According to a recent press release from D23, Dave Bossert, Creative Director and Head of Special Projects at Disney Animation Studios is working on a book about Roy E. Disney. Can´t wait!

Armchair Archivist: The Magic of Models and Miniatures!



In case you had not yet spotted this new episode.

Just spotted an upcoming book by Tony Bancroft named Directing for Animation: Behind the Scenes with Animation Greats which could end up being very interesting.

Walt's People - Volume 12 is almost ready. I have just received the cover drawings from John Musker and am awaiting only a few small pieces to consider it complete. If all goes well it will be sent to the printer around June 18, otherwise it will probably be after a trip I need to make to Latin America, that is around July 9th. We will see. In any case, a new volume is close to be released.

The Disney Books Network was updated today. Please note that its official address is now www.didierghez.com. www.pizarro.net/didier will soon be redirected there.

 

I ended up buying two additional model sheets for the abandoned Disney version of Hiawatha and am convinced you will enjoy seeing both of them.

Just back from a short trip abroad and catching up on some outstanding articles. Do not miss today:

- FAREWELL TO THE MARTIAN CHRONICLER by Brian Sibley
- Ray Bradbury, RIP by Amid Amidi
- Interviews: Phil Monroe (1976) by Michael Barrier (not Disney, but a must-read)
- Marge Champion, Disney and Art Babbitt by Jake Friedman
- Interview: Timothy Susanin by Bob McLain
- Memoir Author Interview: Women’s Memoirs Talks with Cathy Sherman Freemen by Matilda Butler
- Rare First Printing of Mickey Mouse Comic Book Found by Mark Wilson (Thanks to matt Crandall for the link)
- Walt's Friend, Ray Bradbury by Jim Korkis
- Tim Burton: The Early Disney Years by Jim Korkis
-

This just in from Amid Amidi:

[Just wanted to let you know that I've launched 365 Days of Ward Kimball:
wardkimball.tumblr.com
I'm updating it every single day for the next year.]

I was delighted to hear that Jenny Lerew had been selected to write The Art of Brave. I am a big fan of Jenny's Blackwing Diaries blog and since a few days ago also know that Jenny is one of the kindest souls around. So it was a pure delight last week to receive a copy of her new book. The concept art created for the film is absolutely gorgeous and if the final look of the movie is even half as good, it will be a feast for the eyes. Jenny´s text only makes things better. In other words: I loved this book.

Exciting news from Jérémie Noyer whose third collection of interviews with Disney artists will be released in France by L'Harmattan this month. The book focuses purely on the Imagineers who created Disneyland Paris. If you read French and are a fan of the parks this is a "must-have". I had a chance to read an early draft and it is full of stories about the French parks which even I had never heard before.

While this book will only be available on Amazon in September, it is already being sold in the parks and was well worth the long wait. It seems to contain all of the posters ever created by Walt Disney Imagineering for all the Disney theme parks in the world and features the names of all of the artists who designed them. The authors have conducted various original interviews while conducting their research, which makes things even better. Definitely one of the great Disney books of 2012.

Please note that I am currently selling on ebay a copy of this extremely rare version of the Gremlins book, released in Spain (!) in the 1940s.

This great model sheet was sold by Howard Lowery last week. According to the caption:

[This photostat model sheet titled "Puk-wudjies (Hiawatha - 1114)" was made at the Disney Studio during story development of an animated film based on The Song of Hiawatha, the epic 1855 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longellow. For many years after release of Little Hiawatha (1937), Walt Disney kept the story in development for a future animated feature. This model sheet was issued "12-1-'48" and shows a Disney story artist's concept drawings of "the mischievous Puk-wudjies," a tribe of pygmy Indians who conspire to defeat "the Strong Man" Kwasind in the poem's 18th stanza]

It might have been based on early concept drawings from artist Holling C. Holling dating back from 1944. 

Do not miss today:

- Ludwig Von Drake Explains The Computer by Paul F. Anderson
- Three Things You (Probably) Don't Know About Inner Space by Todd James Pierce
- Chess Board by Disney Artists in 1940 by Jake Friedman
- Sergeant Babbitt, WWII Hero by Jake Friedman
- The Secret Origins of Hidden Mickeys by Jim Korkis
- An animated effort to revive a Disney landmark by James Fussell

This region-free Blu-Ray which was released earlier this month in the UK apparently contains a great bonus section about the unmade feature-length version of Hiawatha. I have just ordered it on Amazon.co.uk.

