The Volusia Mall would not open until 1974 and draw away the name stores. Near Bellair Plaza Shopping Center, built just the year before.ĭowntown Beach Street was still the retail and social center of town. Highway 1, a paper map unfolded in my mother’s lap, told us to turn east and roll across the Granada Avenue drawbridge and to a home with a lot of sandy vacant lots around it. The Interstate Highway System did not yet extend here, so like most tourists, we arrived on U.S. Volusia County's population was less than a quarter of what it is now. But in October 1962, as we pulled into the driveway of our new home, my family was part of that early wave of engineers brought in by General Electric’s Apollo Support Program. Aerospace-related jobs that would largely disappear 30 years later, leaving behind a hole in the area’s economic makeup. Daytona International Speedway was brand new, having been built in 1959, and nobody yet knew how the sport of stock-car racing would grow.Īs the manned space program ramped up, it was a decade that brought Daytona Beach a tech sector overnight - 500 jobs in the first year. It was when Volusia County population grew by more than third. That was the time when my parents first moved me to Daytona Beach in the back of a green Rambler station wagon, a vehicle my father recalls as the kind of car that helped make AMC what it is today.īut sure enough, the 1960s really was the decade when things started happening in this area for real.Ĭonsider: It was the decade that brought us spring break, the 24 Hours of Daytona, Deltona, Palm Coast, Ponce Inlet, Daytona Beach Shores, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, racial integration of schools and businesses, and the Volusia County Charter.
And the steady drumbeat of 50-year commemorations for everything that happened in the 1960s encourages me to think that way, too. People usually claim that their area’s most important era had to be right about the time they wandered onto the scene.
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