West of WEDWay
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I'm not much of a sketch artist, but I attended the Wednesday-night art classes in which the students chipped in to pay for a model, and I helped organize (with David Mumford and others) a lunch-time Imagineer's Workshop. One series that came from that was a sketch class taught by studio animator Andy Gaskill. I was proud to be assigned to Project Designer Chris Carradine in 1983, and he could sketch buildings and interiors brilliantly and quickly. He didn't have Joe Rohde's gift for people and scenes, but Chris could get across anything from the way a sprawling hotel would nestle into a hill to the pattern on a twisting wrought iron staircase. Chris did some wonderful sketches for Toad Hall when Fantasyland was remodeled in 1983. Examples of Chris' architectural sketch work appears on page 23 and 42 of Walt Disney Imagineering (1996, ISBN: 0-7868-6246-7). (It's amusing, but unfair, to compare the naturalistic work of Rohde on Animal Kingdom with the crisp geometrics of Carradine's Pleasure Island and chalk it up to relative sketch ability.)

One reader, curious about my role at Disney, wrote "I am an artist (you must be, too?)..." Having met many artists, including my wife, at Disney, I don't consider myself an artist. But one thing I think I know about them: true artists have no problem labeling themselves as such. To some it sounds like saying "I am a god;" while to others it's "I am cursed." Artists brood. To be an artist is to struggle irresistibly to create, to put a small part of the world in order. My wife Peggy is a cheerful person starting a project, but a bleary-eyed dragonslayer at the other end. Me, I'm more of an even-keeled engineer about it. By the way, the reader who stated "I am an artist" is Brad Aldridge, aged 15. The other reader who is creative but can't draw needs to resolve whether or not to be an artist, in my opinion.

I rented the movie U-571 the other day and although it's a fine picture, I didn't feel that the actors behaved like the U. S. Navy men I've met. One of them is a retired admiral named Tom Jones. I don't have any source to confirm my memory of his rank, but Tom Jones was an impressive man in his late fifties when I worked for him on Tokyo Disneyland. He spent the 1970s managing the swamp and other infrastructure at Walt Disney World. A very warm individual, he hugged people and seemed to get misty-eyed on occassion. But he was tough as nails coordinating massively huge projects, negotiating multi-million-dollar deals. He knew all the science behind the pump that some guy in a t-shirt chomping a cigar was trying to install incorrectly. The utilities are centralized at Walt Disney World, which means that enormous underground pipes carry steam and chilled water from gigantic plants behind the scenes--Tom and his crew made that all invisible. It was reassuring just being around the guy. Wiry and energetic as Ralph Nader, Tom is perhaps 6'-6" and he never slouched. In contrast to the crew of U-571, Tom and other Navy men I know look you straight in the eye when they talk or listen. You aren't likely to find them staring at their feet, rubbing their chin and looking worried.

Retired Admiral Joe Fowler helped Walt build Disneyland, of course, and the trend continued. Military logistics are obviously a good training for assembling one-of-a-kind facilities to support millions of visitors.

-- Alastair Dallas

-- Posted November 3, 2000