If you want to get an in-depth look at 20 years of Disneyland Paris history, you need to pick up ASAP the newly released book by Jeremie Noyer and Mathias Dugoujon, 20 Years of Dreams. It's huge and covers the history of the park year by year, event by event. A "must have" for park enthusiasts.

Did anyone read this new book? If so, could you let us know what it is worth?

Karl Guttag was kind enough to send me this review of Bob Gurr’s new book, Design: Just for Fun 

“Design: Just for Fun” is Disney Imagineer Bob Gurr’s autobiographical telling of his first hand involvement with the design of many of the classic vehicles and other attractions at Disneyland and WDW plus some of what he did after leaving Disney in 1981.   Bob Gurr, inducted as a “Disney Legend” in 2004, is probably most famous for his design of both the original Disneyland and Walt Disney World (WDW) monorails, but that is only a small part of his prolific theme park carrier.   He is also one of the very few people alive today that had first hand experiences with Walt Disney in the design of Disneyland. 

From 1954 to 1981, Bob Gurr had a major hand in about everything that moved at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.    If you have ever been on a Disney monorail, parking lot tram, The Haunted Mansion, The Matterhorn, People Mover, Flying Saucer, Excursion Car, Main Street Vehicle, 20,000 Leagues Sub, Open Air Excursion Cars on the Disney Railroads, or Space Mountain; then you have ridden on a Bob Gurr designed vehicle.  Bob also designed the mechanical structure of the original Lincoln animatronic figure among many other Disney non-vehicle designs.    After Disney, Bob’s work included designing the Sinking Pirate Ship at Las Vegas’ Treasure Island, King Kongs at Universal theme parks, effects for Michael Jackson’s Victory Tour, and a full size Godzilla for the 1996 movie.

The book briefly tells the story of going to school as an automobile body stylist and how that led at 23 years old to his being hired on a part time basis to design a body for Disneyland’s Autopia attraction in 1954.   Walt Disney mistakenly assumed that because Bob was a body stylist, that he could also engineer the rest of a vehicle and when Walt asked Bob re-engineer the Autopia cars he was too afraid to not say “yes” to Walt.    Just four years later with the help of the Alweg Company, he was engineering the Disneyland monorail after first drawing its classic body style.  

Unimaginably today, Bob started work on the Monorail in October 1958 and it opened at Disneyland just 7 months later on June 14, 1959.   Bob attributes the speed to the instantaneous decision making by Walt and in part to the non-existence of the distractive effects of emails, PDA’s, PC’s, and iPods and the like.   While Bob had help from the Alweg Company, they had to almost completely redesign the original Alweg boxy “loaf of bread” shape to Bob’s vision of a lower sleeker and more stylish version inspired by Buck Rogers.    

The book takes you mostly chronologically through the various major design activities in Bob’s career.   For each design he tells about how it came about, some of the issues he had to deal with, and often an amusing story associated with the design.   Along with the stories are over a hundred behind the scenes pictures taken while developing the various attractions.  
 
  

Among the stories is the time Bob Gurr was told by Walt Disney before the dedication ceremony for the first Disneyland monorail.  During what was supposed to be only a tour of the cab with then V.P. Richard Nixon, Walt said to take them for a loop around the park.   Bob just took off leaving the all the Secret Service agents on the loading platform and thus “kidnapping” the Vice President of the United States.  Since the monorail had only made one successful loop without breaking down the night before up to that time, Bob “had visions of the monorail catching fire over the Submarine Lagoon” and burning up with Walt and the V.P. of the United States.    In another story he tells how in the days before computer design, he had to figure out the Matterhorn track layout using nothing but paper and long division (not even a slide rule or mechanical calculator).  He tells how they had to keep changing the placement of the I-beams for supporting the mountain so he could get the coaster to work.  

