December 10 - Leigh Harline

On this day, in 1969, Leigh Adrian Harline passed away in Long Beach, California from complications due to lung cancer. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 26, 1907, Leigh was the youngest of 13. His parents, both from Sweden, had joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and moved to Utah in 1891. After graduating from the University of Utah as a music major, Leigh studied piano playing with J. Spencer Cornwall, the conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

By 1928, Leigh had moved to California. He found work at several radio stations in both the San Francisco and Los Angeles markets. He did everything from announcing and singing to playing instrumentals to composing original works and conducting them for on air concerts. His work on the radio culminated in participating in the first coast-to-coast broadcast that originated on the West Coast in 1931. One of the people to hear that broadcast and be impressed by it was Walt Disney.

Image copyright Disney

Leigh became part of the Disney Studio in 1932. Over the next few years, he would score over 50 shorts. His music for several Silly Symphonies, including The Old Mill and The Pied Piper, has been described as some of the finest music ever created in Hollywood. In recognition of all he'd achieved so far, Walt had Leigh co-create the score for the studio's first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Working closely with Frank Churchill, the pair managed to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Score. Leigh would then work on Pinocchio with Paul J. Smith. This time around they would win the Academy Award for Best Score. Additionally, Leigh's song When You Wish Upon a Star would not only win for Best Original Song but become the de facto theme song for the studio, used in everything from training videos to the signature horn blows of cruise ships.

Image copyright United Artists

In 1941, Leigh left the studio to become a freelance composer. He scored dozens of films over the next two and a half decades for several different studios. The Pride of the Yankees, Johnny Come Lately and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm all earned him additional Oscar nominations. Over the course of his career, Leigh would be nominated for Academy Awards a total of eight times. In the last several years of his life, he also made the leap to the small screen and composed for the television series Ben Casey and Daniel Boone.

Leigh was 62 when he died and was made an official Disney Legend for all his marvelous contributions to the Disney songbook in 2001.

October 30 - Paul J. Smith

On this day, in 1906, composer Paul J. Smith was born in Calumet, Michigan. By the time Paul graduated from high school, the family had moved to Caldwell, Idaho where his dad, Joseph, was a professor at the College of Idaho. Not surprisingly, Paul spent three years studying music at that very same college. The boys in the family all turned out to be pretty musical. Joseph composed several songs for the college, Paul's brother Arthur became a studio musician and played on the soundtracks of all kinds of movies and television shows and Paul himself became a legend.

In 1925, Paul moved on from the College of Idaho to attend the Bush Conservatory of Music in Chicago, Illinois. While there, his talent earned him a scholarship to Julliard but for some reason he never used it. After graduating from Bush, Paul would spend two years teaching at Elmhurst College. In 1932, he moved to Los Angeles, California to go back to school at UCLA. This time he majored in English and wrote four musical comedies during his time there.

When Paul landed a job at the Disney Studio in 1934, he hit the ground running. He loved to push the boundaries of scoring animation just as much as Walt loved to push the boundaries of the animation itself. After composing for some shorts, Paul co-wrote the music for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with Frank Churchill and Leigh Harline. He would continue this pattern of scoring some shorts then creating music for a feature film over and over for the next few decades. All told, Paul wrote the score for over 70 of Disney's shorts. His feature credits include Pinocchio (which earned him an Academy Award), Fantasia, Bambi, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, the animated portions of Song of the South, Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time, So Dear to My Heart, and Cinderella.

About the time of Cinderella's release, the studio began producing its Tru-Life Adventure series of animal documentaries. Paul would score most of them, using the same techniques that he used to compose music for animation. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston would later acknowledge that those films became immeasurably better because of Paul's innovative scores. Throughout the Fifties and early Sixties, Paul would move into scoring many of the studio's live action classics. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Shaggy Dog, Pollyanna, Swiss Family Robinson, and The Parent Trap are just a few of the movies that benefited from Paul's touch.

In 1962, after 28 years with the Disney studio, Paul officially retired from the company but not from making music. He scored 26 episodes of Leave It to Beaver and 35 episodes of the Wonderful World of Color. He's even credited with some of the background music in a special celebrating Donald Duck's 50th birthday in 1984. On January 25, 1985, Paul passed away at the age of 78 due to complications brought on by Alzheimer's Disease. In 1994, for all his marvelous musical contributions, he was made an official Disney Legend.

