July 3 - Marcellite Garner

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On this day, in 1910, Edna Marcellite Garner was born in Redlands, California. She enrolled in night classes to study art at Polytechnic High School, the second oldest high school in Los Angeles, California. Right after she graduated she applied for a job at the Walt Disney Studio. At the age of nineteen, Marcelitte became one of only 35 Disney employees in February 1930 as part of the Ink and Paint Department. She’d been there about six months when Burt Gillett, one of the directors of Mickey Mouse shorts, walked in and asked if any of the girls (Ink and Paint was staffed entirely by women) knew how to speak Spanish. Marcellite and one other woman raised their hands. Burt asked if either of them could sing. The other woman wasn’t willing to do that and put her hand down. Burt looked at Marcellite, said follow me and took her to the recording studio for a sound test. She passed and became the first regular voice of Minnie Mouse.

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Starting with The Cactus Kid in 1930 (it’s set in Mexico, thus the reason for the Spanish question), Marcellite would lend her voice to Miss Minnie for over 40 shorts in the next ten years. You can hear her in such classics as Mickey’s Orphans, Mickey’s Rival, Brave Little Tailor and The Nifty Nineties. She is generally credited with helping to develop Minnie’s personality beyond eye candy for Mickey.  Marcellite also provided various other voices and sounds for the Silly Symphony series, like cats meowing in the Academy Award winning Three Orphan Kittens.

When the Great Animator’s Strike happened in 1941, Marcellite’s sympathies lay with the studio not the animators. She couldn’t see how anyone was being mistreated and felt the strike was ruining the family vibes of the studio. Her main contribution to the strike actually came about quite casually. She took some color home movies of the workers walking the picket line; nowadays, whenever footage of the strike is shown, it’s almost always her work you’re seeing. Though the strike was soon settled, Marcellite wouldn’t be around for much longer. Later that year, she retired from Disney in order to focus her efforts on raising her two kids with her husband, Richard Wall.

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In later years, when the Wall family had moved to Los Gatos, California, Marcellite did briefly re-enter the entertainment industry, producing a comic strip called El Gato for the local paper. Throughout her life she continued to expand her artistic skills, taking classes in ceramics, watercolor and oils. She made all sorts of pieces for friends and family, selling a handful in art galleries or at local festivals, but she never did any more voice acting after leaving Disney. Until that is, archived recordings of her were used to create Get a Horse!, the short released before Frozen in 2013. Unfortunately, Marcellite hadn’t lived long enough to hear herself as Minnie again. Horse hit theaters two decades after she passed away at her home in Grass Valley, California on July 26, 1993. She was 83.

June 14 - Evelyn and Claude Coats

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On this day, in 1910, Evelyn Henry was born in Edmonton, Ontario, Canada. When she was three, the family moved to Southern California, first to San Diego and then to Los Angeles. Evelyn studied art at Los Angeles High School and became a master at silk screening. In 1932, she was hired over at the Walt Disney Studio in the Ink and Paint Department as an inker, tracing the animators' pencil drawings onto cels. One of her first projects was the Silly Symphony The Three Little Pigs. Evelyn continued working on the Symphonies, contributing to the Academy Award winning The Old Mill for instance, while occasionally branching out into other series, like Mickey's first color short, The Band Concert.  

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During production on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Evelyn was promoted to head of Ink and Paint. She was specifically in charge of supervising the late night and weekend shifts all the women had to work if the studio was ever going to be finished in time for the  film's release date. At one point there was a brief break in the grueling schedule and Evelyn used it to marry one of the studio's background artists, Claude Coats. Following Snow White, she continued supervising the work that started up on the next animated feature, Pinocchio. 

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In 1939, she decided to retire from Disney to focus on raising a family. She turned the Ink and Paint Department over to her friend, Grace Bailey, and walked away for forever. Or so she thought. When the Great Animator's Strike came along in 1941, the studio was desperate for people to keep things moving along. They called Evelyn asking her if she could return to ink some cels for old times sake. She said sure and crossed the picket lines for several months (she later said she did not support the strikers in any way), helping to keep production on Dumbo rolling along. When the strike ended, she returned to her home in Burbank, at that point finished with her professional career.

