August 31 - Buddy Hackett

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On this day, in 1924, Leonard Hacker was born in Brooklyn, New York. Growing up the son of a garment district worker and a furniture upholsterer, Leonard would have fit right in to the story of High School Musical: he played football and was active in the drama club. He also suffered from Bell’s Palsey, which didn’t permanently affect his appearance but did give him his signature slurred speech. While still in school, Leonard began warming up audiences in various Catskill night clubs as what was known as a tummler, the Yiddish word for tumult maker. He eventually graduated to doing actual stand-up routines in those same clubs, although his debut probably left him questioning his life choices. He later recalled that he didn’t get a single laugh his first time behind the microphone. Luckily, his act quickly improved.

Once Leonard had graduated from New Utrecht High School in 1942, he immediately enlisted in the United States Army. He spent the entirety of World War II as part of an anti-aircraft battery. When the war ended and he returned to the States, Leonard changed his name to Buddy Hackett and jumped back into stand-up. After rewetting his feet at the Pink Elephant club in Brooklyn, he began to make appearances in Los Angeles and Las Vegas while also returning to the Catskill clubs of his youth (although his name was a little higher on the billing this time around). In 1950, Buddy made his big screen debut in a sports related short titled King of Pins. A how-to piece on the proper bowling techniques, he was featured as the sportsman you didn’t want to emulate. Three years later, Buddy was part of the original cast of Lunatics and Lovers, a play that ran for 336 performances on Broadway (Zero Mostel was his replacement when he went on vacation).

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Lunatics and Lovers gave Buddy enough exposure to land him a couple of television specials and expand his nightclub act. He didn’t return to the movies, though, until a bit from his stand-up act caught the attention of Universal Pictures. Unfortunately, it’s a bit that highlights changing social norms. Presently it would have gotten Buddy fired instead of hired, but the Fifties were clearly a different time. He took a rubber band, put it around his head in such a way that it gave a decided slant to his eyes, affected a thick accent and impersonated a frustrated waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Audiences ate it up. He made a recording of it and Universal put him in 1953’s Walking My Baby Back Home specifically so he could do the bit on film. He even got billing right under the picture’s main stars, Donald O’Connor and Janet Leigh.

I’d like to be able to say that his material got better after Walking, but Buddy became a darling of the talk show circuit pretty much because of his off-color jokes and ribald stories. He made frequent appearances with Jack Paar (including one on Jack’s final night as host of The Tonight Show), Arthur Godfrey, Perry Como and holds the record for the most guest shots on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. In 1958, he appeared on the Patrice Munsel Show with his then roommate Lenny Bruce. The significance of that performance is that the duo referred to themselves as the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players,” predating Saturday Night Live’s usage of the phrase by seventeen years (although why anyone thought putting those two on television together was a good idea is a question for another day).

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In spite of a somewhat profane stand-up persona, Buddy began building a more family friendly career starting in the mid Fifties. He had his own television show for a season, Stanley, which co-starred a young Carol Burnett as his girlfriend and featured a voice only character done by Paul Lynde. With that kind of a cast, you might think Stanley would be a big hit, but it struggled against more established shows in its time slot and failed to connect with audiences. In 1962, he played Marcellus Washburn to Robert Preston’s Harold Hill in the classic musical The Music Man. He teamed up with Mickey Rooney twice: 1961’s Everything’s Ducky and 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And he appeared with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in the second of their beach movies, Muscle Beach Party, in 1964.

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Buddy first joined the Disney family in 1968. As the lovable artist and racer Tennessee Steinmetz in The Love Bug, he was introduced to a whole new generation of fans. Twenty-one years later, Buddy gave voice to the well-intentioned but totally off base seagull, Scuttle, in The Little Mermaid. He would reprise the role in 2000 for The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea and for various theme park attractions and shows. For his participation in multiple iconic films for the company, Buddy would be declared an official Disney Legend in 2003, shortly after his death.