The 216 page hardbound book is well written, well organized, and easy to follow as well as being a beautiful looking book with a good mix of numerous photographs and drawings. It is written in what I would call a conversational style;  I have watched multiple entertaining talks by Bob Gurr and the book reads like he talks.   This is an absolute must have for any Disney theme park book collector.  There are some preview chapters on Bob Gurr’s website at http://www.bobgurr.com/index.php/chapter-previews.html.

Now for the bad news, this is a self published very limited edition book with only 1,000 signed red covered books and 1,000 unsigned blue covered books.  Bob’s web site says that most of the first 1,000 signed books were sold before the first book shipped the week of May 14th.    Each edition costs $58.95 + $11.25 shipping (California residents add $5.16 sales tax), while a pit pricey for a 216 page book, it is a limited edition and well worth it to the serious Disney fan.   I can absolutely guarantee that this book will sell out both editions quickly and I fully expect, based on my years of collecting Disney books, you will soon see these selling for many times their cover price on Ebay. 

The book can only be bought directly through Bob Gurr’s website (http://www.bobgurr.com/) which will take you to PayPal for payment.   If you are interested, I recommend you click on the link now.

Karl Guttag

Karl Guttag has collected and read over 130 books on Disney’s theme parks, Disney’s creative people, and Walt Disney.    He also operates a very large collection of Schuco Disneyland Toy Monorails from the 1960s (video demonstration at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_z3nGMyC-U).   He is a former Texas Instruments Fellow for his work in Microprocessors, Image Processors, Graphics Accelerators, the Video DRAM, and the first Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM).   After leaving TI he was the CTO of two high tech startups and today he has a blog about projection, lasers, and other technology at www.kguttag.com.

Redux Riding Hood



I mentioned this short a few years ago and it has finally been posted online. Thanks to CartoonBrew for alerting us about it.

In the comments, Steve Segal says:

[This is one of the funniest and most original cartoons to come from Disney. They should bundle all their recent shorts and release them on DVD or Blu-Ray. They have a lot to choose from (in no particular order):

Oilspot and Lipstick
Off His Rockers
Harold And His Amazing Green Plants
Fun with Mr. Future
Soccermania
Petal to the Metal
Stand by Me
Recycle Rex
Lorenzo
Tangled Ever After
Destino
How to Hook Up Your Home Theater
Tick Tock Tale
Glago’s Guest
Let It Begin
The Ballad of Nessie
Super Rhino
Tiny’s Big Adventure
The Little Matchgirl
The Cat That Looked at a King
A Dairy Tale
One By One
John Henry
Three Little Pigs (1997)
Paperman

Some of these, like Moore’s other short Stand by Me, have never been released on home video, others are spread out on various feature DVD’s (not all of us want to purchase 3 Ninjas to watch Petal to the Metal). ]

I could not agree more.

Do not miss today:

- Illustrator for Hire, 1928 by Jake Friedman (outstanding post)
- New York 1936 on Film by Jake Friedman (another outstanding post)
- The Disneyland 1959 Mermaid Tale of Susan by Jim Korkis
- Speaking of Walt by Jim Korkis

I will be away for work until May 28th. See you all in two weeks (and a few of you slightly earlier).

A few great books whose covers have been released recently on Amazon

 

Poster Art of the Disney Parks

The Fairest One of All: The Making of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney's Classic Animated Film

Astonishing item discovered recently on ebay by Mark Sonntag. According to the caption:

[This is an extremely rare original 1938 homemade Christmas Card from Herman and Ethel Schultheis, done as a photo montage or collage from a photograph taken outside the Walt Disney Studios (with the signage showing the Mickey Mouse statue logo and Silly Symphony Sound Cartoons), with colored in photo drawings of Herman and Ethel posing alongside Disney characters Mickey, Donald Duck, and Pluto in the foreground. The noted animator and camera effects artist Schultheis, who was instrumental in creating the effects on Fantasia, Dumbo, Pinocchio and other classic animated works, is depicted in whimsical fashion here, wearing a diaper and sporting a stetson and cane for added style.]

Disney Historian Jim Korkis and Disney Legend Bob Gurr will be the guest speakers at the Dayton Disneyana Show at the Wyndham Garden Hotel in Dayton, Ohio on June 30^th and July 1^st.  The event is open to the public.  For further information, go to this link.