Her husband, Claude, on the other hand, continued on to bigger and better things. Born on January 17, 1913 in San Francisco, California, he lived most of his childhood in Los Angeles as well, eventually graduating from Polytechnic High School. He went to the University of Southern California as an architecture student but changed majors and graduated with a degree in art, specifically drawing. He went on to study water color painting at the Chouinard Art Institute and became a member of the California Water Color Society. This led to an interview at the Walt Disney Studio and, in 1935, Claude began an apprenticeship as a background artist.

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Claude started out doing backgrounds for Mickey Mouse shorts such as Mickey's  Fire Brigade and Pluto's Judgement Day but it was his work for the Silly Symphony series that really got him noticed. His distinctive, richly layered backgrounds on films like The Old Mill and Ferdinand the Bull helped push both of them into the winner's circle at the Academy Awards. (It also brought him in contact with a fetching young woman in the Ink and Paint department.) These accolades convinced Walt to hand pick Claude to create the backgrounds for the studio's first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Over the course of his career, he would paint backgrounds for 15 features, ending with Lady and the Tramp, and influence the look of several more. But his contributions wouldn't end there.

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In 1955, Walt once again hand picked Claude to join WED Enterprises, what would eventually come to be called Walt Disney Imagineering, as an art director and show designer. Along with the Legendary Mary Blair, he was responsible for crafting the look of three of the four attractions Disney built for the 1964 World's Fair: Carousel of Progress, Ford Magic Skyway and it's a small world. Following the fair, Claude served as a designer for such classic attractions as Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Pirates of the Caribbean, World of Motion and Horizons. When he retired in November 1989, there was an attraction of his design in Disneyland, the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT Center and Tokyo Disneyland, every Disney park that existed except the newly opened Disney MGM Studios. For all of his spectacular work on the screen and in the parks, Claude was declared an official Disney Legend in 1991. You've also seen his name outside the Haunted Mansion on a tombstone that reads "At Peaceful Rest Lies Brother Claude – planted here beneath this sod."

Claude passed away on January 9, 1992 at the Coats' home in Burbank, California. He was just eight days shy of his 79th birthday. Evelyn remained there, spending her time volunteering at the Braille Institute, Goodwill and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She passed away on July 13, 2009. She was 99.

June 10 - Becky Fallberg

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On this day, in 1923, Becky Dorner was born in Los Angeles, California. Her early years were spent in the Elysian Valley area, but in 1936, her parents moved the family into a house in the Silver Lake neighborhood at 3021 Angus Street. It was a move that shaped the rest of Becky’s life. Since the country was in the middle of the Great Depression, the Dorners rented out their extra rooms to artists who worked at the nearby Walt Disney Studio. Having spent her nights and weekends surrounded by talented animators (who were in the heady midst of creating their first animated feature no less), Becky naturally wanted to become part of the excitement of Disney herself. She graduated from John Marshall High School and immediately enrolled at Los Angeles City College as an art student. One year later, in 1942, she was hired as one of the studio’s telephone operators. Within months, she’d been moved into the Ink and Paint Department, where she toiled away on military training films and propaganda shorts like Victory Through Air Power for the war effort.

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Becky’s first stint with Ink and Paint lasted less than a year. By early 1943, she’d become part of the Animation Department as an assistant to animation supervisor Johnny Bond. Her main tasks were to copy drawings that needed to be sent to the Color Model department and help Jonny decide which animators were going to draw which scenes. It was during this period that the Dorner’s choice of boarders became even more personal for Becky. In 1945, she married one of them, Carl Fallberg, who was a story man with Disney. Carl would eventually leave the studio in the early Fifties to write Disney comics at Western Publishing and freelance for Hanna-Barbara and Warner Brothers, but Becky would remain with the company for the remainder of her professional career.

