West of WEDWay
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I started at WED weeks after the interview, knowing that I would be working on Space Mountain Disneyland but nothing more. I was met in the lobby and diverted from the Gold Coast up a flight of stairs past Walt’s portrait. The second floor was nowhere near as nice as even the lobby. Show Designers had a den with some windows to the left, and the window offices above the Gold Coast were nice, too, but cluttered. Contract Administration and other departments, on the other hand, were just cubicles made out of drywall with open doorways. But wait…

I was led down a sloping ramp, through a doorway, and the drafting room yawned before me. No real furniture-everyone was working on 4x8 sheets of plywood on sawhorses. The room was about 40’ x 60’ and the only telephones were mounted on four posts in the middle of the room. If one rang, someone had to stop drawing to answer it, then yell for whoever was being called. Two secretaries outside the drafting boss’ office took all calls and routed them to the correct post. A cosmetics company owned the building before WED bought it in 1965. This portion had been the two-story warehouse and the old-timers knew it as the “loft” before walls were built. The roof beams were uncomfortably close and the air conditioning ducts and hanging fluorescent lights were naturally exposed. Man, we got a lot of work done in there, though.

That first day, I remember giving myself a little tour at lunch time. I wandered through the warehouse in back, divided into smaller spaces by floor-to-ceiling black curtains, actually a light-absorbing material called duvatine. I don’t think there was a sign on the door, but it wasn’t locked and I stepped into a page out of the dog-eared Pirates of the Caribbean program that I kept at home. It was the Sculpture Shop, lined with shelves with pirate heads and featuring Blaine Gibson and George Snowden sculpting maquettes (miniatures) in clay. “You’re Blaine Gibson,” I probably stammered. When my kids ask dumb questions while I’m working…well, I’m not always as calm and even-tempered as the artists I met at WED.

Almost every single Disney legend is just a wonderful, centered human being to be around. I suppose they might kick their dogs at home, but I doubt it. But if you’ve ever met a famous Disney artist and he seemed self-effacing, genuinely pleased to meet you, flattered by your attention and willing to talk about art and design and things that matter, you might be surprised to learn that most of them are that way. Sam McKim and Ken Anderson come to mind-just fine, generous people. Herb Ryman could get mad-he liked to paint nasty caricatures or bad language into his renderings and then disguise it-but he was incredibly nice to young devotees. He would tirelessly repeat stories of Walt if that’s what you wanted. But if you wanted help on some other problem, he’d offer an opinion or guidance without resort to nostalgia. He once gave me an impromptu lesson on the use of the wooden rod he kept at his easel. It had a round wooden ball at one end which could keep it from touching the wet canvas, and he explained the need for a straightedge in painting to help parallel lines converge to a vanishing point. Others in earshot had gathered around for the lecture-no ego in Herbie, but everyone listened when he spoke.

-- Alastair Dallas

-- Posted June 7, 2000