April 17 - Ron Miller

On this day, in 1933, Ronald William Miller was born in Los Angeles, California. The son of Canadian immigrants, Ron played football at John C. Fremont High School before continuing his sports career at the University of Southern California. While he was there, he went on a blind date after a USC football game with a fetching young woman by the name of Diane Marie Disney. It was love at first sight and the couple was married on May 9, 1954. Ron then did a tour in the United States Army, returning to Los Angeles in 1956 to play professional football for the Rams. His career as a tight end only lasted one season. His father-in-law saw him play in exactly two games. In the first one, Ron was knocked unconscious on a carry early in the game and didn’t wake up until the third quarter. The second only went marginally better. Walt informed his son-in-law that he wasn’t interested in raising his own grandchildren, so why didn’t Ron come work for Disney before he got himself killed? Ron felt good about achieving his dream to play in the pros, agreed that Walt’s idea was probably a much safer way to go and hung up his jersey at the end of the season.

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Ron’s first job at his father-in-law’s company had actually occurred a few years earlier. While waiting for his draft notice to come through from the army, he shuttled plans for Disneyland back and forth between the WED Enterprises offices in Burbank and the construction site in Anaheim. For his return, Walt sponsored Ron’s membership in the Director’s Guild of America and made him an assistant on Old Yeller (but whether it was an assistant director or an assistant to the director is unclear, he didn’t get any official credit).

Shortly after getting his feet wet in production, Warner Brothers called Ron asking if he would audition to replace an actor they were having problems with on their popular Western Cheyenne. The audition led to a screen test, but didn’t go any further. When Walt got wind of what was going on, he told his son-in-law to forget acting and concentrate on being a producer. Ron acquiesced. The actor in question, Clint Walker, soon settled with Warner Brothers and returned to the show, so it’s a moot point whether Walt was simply being heavy handed with Ron or if he had some knowledge as to how the situation was going to turn out and was saving Ron some headaches. Either way, Ron never tried acting again.

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Putting his nose to the grindstone, Ron began moving up the production ladder, moving from associate producer to producer and, eventually, executive producer. He worked on classic films like Son of Flubber, Summer Magic and That Darn Cat! His first gig as a full-fledged producer was for the 1968 comedy Never a Dull Moment, starring Dick Van Dyke and Edward G. Robinson. Throughout the Seventies, Ron racked up producing credits on movies like Tron, Pete’s Dragon, Escape to Witch Mountain, The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound. He also produced several episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney anthology show, earning six Emmy nominations and one win along the way.

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In 1978, Ron became the President of the Walt Disney Company, the number two man to then-CEO Card Walker. Ron was the more experimental of the two men. He embraced new computer animation techniques for Tron. He was a driving force behind the development and construction of Epcot Center. He created The Disney Channel. When he moved into the CEO position in 1984, he created Touchstone Pictures to open up the company creatively, which it desperately needed. But he also made colossal blunders, too.

Under Card, the company had been playing its cards very conservatively, spending most of the almost two decades since Walt’s passing trying to guess what the founder would have done. As a result, Disney stopped innovating (for the most part), putting out mostly mediocre fare that really didn’t even play to the company’s strengths much less build on them. Profits fell even though Disney held assets that could have prevented that from happening, if utilized properly. A fact that didn’t escape the notice of investors. One of them, Saul Steinberg, attempted a hostile takeover. As CEO, Ron negotiated a buyout of Saul’s 11.5% ownership, saving the company but at a huge cost (Saul made about $60 million off the deal). A group of shareholders sued. Around the same time, Ron was praising all the wonderful synergistic things that were going to happen along with the next animated classic the company was putting out, so it’s okay that it was the most expensive one yet (spoiler alert: The Black Cauldron failed on nearly every level). When a second hostile takeover reared its ugly head, it proved to be too much. After just 18 months at the helm of the company, Ron was asked to resign and replaced with Michael Eisner and Frank Wells.

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Following his forced retirement, Ron and Dianne relocated to the Napa Valley. A few years earlier, they’d purchased some land there with the intention of cultivating a vineyard for their twilight years. That plan just got moved up a bit. They founded the Silverado Vineyards, which currently produces five varieties of wine.