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In 1947, Becky transitioned into the Layout Department as a blue sketch artist. For the next three years, her job was to chart character movements across background art, assisting the layout artists in framing animated scenes. She returned to the Ink and Paint Department in 1950, as a paint matcher, ensuring each new batch of paint was properly mixed. From there she was promoted to the position of Final Checker, where it was her responsibility to make sure each animation cel was properly drawn and colored before sending it to the Camera Department. In the early Sixties, when Disney developed its Xerography process of photocopying animator’s drawings onto cels rather than hand inking them, Becky moved into the Xerox Camera Department.

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In the early Seventies, Becky became part of the Educational Films Department where she was one of two people who handled all of the Ink and Paint requirements for the unit. In 1975, having worked on every Disney feature since Saludos Amigos, Becky was put in charge of the entire Ink and Paint Department, a position she would hold until 1986, when the company began to transition to computer based coloring of its animation and she retired. For her nearly 45 year career, spanning 25 features and countless shorts, Becky was declared an official Disney Legend in 2000. Carl died in 1996 and Becky spent her remaining years supporting the Santa Cecilia Orchestra and volunteering as a docent at the historic Gamble House in Pasadena. On October 9, 2007, she passed away from complications due to lymphocytic leukemia. She was 84.

March 16 - Joyce Carlson

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On this day, in 1923, Joyce Carlson was born in Racine, Wisconsin. Joyce and her family moved to Southern California when she was 15. After graduating from Santa Monica High School, she needed a job and became a member of the Traffic Department at the Walt Disney Studio. Her job was to deliver mail, paint brushes, coffee and anything else that was needed to the various departments of the studio. It wasn't long before she wanted something more, so Joyce created a portfolio of drawings, showed them to management and was promptly moved into the Ink and Paint Department.

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Joyce's first assignments were the shorts Disney created for the United States Government during World War II. She was quickly moved into the Feature Animation division and worked on The Three Caballeros, Cinderella and Peter Pan. During production on Lady and the Tramp, Joyce was promoted to a Lead Ink Artist position which carried on into Sleeping Beauty and One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Technology had advanced by that time, however. Dalmatians ushered in the era of xerography, which allowed animators drawings to be photocopied onto cels, eliminating the need for inkers. As the Ink and Paint Department shrunk accordingly, Joyce, after 16 years of expertly floating paint on acetate, transferred to WED Enterprises and began the Imagineering phase of her career.

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In 1962, Joyce began a mentoring process under two legends: Mary Blair and Marc Davis. Her first project was as part of the team designing and dressing the sets for the Carousel of Progress for the 1964 World's Fair. She worked closely with Leota Toombs, who had also come from the Ink and Paint Department (and would later achieve immortality as the face of Madame Leota in the Haunted Mansion), specifically creating the sturdier show hinges on all of the doors of the GE appliances that were used in the attraction.

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Joyce is best known for her work on another ride for the Fair, UNICEF's It's a Small World. She was responsible for designing and building the majority of the singing children figures seen throughout the attraction. She was also one of handful of cast members who traveled to New York to oversee the installation of all the Disney created pavilions. After the Fair, she was in charge of moving It's a Small World across country to Disneyland and eventually supervised the creation of the versions in Florida, Tokyo and Paris.

After the World's Fair projects were completed, Joyce and Leota continued to work together making models and final figures for all sorts of attractions. Her work can be seen in The Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, Country Bear Jamboree and America Sings (which had a whole slew of its figures recycled into Splash Mountain), to name a few.

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In 1982, Joyce moved to Florida where she became the resident Small World expert and was promoted to Senior Show Production Designer for Walt Disney World. She was the first female employee of the company to reach both the 50 and 55 year anniversary marks. She retired from full time work in 2000, but like most of Disney's old timers, continued to work at least part time for six more years and was available to mentor new Imagineers beyond that. Just after her retirement in 2000, Joyce was made an official Disney Legend. She was also given her own window on Main Street, USA in the Magic Kingdom that reads "Dolls by Miss Joyce - Dollmaker for the World - Shops in New York, California, Florida, Japan and Paris - Owner and Founder, Joyce Carlson." The eagle eyed among us can also spot a figure in her likeness in the Florida version of Small World. Joyce succumbed to cancer on January 8, 2008 at her home in Orlando, Florida. She was 84.