Also on this day, in American history: John J. Loud

October 23 - Dumbo

On this day, in 1941, Walt Disney Studio's fourth animated feature, Dumbo, had its world premier at the Broadway Theater in New York City. With war raging in Europe, the studio had hit hard times. No foreign markets meant that both Pinocchio and Fantasia had failed to turn a profit. In desperate need of money, Walt decided to go cheap and simple. It was a gamble that paid off, both in the short and the long run.

In 1939, Kay Kamen, the head of the licensing department, showed Walt a prototype of a new toy, the Roll-A-Book. The scroll on the toy was a story by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. The entire scroll consisted of eight pictures and a few words of text. It was enough for Walt to want to buy the rights. He originally intended to turn it into a short, but as development of the story proceeded, it became a feature.

When it came time to start animating Dumbo, Walt instructed his team that they had to make this picture on the cheap. Gone were the lush details of the studio's earlier films. The backgrounds were done in watercolors instead of oils. Character designs were simpler and more cartoony. Exacerbating costs was the fact that rough animation was barely finished when the animators went on strike for five weeks starting in May of 1941. The strike was finally settled (not terribly amicably) and the film was finished that fall. The final cost of Dumbo was a mere $950,000 (about 15.8 million dollars today), half of Snow White and a third of Pinocchio.

When Walt went to turn Dumbo over to RKO Radio Pictures, his distribution company at the time, they didn't want it. At just 64 minutes, Dumbo remains one of the studio's shortest features. RKO wanted it either lengthened or cut down to a short or they'd release it as a B-movie. Walt refused all of that and RKO begrudgingly released it as it was. Naturally that turned out to be the best choice.

Dumbo would be the most financially successful Disney film of its decade, grossing 1.6 million dollars (about 26.6 million dollars today). The simple, charming story resonated with movie goers even with (or perhaps because of) the attack on Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war. Dumbo would be nominated for two Oscars, winning for its score created by Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace. It currently enjoys a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It's spawned two attractions, a television series in the Eighties and a new live action version set to come out next year. I don't think the story of the little elephant who gets bullied, finds an unlikely friend who gives him confidence and ends up saving the day will ever go out of style and might just be needed more today than ever.

Also on this day, in American history: Op Art

October 20 - Frank Churchill

On this day, in 1901, composer Frank Churchill was born in Rumford, Maine. By the age of four, his family had moved to Southern California. He began his professional music career at 15 the same way many musicians of the time did, as a pianist in a movie theater. After graduating from high school, Frank's parents coerced him into enrolling at UCLA as a pre-med student. He didn't last a year. Bound and determined to make it as a musician, Frank would spend the next few years performing anywhere from honky-tonks in Tijuana to an orchestra in Tuscon. Upon his return to California in 1924, he was awarded a contract with KNX as the radio station's accompanist.

In 1930, Frank became part of the Disney family and began writing the scores for dozens of shorts, including Who Killed Cock Robin, Mickey's Gala Premier and the flypaper scene from Playful Pluto. His most famous composition from this period is the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" from 1933's The Three Little Pigs. The song's perky confidence caught on with a nation deep into the Great Depression. When the sheet music went on sale, over 39,000 copies were sold in the first three days in New York City alone.

Based on his successes with the shorts, Walt gave Frank the job of scoring the studio's first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Not only did he produce an Academy Award nominated score, but Frank also helped write "Whistle While You Work", "Heigh Ho", and "Someday My Prince Will Come." By helping propel the success of the Snow White with his catchy tunes, Frank propelled his own success within the company. He became the studio's Supervisor of Music.

Frank's next project was 1941's The Reluctant Dragon. Not only did he contribute to the score, but he can be seen in person in the Studio Tour portion of the film. Next came Dumbo. He collaborated with Oliver Wallace on the score and composed the classic Disney ballad "Baby Mine" with Ned Washington. When Oscar time rolled around, Frank shared a nomination with Ned for Best Song and a win with Oliver for Best Score. A year later, he received dual nominations again for Bambi, one for the score he co-wrote with Edward Plumb and the other for his work on the tune "Love Is a Song."

Tragically, his Oscar nominations for Bambi would come posthumously. While working on the film, Frank became severely depressed when two of his close friends and orchestra members died within a month of each other. He began to drink heavily and, on May 14, 1942, committed suicide while sitting at the piano in his Castaic, California home.

Frank's legacy would outlive him by quite a bit. He had already written music for two more films in production at the time, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and Peter Pan, and although the lyrics were never used in Peter Pan, Frank's song "Never Smile at a Crocodile" was. In 1977, he was posthumously nominated for a Grammy Award for the Snow White soundtrack and in 2001 he became an official Disney Legend.

Also on this day, in American history: Eugene V. Debs