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After the release of the The Love Bug, Buddy continued to make frequent appearances just about everywhere. He was a semi-regular on the Sixties version of Hollywood Squares. He made late night audiences laugh on every talk show you can think of. He narrated the classic Rankin/Bass Christmas special Jack Frost in 1979 (he was the groundhog in that as well). He spent three years as the spokesman for Lay’s Potato Chips. He booked hundreds of stand-up gigs and eventually had his son, Sandy, as his opener on them. And he took on a handful of big screen roles including himself as Ebenezer Scrooge in Scrooged and a pawn shop owner in Paulie.

In the early Nineties, Buddy got bad news from his doctor in the form of a severe heart disease diagnosis. Not only did he refuse to even consider bypass surgery, he also developed diabetes during the same decade. Neither disease seemed to slow him down much for almost a decade. Then, in mid-June 2003, Buddy suffered a stroke that proved to be too much for his ailing body. A week later, on June 30, 2003, the brash comedian who recovered from a laughless debut to enjoy a six-decade long career passed away in his beach home in Malibu, California. He was 78.

August 4 - Don DaGradi

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On this day, in 1991, Don DaGradi passed away in Friday Harbor, Washington. Born on March 1, 1911, on the East Coast in New York City, Don actually spent most of his childhood growing up on the West Coast in San Francisco, California. After graduating from high school, he took his artistic talents south to Los Angeles and the Chouinard Art Institute. He honed his skills for a few years before joining the Walt Disney Studio in the mid-Thirties, at the height of the Great Depression, as a background painter. He was quickly bumped up to the Story Department, where he contributed gags and minor plot points to many of the studio’s shorts produced at the time.

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As the studio grew, Don's responsibilities grew as well. By 1940, he was the production designer on Dumbo. Throughout World War II, he was put in charge of layouts for in the Shorts Department (really the only thing the studio was producing in those lean years). His work can be seen in classic films including Der Fuehrer’s Face and Victory Through Air Power. Following the war, Don added features to his plate as the layout artist for The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music and Fun and Fancy Free.  At the end of the Forties, he started designing the color schemes and the overall feel of features. He sharpened the look of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

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As successful as all of Don’s endeavors were up to this point, he didn’t really start hitting his stride until he became a senior member of the story department in the mid-Fifties. He has a full story credit on Lady and the Tramp and contributed additional story elements to Sleeping Beauty (as well as being part of that production’s design team). Then, in 1959, he made the leap into live action movies and blossomed like never before.

Don’s Legendary co-workers, the Sherman Brothers, once said that he wrote scripts with a sketch pad and pencil, meaning that Don’s pictures were worth more than a thousand words. He could draw a quick picture of what a scene looked like in his head and everyone else could see it too. Pages of words could flow from each drawing, most of the time with very little effort. Don’s first effort in the live action arena was at Walt’s personal request. He designed and wrote the underground cavern scenes in Darby O’Gill and the Little People. He followed that up by developing sequences in The Absent-Minded Professor, Pollyanna, Kidnapped and The Parent Trap. For the sequel to Professor, Son of Flubber, Don teamed up with the Legendary Bill Walsh, completely writing that film’s script between the two of them. It was a professional match made in heaven that would last until Don’s retirement nearly a decade later.

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After Flubber, Don and Bill created the script for what is arguably the Walt Disney Studio’s magnum opus, as far as live action films go. Mary Poppins turned out to be as whimsically delightful as it is because of the two men wrote it. Don is credited with creating the visions of everything from people popping out of chimneys and flying through the air to how a tea party on the ceiling might look. His sense of wonder paid off. Audiences have adored the film since its debut and it was honored with five Academy Awards. Don and Bill’s script had also been nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Beckett.

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The overwhelming success of Mary Poppins basically gave Don and Bill carte blanche as screenwriters. While they would never reach those same heights again, they add several more classic Disney films to their resumes. Over the next seven years, the duo wrote Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N., Blackbeard’s Ghost, The Love Bug, Scandalous John and Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

During his career, Don was also tapped to occasionally do some moonlighting over in Imagineering. He designed costumes for Disneyland cast members including the outfits the resident marching band wore. He also designed the look of the exteriors of attractions, like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, keeping them in line with the looks he helped create for the animated features they were based on. And then, in 1970, after 34 years of making magic on and off the silver screen, the man who often described himself as a misplaced cartoonist retired from Disney.

