West of WEDWay
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In the drafting room, three Job Captains were assigned. An old guy with longish blond hair and a droopy mustache named George Nelson handled the main show building and the food facility. If you told me George had been a surfer in the 1930s or a biker in the 1950s, I'd believe either. He had a gravelly voice and an insistent stare, but he had been there and back. The buzz in the 60-person office was that George was the best. Joe Navarro, a fun guy from South Texas (or West Texas, or someplace) was in charge of the ampitheater and promenade. He later went on to head the Big Thunder project in Disneyland and Walt Disney World and had a lot to do with onsite management of the EPCOT construction. Joe sat next to me and showed me the ropes and he could always make me laugh. He drew some sections through the Space Mountain coaster track and it was pointed out that you couldn't tell what the ride was doing at any given point. So Joe went and labeled the tracks as either "TRACK GOINFRUMYA" or "TRACK COMINATYA." Glenn made him erase each and every label.

I was assigned to Ron Bowman, the job captain for the Starcade and the huge bathrooms. As I've mentioned here before, I had the pixie-dust. I knew Ron Bowman's name because I'd snagged some blueprints from Bear Country back in 1971. Silver-haired and courtly in a Southern California (rather than a European or Antebellum) way, Ron's professional experience before Disney was as the architect of a sucession of churches, some modern, some traditional. Ron had a flair for wood--he designed the Hungry Bear Restaurant at Disneyland and the Village Haus in Walt Disney World's Fantasyland. Ron was later promoted, like Glenn, to Project Designer, and he was responsible for the Germany pavilion in World Showcase. Here he was doing the Starcade, a stucco and drywall box that I thought was incredibly boring. But Ron had fun with it--the railings and some walls slope and Ron made sure that every intersection had some reason to it. The line where the railing bent met the wall at exactly the point where the column touched. I learned from Ron that such precision is not accidental and that without clear drawings the original intent can be lost during construction. Mies van der Rohe said "God is in the details," and Ron patiently explained what that meant to a over-eager young pup.

One thing about the bathrooms. Every architect in the world designs men and women's rooms symmetrically, often sharing a common plumbing wall. If the men have 4 urinals and 4 stalls, the women get 8 stalls. It's obvious...and utterly wrong, as Disneyland learned soon after opening. Women take almost twice as long, which means that they need nearly twice the facilities to avoid the long lines you see at movie theater or event rest rooms. Ron cleverly used the angles of the building to make the women's room twice as long as the men's room but still share the plumbing wall. And yours truly did all the drawings. I'd never seen such a humongous bathroom.

One thing we knew for sure--Space Mountain would be very popular as the first new ride in almost ten years and a Matterhorn-like experience at that. We had to do something with all the people or the line would stretch across the park. By choosing a single track, we had given the ride only half the capacity of the WDW installation, or about (if I remember) 1600 people per hour, peak. That's lower than Haunted Mansion's 2200 and much less than Pirate's 4400. So we needed queue lines and Glenn designed a flexible system with posts and chains on the promenade, where the crowd could be entertained by the stage show while they waited. An awning (fabric on horizontal wires) would provide sun protection when necessary.

The project was "fast-tracked," meaning that the basic structure of the main show building was released for construction before we finished the food and arcade drawings. That was the next contract, which was let before we finished the show drawings. The show drawings, working under George Nelson, were the most fun. We worked more closely with George MacGinnis and with the ride's designer over at MAPO, a young man named Don Hilsen. George MacGinnis designed the PeopleMover cars, the '67 Rocket Jets theming and probably the Mighty Microscope. He was soft-spoken with prematurely white hair (like Phil Donohue), and I heard that he and his wife were very active with Christian Youth somehow. I keep confusing my memory of George with interviews I've seen with Charles Schulz. George had a 1/4"=1'0" model of the load/unload area on his desk, made of plain white posterboard. It had the rakish fins and the hanging angular "spaceship" and looked almost exactly the way we built it. But if I tell you that the design was first executed with posterboard, the hanging spaceship seems less space-worthy, doesn't it? I mentioned this is an earlier column, but I was stunned one day when I came to George with a design problem and he pulled a dog-eared, well-thumbed "2001: A Space Odyssey" program from a desk drawer and flipped through it looking for ideas. (Production designers Ernest Archer, Harry Lange, and Tony Masters were English and never worked at Disney as far as I know.) I think of this whenever Disney sues someone for copyright infringement.

Don Hilsen rented time on a computer in West L. A. somewhere and produced a ream of fanfold green and white striped printouts that detailed the track geometry. The two rails the ride rolls on are connected to a pipe spine. The printouts gave x, y, and z coordinates for the spine every three feet, along with a "superelevation" angle that told us where the two rails would be, relative to the spine. From that, we had a distended radius that represented the maximum reach of someone seated in the car and we could calculate our "clearance envelope." I was the guy who drew dozens of sections through the building showing how the show elements and the load/unload area would stay out of the clearance envelope. A Filipino drafter named Nilo Dichoso produced a set of drawings for the entrance ramps, and a card-carrying Mayflower descendent named Bob Bumpus detailed the load/unload area. Bob's challenge was to mimic the fins on George MacGinnis' model, while also satisfying Don Hilsen's requirement that the floor slope 1 1/2" per foot so that gravity would move the cars through the load area. Each sloping fin hit the floor at a different point--the floor moved away from the fin's spring line. Bob taught me a great deal of practical trigonometry on that project. He used to say that he was the king of dementians (dementia, as in mental disorder, rather than dimensions...never mind, you had to be there). I used what Bob taught me and placed the exit speedramp precisely above the toroidal clearance envelope. It was my big triumph, and, yes, I know it came out looking boring and stupid. But the geometry was cool on paper.