did it for ten of the best years of my life.
What kid wouldn’t have liked to literally grow up in WDW like my sister and I did? I was there for the greatest Fourth of July Celebration ever in 1976, every Christmas, the opening (and closing) of every attraction and theme park in the area.
In 1989, after graduating from the Sacred Heart University with a degree in Travel Industry and one in Criminal Law (long story), I fulfilled a lifelong dream and moved to Orlando permanently. I worked as a waiter/ entertainer in the now-defunct dinner theatre Wild Bill’s in Kissimmee, where I learned to take orders, carry big trays and learn to be a cowboy and stage gunfights. I even got to fall off a roof. Ironically I did that at home years later but not as a stunt.
As long as I can remember I have been a voracious reader. Anything I could get my hands on I would read. My favorite writer was, and still is Jules Verne. I read his books over and over again. I was also hooked on MAD paperbacks very early, which is where I get my sarcastic, satirical humor.
Since then my taste has expanded to include everything, from biographies to humor, to mysteries to history. In mystery I love the classics like Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, as well as contemporary writers like Catherine Aird, Catherine Hart, Martha Grimes, Dorothy Simpson and Marie Daheim.
In biographies I love Peter Ackroyd’s biographies of Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare, and David McCullough’s work on John Adams and Harry S. Truman, and am now reading Conrad Black’s “Franklin Delano Roosevelt”.
Needless to say, I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but only in recent months have I decided to do it in a more full-time basis by writing something every day.
I still love everything Disney and taking my son there and looking at everything through his eyes is like doing it all over again for the first time. And there it is, all there is to know about me. Back to Orlando Travel Articles | | |
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