June 3 - Wally Boag and Betty Taylor

On this day, in 2011, Wallace Vincent Boag passed away in Santa Monica, California. Born on September 13, 1920 in Portland, Oregon, Wally was a professional dancer by the age of nine. By the time he was 16, he ran his own dance school. When he turned 19, Wally added comedy to his resume and his career was off and running. Like many performers of the time, he became part of the vaudeville circuit, honing his act on the tough crowds of Poughkeepsie and other Peoria. But Wally had that certain something that tends to be elusive in show business (I like to call it talent) and he not only played the smaller venues of America but he was invited to places like Radio City Music Hall in New York City and the Palladium in London, England. During a show at the London Hippodrome, Starlight Roof, he brought a 12 year old girl onstage to assist with his balloon act. Part of the act involved a little singing and the young lady’s voice wowed the audience so much she became a regular part of the show (her name, by the way, was Julie Andrews).

Image courtesy wikipedia.com

In 1945, Wally’s talents brought him to the attention of Messrs. Metro, Goldwyn and Mayer. They offered him a contract and he began a brief career in movies. He appeared in exactly two for MGM and went uncredited in both: as a soldier in Without Love with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and as a Canadian flier in Thrill of a Romance with Esther Williams. While his turn on the Silver Screen didn’t exactly pan out, Wally didn’t stop performing. He continued to appear on stages across America and around the world. In the early Fifties, Wally was in a musical revue in Australia when he met a tenor by the name of Donald Novis. A couple of years later, Donald convinced Walt Disney to give Wally an audition for a new show that was being developed for his soon to be open theme park. Walt loved him and that’s how Wally signed a two week contract to open The Golden Horseshoe Revue at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon in Frontierland of Disneyland.

Image courtesy nytimes.com

I think it’s probably unnecessary to say that Wally’s Horseshoe contract was renewed and for a little bit longer than just two weeks at a time. Wally’s character of a travelling salesman eventually morphed into Pecos Bill which he would perform three times a day. Over the course of the next 27 years, Wally logged almost 40,000 performances. His routines included songs, dancing, the ability to spit out a seemingly endless amount of teeth, rapid fire jokes and balloon creations he called Boagaloons. In 1963, he was joined onstage by an old co-star, Julie Andrews, for a press event for Mary Poppins. The duo recreated their first meeting by singing By the Light of the Silvery Moon together.

In 1971, Wally travelled to Central Florida to help get the Diamond Horseshoe Saloon up and running for the opening of the Magic Kingdom. He spent three years performing Pecos Bill for Walt Disney World guests before returning to California to finish out his career. He finally retired in 1982, quipping that before his contract with Disney, the longest he’d ever worked a gig was 54 weeks, who knew two weeks was going to last so long?

Image courtesy disney.fandom.com

In the Sixties, while Walt was still alive, Wally also did a handful of other projects for the company. He had small roles in The Absent Minded Professor (as a television newsman), Son of Flubber (the father in a television commercial) and The Love Bug (a flabbergasted driver). His second biggest contribution to Disneyana (yet, ironically, his longest lasting) is as the voice of Jose in The Enchanted Tiki Room, for which he also wrote a big chunk of the script. Walt was reportedly considering Wally for the voice of Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh shorts, but the role ultimately went to Paul Winchell. After Walt’s death, with his biggest cheerleader no longer championing him, Wally’s involvement outside of the Saloon dried up. Until 1981, that is, when he was the special guest star on an episode of The Muppet Show, bringing bits from his Pecos Bill persona to a worldwide audience.

Image courtesy jimhillmedia.com

In 1995, Wally was declared an official Disney Legend for his decades of thrilling audiences in the Horseshoe Saloons and leading the show in the Tiki Room. As a deeper honor, he also received his own window on Main Street USA in Disneyland that reads “Theatrical Agency – Golden Vaudeville Routines – Wally Boag, Prop.” In 2009, he published his autobiography, Wally Boag, Clown Prince of Disneyland and lived out the rest of his life in Santa Monica with Ellen, his wife of 68 years, until he succumbed to Alzheimer’s in June of 2011. He was 90.

Image courtesy waltdisney.org

Coincidentally, on June 4, 2011, the day after Wally died, his longtime costar at the Diamond Horseshoe Revue, Betty Taylor, also passed away in Coupesville, Washington. Born in Seattle, Washington on October 7, 1919, Betty began her professional singing career at the age of 12. Over the first twenty four years of her career, she shared the stage with folks like Les Brown, Red Nichols and Frank Sinatra. In 1956, a year after the Golden Horseshoe Revue opened, it became necessary to recast the Saloon’s feisty female proprietor (and Pecos Bill’s sweetheart), Sluefoot Sue. Betty auditioned for and got a four week contract to play the character (twice as long as Wally’s); she spent the next thirty years working through it.

One of the highlights of Betty’s years with the Golden Horseshoe came in the mid Sixties. Walt had decided to mark the 10,000 performance of the Revue as an episode of The Wonderful World of Color and asked Betty to not only play Sue but to emcee the program as well. She initially demurred but Walt insisted and the episode remains one of the classics. Betty remained with the Revue all the way until it closed on October 12, 1986, making her the longest continuous cast member (beating out Wally by a little more than three years) and logging in over 45,000 performances. She was declared an official Disney Legend right along with her perennial beau in 1995. She continued to enjoy singing for the rest of her days and would frequently serenade visitors, even after she moved into a nursing home. When her last note finally faded away, she was 91.