In 2009, Ron and Dianne help found the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, California. Ron served on the board of the museum from the beginning and was the President for several years. After Dianne passed away in 2013, Ron continued to look after the museum and the winery, until succumbing to heart failure himself earlier this year. On February 9, 2019, he passed away in Napa, California, never quite shaking the stigma that comes with getting fired on such a grand scale, but always believing that he had left Disney stronger for his service. He was 85.

February 21 - Hazel George

On this day, in 1904, Hazel Inez Gilman was born in Bisbee, Arizona. The details of Hazels personal life are a bit shaky. She told stories in interviews in the Nineties that seem to contradict everything we think we know, but since she was in her nineties at that time, we'll just go with the generally accepted narrative (not that either version is highly verifiable, but here goes). Hazel was still in Brisbee in 1917 to witness the Brisbee Deportations, a horrific event where the local mining company forced 1,200 striking workers onto cattle cars and dropped them off in the New Mexico desert two hundred miles away. It's not clear if Hazel's father was one of the miners that were deported, but her parents divorced and she moved to Southern California with her mother and brother soon afterwards.

Two things happened for Hazel in 1928. First she graduated as a nurse from the University of California, Los Angeles. Second she got married to an office manager, Emerald Robert George. A year later, she'd had a daughter, Deborah, and her little family was living with her mother, while she worked at LA County Hospital.

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In the early Forties, Hazel became the resident nurse at the Walt Disney Studio. She claimed she came on board during, and specifically because of, the animators strike in 1941, but it could have been as early as April 1940. She quickly became Walt's personal nurse as well, helping him mitigate the pain he still experienced from a 1938 polo accident. Hazel spent many afternoons in Walt's office, treating his injury and listening to him unwind from his day. She became one of his closest confidants and stayed loyal, never revealing very much of anything he ever told her. Supposedly one of chief complaints was his inability to play polo anymore and she suggested a new hobby, turning him on the trains. Walt wouldn't build his famed Carolwood Pacific Railroad over his wife's flower beds until 1949, so that story actually carries an air of plausibility.

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Hazel's husband died in 1944 and her daughter followed in 1947. At some point, she began a relationship with one the studio's house composers, Paul Smith (which will be become relevant in a moment). In the early Fifties, when Roy O. Disney was reluctant to commit company money to his brother's amusement park idea, Walt asked Hazel if she would be willing to invest some of her own funds. She was willing , and after convincing other employees to do the same, they collectively convinced Roy that maybe the park wasn't such a screwball notion after all.

The real twist to Hazel's story comes with the creation of the iconic Disney television show, The Mickey Mouse Club. The nurse from Arizona took on a pseudonym, Gil George, and became a lyricist to her companion Paul's composing. The duo wrote over 90 songs used in the series including Talent Roundup, Mickey Mouse Newsreel, The Wrong Syl La Ble and all the songs used in the Corky and White Shadow serial. Hazel also wrote most of the Doddism songs for host Jimmy Dodd such as Safety First and Beauty is as Beauty Does. Hazel and Paul went on to write songs for Old Yeller, The Light in the Forest and the Disneyland anthology show. Once Paul retired fro the studio in the early Sixties, 'Gil' also stopped writing lyrics.

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Hazel would stay on with the studio as nurse, at least as long as Walt was around. She treated her old friend right up to days before his death. And it was, again supposedly, Hazel who got Walt interested in cryogenics, starting rumors about the whereabouts of his remains that persist to this day (let's be clear: Walt was cremated and his ashes are in Woodlawn Cemetery; he's not coming back).

At some point Hazel stopped working at the studio but her connection to her old boss and company never really ended. Bob Thomas, Walt's official biographer interviewed her extensively beginning in 1975 as subsequent biographies have relied on those interviews for insight into Walt's mind. Throughout the twilight years of Hazel's life, Walt's daughter Dianne was a frequent visitor (as, oddly enough, was Michael Jackson, who had asked to be introduced to Hazel through Bob Thomas). On March 12, 1996, Hazel quietly passed away at a nursing home in Burbank, California. The woman who unlikely involvement in so many aspects of Walt's later life made her a veritable Forrest Gump of the Walt Disney Company was 92.