Do not miss today:

- Will Rogers and the American Adventure by Jim Korkis
- Once Upon A Time In A Land Faraway...
- Chim-Chiminey, Chim Chiminey, Chim-Chim Chiree! When you’re with a Behind the Scenes Pic of the Day you’re in glad company! (Thanks to Jim Korkis for the link)

This just spotted on the Ward Kimball Facebook page:

[In the photo, from left to right, Von Braun, Kimball, Rex Bohanan and Willy Ley.]

This just in from Jim Korkis:

[Here is a short video from the March 1948 Oscar ceremony where James Baskett accepted an honorary Oscar for his portrayal of Uncle Remus in Song of the South.  That moment occurs at the 1:50 mark on the video.]

Speaking of books which could contain rare information about Disney, this in-depth biography of Deems Taylor seems likely to contain quite a few elements about the making of Fantasia. I am looking forward to receiving it in a few weeks.

Do not miss today:

- Inventing Live-Action Reference for Animation by Jake Friedman
- Frank Thomas honors Art Babbitt by Jake Friedman
- Disney and Babbitt – the 30s in Public Records by Jake Friedman
- Golden Horseshoe - Girlie Club Edition by Todd James Pierce

This just in from Jeffrey Jones:

[I noticed you posted information on the upcoming Pierre Lambert book, La Belle au Bois Dormant. Here is a good money saving tip to share with your readers, which I did with the previous Lambert book, Le Livre de la Jungle :  Rather than ordering the book from Amazon in France, it can be ordered from Amazon.Ca (Amazon Canada).  The shipping cost is much less and the dollar exchange rate is better.]

This just in from Jim Korkis:

[Disney Historian Jim Korkis thanks to some help from Matt Crandall has interviewed the final Space Girl who appeared in Tomorrowland in 1964-1965 for a future edition of Walt's People.
Here is a photo of Carol with her Space Man companion, Pete.  Both Carol and Pete were over six feet tall and wore heels as well so they towered over the guests.]

Do not miss today:

- Taking a Trip on Star Tours by Jim Korkis
- Disneyland: Year One - pt. 1 by Todd James Pierce
- HAPPY BIRTHDAY To Walt's Burbank Studio by Paul F. Anderson
- Guess who? by Andreas Deja
- Madame Bonfamille by Andreas Deja
- Aerial view of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion facade and ride-building by Cory Doctorow

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the book Gifts of an Eagle. I forgot to mention that a DVD was also released in complement to the book. Todd James Pierce was kind enough to remind me this a few days ago and I thought it might be of interest to a few of you.

When I heard about the 2nd edition of the book Building a Dream by Beth Dunlop, which was released last year, I thought it was a simple re-hash of the volume which had been released in 1996. It isn't. At least 50% to 70% of the book is brand new and the title should probably have been changed to reflect this. If you loved the 1st edition, you need to do yourself a favor and pick up this one too.

This just in: Bamboo Forest Publishing Announces Acquisition of Ron “Dreamfinder” Schneider’s Autobiography

More at this link.

This is slightly off-topic, but Adam Abraham, author of the definitive history of UPA has just launched a web site which is well worth the visit.

Pierre Lambert´s new book will be released at the end of the year. Here is the cover, for your enjoyment.

Didier Ghez: How did you get the idea to write this book?

Amid Amidi: The seed was planted when I interviewed Ward in 2000 about his colleague Tom Oreb. After the interview, we walked out to Ward's storage shed to find a painting he'd made of Oreb. His storage was dusty, but meticulously organized with dozens of neatly labeled boxes. I was excited when Ward said he wanted to show me some work besides that painting. He pulled out a large flat box that contained figure drawings from the 1940s. The drawings were beautiful and had a real sense of caricature to them. When I looked at those drawings in front of me and all the surrounding boxes, it struck me that there's a lot more to Ward than I knew. There's that famous quote where Walt Disney said, “Ward’s the one man who works for me I call a genius.” I wanted to understand what Walt truly meant when he singled out Ward from the rest of the studio. That required taking a step back and looking at Ward not simply as an animator, but as an artist first and foremost.

DG: Did you get collaboration from the family and did you get access to the famous Kimball diaries?