January 18 - Jay Meyer

On this day, in 2009, Jay Meyer passed away in Los Angeles, California. In a career that spanned decades, Jay was truly one of those performers that literally everyone has heard at some point but no one has any idea who he is. Born in Webb City, Missouri on May 20, 1923, he began singing at the age of five, mostly in local churches. He learned to play the trumpet and, in high school, was his team's only cheerleader (they for some reason didn't have any female cheerleaders and he wasn't big enough to actually play football). His older brother was a radio entertainer in St. Louis and Jay would occasionally visit him and sing on his program.

After graduating from high school in 1941, Jay could sense that war was coming and he signed up for the Marine Corps. He was officially stationed in New Zealand for most of his tour and spent his time singing for his fellow troops, both on Marine Corps radio and all over the world in live shows. When the war ended, Jay knew he couldn't go back to Missouri, so he stayed in Los Angeles, California and enrolled in the University of Southern California. Meanwhile he began performing with the likes of Spike Jones and eventually joined the Sportsmen's Quartet, a group that regularly sang on Jack Benny's radio program, including all the Lucky Strike cigarette commercials. For a while, the Sportsmen were doing double duty; they'd no sooner finish Jack Benny's show then they'd go down the street and do Phil Harris' show.

All this exposure led to the Sportsmen getting their own radio deal in New York. So Jay moved across the country with his wife, Tommy, to make it big in the Big Apple. The show flopped, but Jay stuck around, working pretty constantly. Tommy was a writer and Jay got into doing summer stock theater for a few years. Eventually, Tommy wanted to be back on the west coast, so the couple returned to their home in Los Angeles. Jay began doing all sorts of film gigs. He's in the chorus for movies like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins.

Then one day, he got a call to come do a recording at the Disney Studio. He arrived to see fellow Sportsmen Quartet member Thurl Ravenscroft, as well as Chuck Schroeder, Bob Ebright and Vernon Rowe. Jay says they didn't really understand what they were making the recording for but the song they sung was called "Grim Grinning Ghosts." The five performers were also filmed and, as anyone who's ever ridden the Haunted Mansion knows, they became a quintet of singing busts in the graveyard section of the attraction. The bust that Jay plays is the only one not wearing a necktie, is officially named Ned Nub and is generally the fourth one from the left. Phantom Manor, the Disneyland Paris version, only has four busts, so Jay is third from the left there.

As if that wasn't a big enough contribution to Disney lore, Jay got another call in 1972. Fulton Burley, a staple performer in the Golden Horseshoe Revue in Disneyland was taking some time off and needed a substitute. Jay agreed to fill in for him as resident Irish Tenor (although Jay is actually more German than Irish) over a six week period. When the month and a half was over, it was decided that the show needed Jay for a few more weeks. He actually stopped performing in the Revue when it closed fourteen years later. He was even a featured performer in the final show on October 12, 1986.

In addition to all his work with Disney and in films, Jay appeared in television commercials for everything from McDonald's (singing, of course, the famous slogan "You deserve a break today") to Mattel Toys and Knotsberry Farm. He sang in concerts at the Hollywood Bowl with Sammy Davis Jr. and Ray Charles. He made records with the Ray Connif Singers, the Pied Pipers and the Johnny Mann Singers. His final public appearance was, ironically, at a private function at the Walt Disney Studio, where he sang Too Ra Loo Ra Loo, a song he'd sung hundreds of times in the saloon in Frontierland. His amazing, mostly unrecognized, career ended 80 years after it began as a little five year old local singing sensation.

December 20 - Sam McKim

Photo lifted from filesofjerryblake.com

On this day, in 1924, Sammy McKim was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. During the Great Depression, Sammy and his family moved to Los Angles, California. When he was ten, Sammy was visiting a relative on the MGM movie lot when he caught the eye of a casting director as was almost immediately put to work as an extra. Republic Studios signed him to a contract and he began appearing in Westerns and other B movies, working with the likes of Spencer Tracy, John Wayne and Gene Autry. Throughout this entire period, Sammy was constantly drawing. Many times he’d make caricatures of his fellow actors and have them sign the pieces for him. When he hit high school, Sammy submitted his portfolio to the Walt Disney Studios and… was offered a job in traffic control. He said no thanks and joined the United States Army instead to serve in World War II.

At the conclusion of that conflict, Sam (as he was now called) returned to LA and enrolled in the Art Center College of Design. He graduated in 1950 and the military waited a whole 24 hours before they drafted him back into the Army for the Korean War. Sam served for 14 more months, earning the Distinguished Service Cross in the process, returned stateside again and, this time, enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute. Graduating again in 1953, Sam was faced with a choice: return to a life of acting (he was offered a role in John Ford’s The Long Gray Line) or stay behind the cameras and create storyboards for 20^th Century Fox. He chose the career in drawing and never looked back.

Image copyright Disney

A round of layoffs hit Fox the following year and swept Sam into a new job at the Walt Disney Studios. His first assignments were to draw inspirational sketches of attractions for a little project called Disneyland. It wouldn’t be long before every land in the new park had some sort of influence from the hand of Sam McKim. He contributed to the look of the Golden Horseshoe Revue, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Haunted Mansion and many more. Eventually, Sam would touch theme parks in the Florida Project as well. He helped design The Hall of Presidents at the Magic Kingdom, the Universe of Energy at Epcot and made dozens of sketches for the Disney-MGM Studios.

Image copyright Disney

Sam’s biggest contribution to the Disney legacy, however, is easily the souvenir maps he drew of Disneyland between 1958 and 1964. The intricacy of these maps has made them one of the most sought after pieces of memorabilia in all of Disney collecting. Almost thirty years later, Sam would reprise his role of park cartographer when he created one of his detailed masterpieces for the opening of Disneyland Paris.

In 1996, Sam was declared an official Disney Legend for all of his inspiring (and enduring) design work for the company over the years. He would pass away from heart failure at his home in Burbank, California on July 9, 2004. He was 79.