West of WEDWay
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The Model Shop

When I started work at Walt Disney Imagineering's Architectural Drafting department in the mid-1970s, the only computers in the entire building were running Audio-Animatronic figures. If you had a question, the Payroll Department retrieved your records from one drawer of a bank of file cabinets along one wall. It was a different time in many ways.

The men I worked for were great role models. These days, I work with people who often insist on impossible deadlines, who panic and want me to panic, too, and sometimes I have to deal with people who are mean or rude. Not at Disney, at least not back then. Ron Bowman is a case in point. A mild-mannered architect with many years before Disney specializing in the design of modern churches around Southern California, Ron was in charge of the Starcade and the new PeopleMover track for Space Mountain, Disneyland. He had led the Hungry Bear Restaurant and Village Haus (Walt Disney World) teams as well. Ron had silver hair and a silver moustache and he never raised his voice. When I delivered sub-standard work, he gave it back to me covered in red pencil corrections. It was very embarrassing to realize how far from good I was, but his only words, as I recall were, "don't hesitate to ask questions." Years later, Ron showed me some photographs of his hobby--he carved wizards and elves into tree trunks so that it seemed that a wooden sculpture was trapped in a hollowed-out trunk. Ron was a lead--what they called a Job Captain--when I met him in 1975. In 1984, when I left WED (now known as Walt Disney Imagineering), Ron was a Project Designer - then the top architectural title - who designed the Germany Pavilion for World Showcase, and I was a Job Captain myself.

Thanks to the Internet, I've heard from a few people, mostly teenagers, who are dreaming of a career with Disney. When I was a teenager, I thought I was the only one, but when I made it to WED, I met dozens for whom working for Disney was a life-long dream. We say people with this passion "have the pixie dust." One of my best friends at Disney was a Hoosier named Lenzy Hendrix, and, boy, did he have the pixie dust. Lenzy and I would prowl around WED during lunch and after hours, doing our best imitation of the way we were told that Walt himself liked to work. Like the stories about Walt, we knew what everyone was doing at all times. (One of my favorite Walt stories was of the animator who came to work in the morning to find a drawing he'd discarded smoothed out and placed on his desk with a note from Walt: "Quit throwing the good stuff away.")

Lenzy and I wandered and peeked, but I also have Lenzy to thank for striking up many conversations with some of the great artists there at the time. Thanks to him, I spent more time with Herb Ryman, Bob Clatworthy, Harriet Burns, Paul Gross, Marc Davis and others. He worked on projects like the Japan Pavilion at World Showcase and the Gene Autry Museum in Glendale. To give you an idea of Lenzy's caliber, after Disney he returned to his tiny hometown of Fortville, Indiana. He served on the town council, created a new master plan for the town, bought and renovated several historic buildings and staged a town event and persuaded Good Morning, America to cover it live.

The model shop was a favorite hangout. This was a large room on the first floor with a two-story ceiling, and there have been many photographs published of it. From 1979 until I left (for the second time) in 1984, the front half of the room was consumed by a 1/8"=1'0" model of EPCOT. (It's on page 73 of the book Walt Disney Imagineering.) Near the model shop was a fully-equipped carpentry shop, not too different from a good high school's industrial arts shop. I watched Ted Sebern assemble and carefully level little 4' x 4' tables with matte board on top to become the base of the EPCOT model. They were designed so that the legs could be clamped together. In the early stages of the model, John Hench would move Kleenex boxes around to give a sense of where a country's pavilion would be. Modelmakers might cut a few simple shapes from foam blocks to keep the process going while my department prepared more drawings. When the drawings were advanced enough to show the extent of the building from all sides (what architects call "preliminaries"), a modelmaker would be assigned to build it for real. Every pavilion was modeled in neutral gray with no texture. Spaceship Earth was a shiny silver ball for a long time. Very late in the process, long after construction had started in the swamp, John Hench would work with Sue Macauley to choose colors, which would then be added to the model, along with textures.

I worked on Spaceship Earth, and how to model the individual triangular facets of its surface became an issue at one point. Perhaps you've seen photos of the model and wondered how we assembled those facets without distorting the spherical shape? They are painted on the shiny silver ball we used from the first. The facets are painted with appropriate shadows--it looks dimensional even in person.