AA: This book would not have been possible without the Kimball family's cooperation. When Ward died in 2002, I kept in touch with the family. Whenever I saw Ward's son, John, around town, I'd casually mention that I wanted to write a book about Ward. After "Cartoon Modern" was published in 2006, I was looking for another project and decided that the time was right to pursue this bio. That's when I approached the Kimball family with the idea for the book. They made his entire personal archive available to me—a sizable collection of art, documents and photographs. Ward's wife, Betty, was a huge help and she filled in many of the details. The legendary Kimball diaries were off-limits initially, but a couple years into the project, I became the first historian who was allowed access to those. I'm grateful for that because it enhanced my understanding of Ward's work tremendously and allowed me to tell the complete story of his life. 

DG: Could you give us some information about the content of the diaries?

AA: Ward’s Disney-era journals comprise three bound volumes totaling nearly 1,400 pages. He kept them between September 1939, and the end of 1948. (He skipped the year 1945, and there are extended gaps in some of the other years.) The diaries are interesting both for what they contain and for what they don't. There are many things Ward hints at, but doesn't follow up on. Clearly, they were personal notes intended to help him remember events in his life, not some grand statement on his philosophies or art. Having said that, they contained invaluable nuggets of information that shed light on life at the Disney studio in the 1940s. His account of the Disney studio strike of 1941 is fascinating and will hopefully be made available someday for the sake of animation history. Ward's entries about the strike give a real sense of the stakes, both for the artists on the inside and outside.

DG: How long is the book and what are the highlights?

AA: The book is comprised of eleven chapters spread over 240 pages. There's a lot of ground to cover, and I had to convince my editor to add more pages on two separate occasions. For me personally, the biggest highlight is simply that this is not your typical animation history book. Anybody who works in a big animation studio will empathize with Ward's story and appreciate how ferociously he fought to preserve his personal voice while working at Disney. He was loyal to a fault to Walt, yet he was anything but a company man, and that tension drives much of the work he produced as an artist.

DG: What are the key discoveries you made while conducting your research?

AA: I never knew how close the relationship was between T. Hee and Ward. They were great friends, and Hee was the one who pushed him toward a more design-oriented approach to drawing long before Ward directed "Melody" and "Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom." Ward's relationship with Fred Moore was also intriguing, and evolved in directions I never anticipated when I first started working on the book.

I was perhaps most surprised by the creative struggle involved in the work that he created. When we look at the classic characters and sequences that Ward animated, we assume he arrived at work every day, sat down at his desk, and pumped out beautiful animation. In reality, there was immense external and internal pressure weighing down on him during almost every production. For example, he struggled to get a handle on Jiminy Cricket in "Pinocchio" until there was barely any production time left, had a nervous breakdown while working on the crows in "Dumbo," and had to redo a significant amount of the animation in the Mad Tea Party sequence of “Alice in Wonderland” due to creative conflicts with Walt. There was so much upheaval and creative conflict during the production of "Pecos Bill" that it's amazing it turned out as well as it did.

The book will hopefully dispel the one-dimensional picture of Ward as a zany prankster who provided comic relief for others at the studio. He was an amusing figure to be sure, but he was also one of the smartest and savviest people who worked at the company. Ward pushed himself harder than anybody, and pursued an idea until he had realized its creative potential. A great example of this is his music career. The Firehouse Five Plus Two took off in the late-1940s, but it was hardly an overnight success. Ward had worked the better part of a decade prior to that learning how to lead a band and developing his voice as a musician.

And speaking of the Firehouse Five Plus Two, I was surprised by how popular the band was during the 1950s. From our modern-day perspective, they often appear like some kind of fringe musical novelty group. But when they exploded onto the scene in 1950, they were a national sensation and received massive media exposure. They were a household name for the rest of the decade and well into the Sixties. For much of the 1950s and '60s, Ward was better known by the general public for his music than his work at Disney.

DG: What are the most interesting visual documents we will discover in the book?

AA: There's literally hundreds of images in the book, most never-before-published, and each I hope will reveal something new about Ward or his work. There's tons of personal drawings, paintings, gag drawings, and photos, along with rare pieces like his retirement notice to the studio in 1973, a hilarious two-page letter that Walt Kelly wrote to him which illustrates their warm relationship better than anything I could write, examples of Ward's animation thumbnails, and rare images from the WWII-era USO camp shows that contained the seeds of the Firehouse Five Plus Two.

