March 28 - Jimmie Dodd

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On this day, in 1910, Ivan Wesley Dodd was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. After his parents divorced when he was a young child, his mother decided she’d never liked the name Ivan and by the time he was nine, he was known as James. The divorce must have been somewhat amiable as Jimmie’s father lived just two doors down from his aunt’s house, where he lived with his mother. When his father became a salesman for a music store nearby, Jimmie would spend a lot of time at the store, playing with all the instruments and cultivating a love for music.

Jimmie attended Withrow High School in Cincinnati, playing banjo in a local dance band. When he began attending the University of Cincinnati, he played in his own band. Then the Great Depression hit, money got tight and it was hard for Jimmie to stay in school and work to pay for it. He also spent time at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and the Shouster Martin School of Dramatic Arts (where he created a dance act with a young Tyrone Power), but never graduated from any school.

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Jimmie’s first big break came when he got a job on a local radio station in 1933. This lead to another gig in Fort Lauderdale, Florida which lead to Nashville, Tennessee. While picking up a few more classes at Vanderbilt  University, he became part of Louis Prima's orchestra and began touring the country. By the end of the Thirties (and the end of his run with Louis), Jimmie found himself in Southern California looking for the next big thing.

Starting with the 1940 William Holden picture, Those Were the Days!, Jimmie began a film career that covered more than 75 films over the next fifteen years. His biggest role was Lullaby Joslin in the Three Mesquiteers series of movies but he had small roles alongside the likes of John Wayne, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. A weak heart kept him out of any fighting during World War II, but he did tour Europe several times with his wife, a dancer, as part of the USO. He also wrote songs throughout much of the war, including once called Washington which became the official song of the United States capital city.

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One of their fellow USO performers, Jinx Falkenburg, would later introduce Jimmie to Arthur Godfrey, who would give him some of his first television appearances as the Fifties began. But it was the good luck of playing tennis with Bill Justice that really changed his life. Bill was an animator for the Walt Disney Studio and one day mentioned to his game partner that his boss needed a song about a pencil, could Jimmie write one? He banged one out, sent a demo over the studio and was hired to write songs for the Disneyland television show.  Producer Bill Walsh thought Jimmie would make a great host for another show in the works and had him perform The Pencil Song for the boss. Walt watched that one performance and immediately suggested that Jimmie be the host of The Mickey Mouse Club. Bill said that’s a fabulous idea and made it so.

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Jimmie and The Mickey Mouse Club were a match made in television heaven. His energy and positivity and honest sincerity were exactly what the show needed. The fact that he was really good at writing songs under pressure helped, too. In the few weeks leading up to the shows debut, Jimmie wrote more than two dozen songs, many of which, like The Mickey Mouse Club March and Today is Tuesday, have become iconic. His one air presence reassured parents and kids alike and his mini sermons, which became known as Doddisms, not only helped shape the kids playing the Mouseketeers into more professional actors, but inspired a whole generation of kids around the world to be better citizens.

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When The Mickey Mouse Club ended its run in 1958, Jimmie’s official contract with the studio also came to an end, but his involvement did not. With a select group of Mouseketeers, he would tour the United States making personal appearances for throngs of adoring fans. When the show was released and became a big hit in Australia, Jimmie and some of the kids made two tours of the Land Down Under in 1959 and 1960. And he continued to record promotional material and make appearances for the studio throughout the beginning of the Sixties as Disney launched a syndicated version of the show.

By 1964, Jimmie and his wife had relocated to Hawaii and were busy creating a new children’s show for television, Jimmie Dodd’s Aloha Time, but it would never make it to the air. He became gravely ill during preproduction and passed away in Honolulu on November 10, 1964, reportedly from cancer (although some sources claim it was his weak heart finally giving out). The Head Mouseketeer was only 54.

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.

Image courtesy Mike Sekulic

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.