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Don and his wife of many years, Betty, moved north to the state of Washington, enjoying their post-work life away from the hubbub of Hollywood for the next two decades. When Don passed away in August 1991, it was just a few months before his old company would honor him, and his writing partner Bill, as official Disney Legends. He might have been 80 years old at his death, but in his heart he still saw magic everywhere he looked.

May 7 - David Tomlinson

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On this day, in 1917, David Cecil MacAlister Tomlinson was born in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. David’s early life gave no indication of path he was eventually going to forge for himself. He went to boarding school at the venerable Tonbridge School in Kent, became a part of the British Army as a Grenadier Guard for 16 months and took a job his father, a respected lawyer, procured for him as a clerk in the London headquarters of Shell Oil. All very proper and aboveboard, as the English might say. It didn’t take long, however, for that Edwardian sense of propriety to start slipping.


It started with the revelation that David’s father was leading a double life, having sired another, separate family. A letter mailed to the wrong wife began unravelling the lies but when one of David’s brothers, from the upper level of a double decker bus, chanced to look into an apartment window and see their father lying in a strange bed casually reading the paper (he was supposed to be visiting his club), the duplicity had no choice but to be revealed. His father was wholly unapologetic, causing a rift between father and son that never healed. As an escape, David began acting in local amateur plays, soon discovering that he had a knack for that sort of thing. By 1940, he’d landed his first (uncredited naturally) film role in Garrison Follies. The following year brought him not one but three named roles and a starring role in the British war movie Name Rank and Number. Then World War II, as it did to so many people, fully interrupted his life, in more ways than he ever bargained for.

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David joined the Royal Air Force as a Flight Lieutenant. He was sent to Canada where he became a flight instructor, seemingly far away from the tragedies of war. While in North America, he met Mary Lindsay Hiddingh, the daughter of the vice president of the New York Like Insurance Company and already a war widow. Her first husband had been killed in action in 1941, leaving her two young sons fatherless. David and Mary hit it off, became romantically involved and married in September 1943. Two months later, he was reassigned to a position in London. Because of wartime restrictions on immigration, Mary and the boys weren’t allowed to travel with him. Apparently terrified that she would lose another husband to battle, Mary’s mental state quickly deteriorated. On December 2, 1943, she jumped from the 13^th floor of the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York City, with her two sons, killing all three of them. The blow was devastating to David. It would be another decade before he fell in love again and even years later he admitted he was still too distraught to ever visit Mary’s grave.

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Not that anyone was able to guess at David’s personal woes from his (usually) bright, cheery screen persona (I mean, there’s a reason it’s called acting, but even today, a whole lot of people can’t quite grasp that). Over the next eighteen years, he would star in 34 British films, mostly comedies with titles like Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? and Warning to Wantons. In 1963, David was part of the cast of the hugely successful comedy Tom Jones, playing the rare villainous role. All the sunny, yet sometimes stuffy characters David played over the years brought him to the attention of the producers at a studio in Burbank, California who were poised to give him everlasting, international fame.



A large chunk of the cast of Mary Poppins was relatively unknown in America (with the obvious exception of Dick Van Dyke). The Banks’ children, Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice, had already appeared together in The Three Lives of Thomasina, but that was nothing compared to the fame that was coming. David, Glynis Johns and even Julie Andrews were not household names until August 27, 1964 when Mary Poppins exploded onto the big screen. David, already popular in Britain, would now be recognizable throughout most of the known world. Not only did he play the venerable George Banks, who wakes up to the fact that his children need their father to actually be present for their childhoods, but he also provides several other voices for the film, including Mary Poppins’ umbrella and a overdub for Admiral Boom’s first mate.