Do not miss today:

- Clarice by Andreas Deja
- The Birth of Disney Fandom Part 3: The Disney Fanzines by Jim Korkis

The Disney Books Network was updated this weekend.

 

Garry Apgar was kind enough to write the essay below for the Disney History blog.

Walt and Lilly´s "Gypsy Jaunt"

According to the digital image licensing company Corbis, the photo on the left shows “Walt Disney, clever originator of the world-famous Mickey Mouse animated cartoons and newspaper comic strip, on the terrace of his hotel during a two-week holiday in Havana." Like the image to the right, in which Walt looks especially relaxed, it is dated by Corbis October 30, 1931. Michael Barrier has a print of the latter photo “marked as published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on October 31,” with “a wire-service caption dating it as from October 30, 1931.”

In Havana, Walt and Lillian Disney stayed at the posh Hotel Nacional de Cuba, designed by the prestigious architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White (the hotel had opened just nine months earlier, on Dec. 30, 1930). The Disneys’ sojourn in Cuba was the principal stop on what the Los Angeles Times (Nov. 12, 1931) described as “a five-weeks tour,” … Walt’s “first vacation in four years.” The itinerary was hastily cobbled together after, as Walt later remarked, he'd suffered "a hell of a breakdown," caused by stress running the studio. It would be the couple’s longest and most exciting vacation prior to their “grand tour” of Europe (London, Paris, Rome, etc.) with Roy and Edna Disney, in the summer of 1935.

En route to Cuba, the Times reported, Walt and Lillian visited “the Grand Canyon; Kansas City, [Walt’s] old home; Washington, D. C.; Miami and other Florida resorts.” On October 15th they arrived by train in Kansas City where Disney had been invited to receive a Legion of Honor award from the Order of DeMolay. It was the first time he’d been back since he’d taken off to try his luck in Hollywood in 1923.

In a story published in the Kansas City Times on October 16, Walt and Lillian called their vacation a “gypsy jaunt,” taken on doctor’s orders. Lilly said, “It’s great fun just to start out, without knowing in advance exactly all of the places you’re going to see.” (See http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Commentary/Gabler/GablerErrata.htm for Michael Barrier’s critique regarding pp. 166-167 in Neal Gabler’s biography of Disney; and Brian Burnes, et al., Walt Disney’s Missouri: The Roots of a Creative Genius, 159-160).

A photo (below), from Walt Disney’s Missouri, first published in the Kansas City Star, shows Walt and Lilly being met at Union Station in Kansas City by DeMolay founder Frank S. Land.

 

Three years ago, David Lesjak (http://vintagedisneymemorabilia.blogspot.com/2009/02/on-vacationin-cuba.html) reported on his website Vintage Disney Collectibles that Gunnar Andreassen "located and shared with me the manifest for the SS California, the luxury cruise ship Walt and Lillian sailed on from Cuba to Los Angeles. The manifest, which lists Walt and Lillian as passengers, indicates California departed Havana on November 3, 1931 and arrived in the Port of Los Angeles on November 14th."  The next day, the Los Angeles Times published a shot of the couple (above right) taken when the ship docked in L.A.

 

Also on November 15, 1931, the Hartford Courant printed a standalone photo above (left), furnished by the renowned Washington, D. C. photographic studio, Harris & Ewing. It was taken during the second major stop on Walt and Lilly's epic “jaunt,” at the Mayflower Hotel in the nation's capital. Based on Pete Martin's taped interviews with Walt from 1956, Gabler said that Walt and Lillian stayed at the Mayflower for three days, then "trained to Key West and caught their tug to Havana, where they spent the next week." If the Disneys did spend only one week (perhaps ten days, but not, as seems likely, a full two weeks) in Cuba, the Mayflower Hotel photo probably dates from around October 20th or so. The Mayflower, incidentally, appears to have been Walt’s hotel of choice in Washington. Above (right) he was photographed in 1943 discussing his movie, Victory Through Air Power, with Clare Booth Luce, seated in the lobby of the hotel (McClinsey, Washington D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel, 2007, 54).