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David would return to the Walt Disney Studio twice more in his career, both times playing iconic characters (albeit not quite on the scale of Mr. Banks). In 1968, he played the bumbling villain, Peter Thorndyke, in The Love Bug. Three years later, in what was conceived as a reteaming with Julie Andrews (she turned down the part), he starred with Angela Lansbury in the big screen adaptation of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. This time around he plays a smooth talking con man who struggles with the fact that he may have actually taught someone real magic.

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Post Disney, David appeared in a handful of films throughout the Seventies and made a rare television appearance on an episode of Hawaii Five-O in 1976. His final film (which also happened to be Peter Sellers final film) was the unfortunate The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1980. I’ve never seen it, but apparently it is just awful. Maybe David wouldn’t have retired from acting before its release if he’d known how bad it would be, but he probably still would have. He’d already done pretty much everything he’d ever wanted and was ready to concentrate on enjoying his family.



In 1953, David had married a second time, to an actress, Audrey Freeman. They had four sons together and enjoyed 47 years of relatively happy marriage. I say relatively, because one of their sons, Willie, was autistic. Being the parent of an autistic child today is no walk in the park, but it was far worse in the Sixties. In his memoir, David writes with bitter frustration about living through a time when doctors barely recognized autism as a condition, forget being able to get a diagnosis for it. He also recounted the stark lack of sympathy he and his wife got from friends and family, calling most people’s reactions to his son downright inhuman. His (bad) relationship with his father may have gotten him into acting, but he got out of it determined to have a good one with his son.



David quietly lived out the last two decades of his life, doting on his children and grandchildren, occasionally reliving his marvelous career in an interview. Then, on June 23, 2000 he suffered a massive stroke and was rushed to King Edward VII’s Hospital in Westminster. Early in the morning of June 24, he passed away without regaining consciousness. Two years later, he was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend for portraying not one but three titans of Disneyana and living forever in our hearts.

March 31 - Robert Stevenson

On this day, in 1905, Robert Edward Stevenson was born in Buxton, Derbyshire, England. Robert attended St. Johns College, part of Cambridge, on a scholarship. While there he won an award for aeronautics and graduated in 1927 with a degree in engineering. At that point, his parents gave him six weeks to find employment, so, of course, he became an assistant to Michael Balcon, who was one of the most famous British film producers of the time.

Robert's first real task under Michael was to write scripts (not as hard as it might seem as movies were still silent at this point). The first film he received story credit on was the 1928 war picture Balaclava. But even as movies became talkies, it was evident that Robert had a real talent for story crafting. Over the next few years, he would write musicals (1930's Greek Street), mysteries (1931's Night in Montmartre), dramas (1931's The Calendar) and comedies (1932's Lord Babs).

In 1932, Robert was given his first shot at directing a movie, a musical called Happily Ever After. Throughout the rest of the Thirties, he continued cutting a path through the British film industry, sometimes writing, sometimes directing and often doing both. He did several films with Jack Hulbert, another writer/director/actor type, and worked with the likes of Paul Robeson and Boris Karloff. By 1940, Robert had gained the attention of American producer David O. Selznick, who invited him to hop the pond and ply his craft in Hollywood.

While under contract to Selznick, Robert was loaned out to RKO Pictures for hits like 1942's Joan of Paris and to Universal for 1941's Back Street, which garnered an Oscar nomination for Music. In 1943, he wrote and directed an well received adaptation of Jane Eyre starring Orson Welles. When his contract with Selznick ran out, Robert signed a new one with RKO in 1949 and produced a string of films that consistently lost money even though they had stars like Robert Mitchum, Joseph Cotton and Jane Russell. This led to a period of television directing in the early Fifties for everything from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Gunsmoke. Many of the gigs he got during this period came from old friends in the industry (Robert and Hitchcock had worked closely together in 1940 for instance) and Robert's career could have fizzled into obscurity at this point, but a change of studio did wonders for his legacy.

In 1956, Robert was hired by the Walt Disney Studio to direct some of the live action movies they were starting to get more heavily into. His first project was Johnny Tremain. Set during the American Revolution, Tremain was filmed as part of the Disneyland television show but released to theaters before appearing on the small screen. Tremain was quickly followed up with one of the all time Disney classics, Old Yeller, the success of which cemented Robert's position with the studio.

Most of the rest of the nineteen films that Robert would direct for Disney over the next two decades are recognizable to the vast majority of people (and the few that aren't really are little gems just waiting to be discovered). His well known titles include Kidnapped, The Absent-Minded Professor and its sequel Son of Flubber, In Search of the Castaways, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones and its sequel The Monkey's Uncle, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, That Darn Cat!, The Love Bug and its sequel Herbie Rides Again, and The Shaggy D.A. His lesser known films are Darby O'Gill and the Little People, The Gnome-Mobile, Blackbeard's Ghost, The Island at the Top of the World and One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing.

Eagle eyed readers may have noticed that I've only listed eighteen movies so far. That's because the nineteenth film on the list (although in the middle of the pack chronologically) is the biggest one by far, for both Robert and the company. He was the man in charge of bringing Walt's magnum opus to life: Mary Poppins. Not only did Poppins become a run away hit, it gave Robert the only Oscar nomination for Best Director that Walt Disney Pictures had ever received (or would receive for years to come). Yes, he lost to My Fair Lady (which probably was extra galling because of the whole Julie Andrews 'controversy'), but that's still quite an accomplishment.

In a list published at the end of 1976, Robert was declared the most commercially successful director in the history of films. He had 16 films on the list of top grossing movies, all of them Disney pictures. The number two man (and of course it was a man, this was only the Seventies) only had 12. Robert's final picture, The Shaggy D.A., would join the list and push his supremacy even higher. It was estimated that he had worldwide grosses of over $750 million. I don't know if any of that was adjusted for the 20 year time frame the films spanned, but that's over $3.3 Billion in today's terms. Not to shabby for an engineer.

Robert spent the final decade of his life relaxing in his home in Santa Barbara, California with his fourth (and final) wife of 23 years, Ursula. He passed away on April 30, 1986 at the age of 81. He was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend as part of the class of 2002 as part of the opening of Disneyland Paris.

September 30 - Bill Walsh

On this day, in 1913, Bill Walsh was born in New York, New York. He was a bearcat on an athletic scholarship at the University of Cincinnati. It was in college that he also began writing for shows. After they caught the reviews of a show Bill wrote, Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay hired him to contribute to their 1933 Broadway show Tattle Tales. The show itself flopped but Bill was destined for bigger things.

In 1934, Bill headed west to Hollywood. He started out in publicity, writing not only press releases but sketching advertisements. One of his clients happened to be Edgar Bergen, who used Bill to juice up gags for his ventriloquist act. And one of Edgar's good friends happened to be Walt Disney.

By 1943, Bill was working for The Disney studio, writing gags and stories for the Mickey Mouse comic strip. He happily did that for several years until one day the big boss called him into his office. Bill tells this story: "Walt said he'd decided to go into television and I was the guy who was going to do it. I looked stunned and said 'But I don't know anything about television.' Walt smiled back at me and said, 'That's okay. Nobody does.'"

In 1950, Bill wrote and produced One Hour in Wonderland. It was Disney's first attempt at a television program and was a promo for the soon to be released Alice in Wonderland. It was also a smash hit, at least by the modest standards of early television shows. It was enough of a success that Bill would go on to produce both The Mickey Mouse Club and Davy Crockett programs.

Bill moved from the small screen to the big one in 1956. Over the next two decades, he would be an integral part as both writer and producer of 18 movies for the studio, seven of which appeared on a 1973 list of all-time box office champions. Maybe you've heard of a few of them: The Shaggy Dog, The Absent Minded Professor, That Darn Cat!, The Love Bug and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. His grandest achievement coincided with Walt's. He co-wrote Mary Poppins with Don DaGradi, earning one Oscar nomination and a Writer's Guild of America win, and also produced the film, earning a second Oscar nomination.