As Bob Thomas reported in his 1976 biography of Walt, while in Washington the Disneys visited such must-see sites as the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol, along with nearby Mount Vernon. Walt seems to have had but one disappointment during his time in D. C. After checking in at the Mayflower.

the [hotel's] publicity man ... asked if he could make any arrangements. "Yes, I'd like to meet General Pershing," Walt replied. "When I was driving a canteen car in France, I drove his son, and heard the general give his farewell speech in Paris on the back of a truck. He was my hero, and I'd sure like to meet him."

   "Well, that's pretty hard to arrange," the publicity man said. "Would you like to see President Hoover instead?"

   "No, the President's too busy," Walt replied, "and I wouldn't know what to talk to him about. An appointment proved impossible, but Pershing sent an autographed copy of his memoirs. ....

In 1932 Pershing was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history for the two-volume memoirs, My Experiences in the World War. (The copy given to Walt, inscribed, not merely autographed, is now at the Walt Disney Family Museum.)

Over the years, Disney came into personal contact with three future U. S. presidents: his good friend Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, who took his family to Disneyland at least twice in the ’50s, and, in 1946, Dwight D. Eisenhower (Ike and Walt crossed paths at least one other time, in 1964 at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco). LBJ was the only sitting president he came face to face with. Franklin D. Roosevelt was widely proclaimed to be a fan, but Walt and FDR never met—though Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Burbank studio in late April 1941. In 1957 Harry Truman toured Disneyland. However, perhaps because he was a staunch Republican by then, Walt was not on hand to greet the former president. (In 1961, after he’d left the presidency, Ike brought his entire family, including their four grandchildren, to the park, but Walt was absent on that occasion as well.)

General Pershing was alive until 1948, but despite Walt's great admiration for him, they never met. This must have been all the more disappointing in that Pershing was born and raised in Laclede, Missouri, a mere 17 miles from Marceline, where the future father of Mickey Mouse spent the happiest of his boyhood years. It is, therefore, a happy coincidence that the Walt Disney Family Museum is housed in a former Army barracks facing the parade ground of the Presidio in San Francisco, where Walt’s hero served for several months in 1914 as commander of the Presidio, prior to being assigned to Texas to lead the 8th Cavalry in pursuit of the fabled Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

In August 1915, Pershing's wife and three young daughters perished in a fire in their home, located just north of what is now Pershing Square at the Presidio, not far from the Disney Museum. Only the couple’s six-year-old son, Francis Warren Pershing, survived the conflagration. A flagpole now marks the spot where the house once stood.

 

above: The Pershings’ home at the Presidio (left), from Tim McNeese, John J. Pershing (New York, 2004), 74.

middle: The arrow points to the window through which young Warren Pershing was rescued (National Park Service photo).

bottom: The flagpole at Pershing Square today (National Park Service photo).

This was the same ten-year-old boy that "Driver Disney" (as he was identified in his official orders) and Walt's beloved Red Cross "boss," H. Alice Howell, took on a day trip and picnic in April 1919 to Domrémy, birthplace of Joan of Arc. Alice, Walt and young Warren may have made the excursion in a Red Cross vehicle like the one on display at the Disney Family Museum.

In an article published in the Lincoln Sunday Journal, May 13, 1934, Alice Howell said that she had known Pershing "intimately" during his stint at the University of Nebraska as a military instructor from 1892-1895. (Howell was head of the dramatic arts department at the university at the time.) She also revealed that she saw Pershing "innumerable times in France." Walt, it appears, got to see him just once, "from the back of a truck," as he later said. Presumably, Walt's recollection refers to Pershing’s ceremonial review, as commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, on July 19, 1919, in the Bois de Vincennes, of a special “Composite Battalion” that, just days before, had represented the AEF in Paris’s Bastille Day parade and the Empire Day victory parade in London.

For a transcription of the 1934 article on Howell, posted at Vintage Disney Collectibles, see: http://vintagedisneymemorabilia.blogspot.com/2009/04/walt-disney-and-red-cross-part-4.html. 

At the same site are posted the two images below:

above: Cartoon by an unknown staff artist of Alice Howell and Walt Disney in the Lincoln Sunday Journal, May 13, 1934.

bottom: Photograph of General Pershing and his son Warren, ca. 1918-1919.