Shortly after returning home from the set of his last film, One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing, Bill suffered a heart attack and passed away on January 27, 1975. In 1991, he would become an official Disney Legend for his 32 years of outstanding work with the Walt Disney Company.

September 1 - Dean Jones

On this day, in 2015, Dean Carroll Jones passed away from Parkinson's disease in Los Angeles, CA.

Born on January 25, 1931 in Decatur, AL, Dean started in professional show business while attending Riverside High School. He could be heard on the local radio station in his very own show, "Dean Jones Sings".

From the success of that show, Dean left school and began traveling, working odd jobs, looking for a new gig. He found one in New Orleans for the grand salary of $3/hour plus all he could eat. Maybe the teen-aged Dean ate too much though, because the club went out of business and he returned home to finish school.

After graduation, Dean enrolled in Asbury College near Lexington, Kentucky as part of the class of 1953. He wouldn't graduate, however, as the call of the Korean War enticed him to move to San Diego, California and join the Naval Air Corps.  After an honorable discharge in the summer of 1954, Dean began performing in a show at the Bird Cage Theater at Knott's Berry Farm. This show led to a contract with MGM, where, as Dean put it, they were grooming him to become the next James Dean. Although he would have a near fatal motorcycle accident later in life, that plan did not gain much traction.

After a series of minor film roles, working with such stars as Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, Dean made his Broadway debut in 1960's "There Was a Little Girl" with Jane Fonda. That show only lasted for 16 performances, but later that year he would star as Dave Manning in the comedy "Under the Yum-Yum Tree". Dean's sophomore Broadway effort would run for over 170 performances and he would reprise the role in the 1963 film version alongside Jack Lemmon.

Various roles on television led to Dean getting cast in an NBC sitcom, "Ensign O'Toole", as the title character. As luck would have it, "Ensign" was the lead in show for "The Wonderful World of Color" and Dean caught the eye of one of the producers of "Color", Walt Disney.

Based on Dean's work in "Ensign O'Toole" and "Under the Yum-Yum Tree", Walt thought he would be perfect for FBI agent Zeke Kelso in "That Darn Cat". Dean's first picture with Disney would also be costar Haley Mills' last. Audiences so enjoyed Dean's performance, that Walt would use him again in 1966's "The Ugly Dachshund". After Walt's death, Dean would continue to be a regular for the studio throughout the rest of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. He appeared in:

Monkeys,Go Home with Maurice Chevalier

Blackbeard's Ghost with Peter Ustinov

The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit with a young Kurt Russell

The Million Dollar Duck with Sandy Duncan

Snowball Express with Nancy Olsen and Harry Morgan

The Shaggy D.A. with Tim Conway

The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, a 1995 Wonderful World of Disney remake of the 1969 original

Dean's biggest hit with the Disney Studio was easily 1968's "The Love Bug". Starring as Jim Douglas, the owner and driver of a surprisingly active Volkswagen racing Beetle named Herbie, Dean helped create the year's third highest grossing film. He would go on to reprise the role in one of the film's four sequels, "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo",  in a short lived television series in the early 1980s and as a cameo in a 1997 television remake of the original film.

Outside of Disney, Dean returned to Broadway in 1970, originating the role of Bobby in Stephen Sondheim's Company. He was only able to perform the role for a month because of bitter divorce proceedings he was going through at the same time.

 Dean became a born again Christian in the mid 1970s which caused him to put the brakes on his acting career. As he put it, he limited his opportunities so he could live with himself, turning down a number of "cheapo films with graphic sex." He appeared in a handful of films after that: "Other People's Money", "Beethoven" (uncharacteristically as the villain), and a number of Christian movies. He also did a variety of guest appearances on television, shows like "The Love Boat" and "Murder, She Wrote." In 1998, Dean founded the Christian Rescue Committee to provide a "way of escape to Jews, Christians and others persecuted for their faith."

In 1995, Dean was made a Disney Legend for his legacy of contributions to the studio's film history.