August 1 - Chuck Keehne

On this day, in 1914, Charles Keehne was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Chuck was the middle child of five children born to a telegraph operator for a railroad. He spent most of his formative years in southwest Missouri, graduating from high school in 1932. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Southern California to try his luck at the movie business. He found steady work as a carpenter building movie sets for various studios. At some point he was hired by the Western Costume Company as a costumer. He made it his business to become an expert in historically accurate costumes and by 1940 had left Western to strike out on his own. He found freelancing success on pictures like Knute Rockne, All American, with Ronald Reagan, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, with James Cagney.

World War II brought an interruption to Chuck's costuming career. He joined the Army Air Corps and became a combat cameraman in the Pacific. When the war was over, he remained stationed in Japan until receiving an honorable discharge in 1946. He returned to Hollywood, resumed working as a costumer and married his childhood sweetheart. Over the next several years, Chuck created the clothing for classic films like Fort Apache with John Wayne and A Bullet for Joey with Edward G. Robinson. Then, in early 1955, he stopped being a freelancer and created one of the most iconic wardrobe pieces in television history.

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The Walt Disney Studio found itself with a problem in the mid Fifties. They had done several live action films by that point and were poised to get heavily into television, but they lacked something that all the other studios already had: a wardrobe department. Animated characters didn't require a costumer but real people needed something to wear. Bill Anderson, the studio's production manager, needed to hire someone on full time to fix this dilemma. When Bill interviewed Chuck in April 1955, one of Chuck's first questions was Where is the Wardrobe Department? Bill's answer was Wherever you build it. Luckily for Disney, Chuck not only didn't shy away from the challenge of creating Costuming for a major studio, he was able to bring along two highly capable people to help him. He put Ted Tooey in charge of Men's Wardrobe, Gertie Casey in charge of Women's and took over part of the building that housed the Shorts Department (which would be closing down soon anyways, although most people weren't aware of that).

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Chuck's first task was outfitting the cast of Disney's new television show, The Mickey Mouse Club. Creating the look of the costumes the Mousketeers would be wearing was a piece of cake compared to actually keeping the cast in properly fitting clothes. Over the course of the shows three seasons, it would seem like every single cast member had several growth spurts. And then there was their headgear. Everyone agreed that some kind of mouse ears was definitely the way to go, but turning that great idea into a practical reality was a daunting task that fell to the newly hired costumer, Chuck. Working closely with Roy Williams, who had the original idea, several prototypes were designed and discarded. Some just looked too big, others were too heavy and ones that did actually look good wouldn't stay on the kids heads when they danced (or even just moved around).

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Chuck and Roy finally devised small hand crafted ears, tailor fitted to each individual Mousketeer, complete with rubber band chin straps to keep them from falling off all the time. The problem with the ears was the price: it cost $25 a piece to make them (about $240 each in today's money). Multiply that times dozens of cast members, add in the fact that the kids kept losing or crushing sets of them, and you begin to see Chuck's headache. Because mouse ears were actually just a small part of the wardrobe required for The Mickey Mouse Club. Distinct costumes were created for each of the individual days of the week (you couldn't possible wear the same thing for Talent Round-Up Day that you did for Anything Can Happen Day, right?) plus everything needed for the various shows-within-the-show like Spin and Marty and Annette. It really was like doing several separate shows all at once. Good thing Chuck and his crew were not only up to the task but created television history at the same time.

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After getting The Mickey Mouse Club up and running, the next two and a half decades must have seemed like something of an extended vacation, even as Chuck would oversee wardrobe for every single live action production the Walt Disney Studio did whether it was on the big screen or the small. He costumed Zorro and all the Wonderful World of Disney shows. He created Mrs. Banks' suffragette look in Mary Poppins, Haley Mills' California chicness in The Parent Trap and clothed Jodie Foster's teenage angst in Freaky Friday. Chuck was also Walt's personal dresser for all of his television introductions and public appearances. When he retired in 1979, he was personally responsible for the look of over 70 feature films and hundreds of television episodes. He then lived quietly with his wife, enjoying his two daughters and his grandchildren until his death on February 24, 2001 in Los Angeles, California. He was 86.

July 25 - Harriet Burns

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On this day, in 2008, Harriet Burns passed away in Los Angeles, California. Born as Harriet Tapp in San Antonio, Texas on August 20, 1928, growing up during the Great Depression really brought out her creative side. Toys and games couldn't be purchased, they had to be created out of materials that could be found. How imaginative was Harriet as a child? While most kids would give their pet goldfish a name like Goldie, she named hers Tackaonsitgo Popeye Gotsinyammer Cockapinay Kasuzyanna Karachi Dianashey Brianashey Jickalicky Jackaboney Christianna More and could actually remember the whole name every time. Was she destined to become an artistic Legend? Whether you believe in that sort of thing or not, yes.

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Following high school, Harriet's father told her that he would only pay for college if she majored in Home Economics (yes, that was, and still is, a thing). She agreed and enrolled at Southern Methodist University in Dallas but, in the end, pulled one over on dear old dad by changing her major to Art, kind of forgetting to tell him about that. After graduating from SMU, Harriet spent another year at the University of New Mexico studying advanced design (no word on whether or not dad paid for that). In 1951, she married her college sweetheart, Bill Burns and did some work designing displays for Neiman Marcus in Texas.

In 1953, the Burns family moved to Los Angeles, California so Bill could try his hand at a career in acting. It didn't work out terribly well. In spite of the fact that she had a one-year-old daughter at home, Harriet decided that she'd better find some work to help pay the bills. On the basis of her previous design work, she was able to get a position with Dice Display Industries Cooperative Exchange, a Hollywood based prop company. For a little over a year, Harriet designed and built props for shows like the Colgate Comedy Hour. She was also part of a team that designed and built sets for the floor shows at Las Vegas hotels like the Dunes. Near the end of her short time with Dice, Harriet was a leader of the team that designed Santa's Village, a small theme park in Lake Arrowhead, California. Even with all that steady work, Dice Display still went belly up in early 1955. One of Harriet's co-workers decided to  return to his former place of employment and suggested that she try to get a position there as well.

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Harriet heard rumors that the Walt Disney Studio wasn't hiring women right at the moment, but she applied anyways. She later quipped that they must have thought her name was Harry because she got the job. Her first assignment was on a new television show the studio was working on, The Mickey Mouse Club. She started out making props but soon was helping to design and build the iconic clubhouse set that would feature prominently in every episode. Harriet worked her magic at a station right next to Fred Joerger, who was one of two people in a new department known at that time as Model Department. Fred's admiration of her talents would change the course of her career (as well as the look and feel of Disney theme parks).

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Fred worked with Wathel Rogers doing a very specific job that Walt felt needed to be done. They were making models of everything that was being built for the company's new theme park over in Anaheim, Disneyland. Fred felt that he and Wathel could use the help of Harriet in their model work and suggested to Walt that she become part of their department. Walt agreed and Harriet was transferred in. She was only the third person, and the first woman, to become what would eventually be known as an Imagineer. It's a position she would hold until her retirement over thirty years later.

Harriet's first task in the Model Department (soon to be renamed WED Enterprises), was to create a detailed model of Sleeping Beauty Castle, the most iconic landmark in Disneyland. Once the park was opened in July 1955, the trio at WED continued making models of attractions, but now they started depicting potential rides instead of existing ones. One of Harriet's first projects of this kind was to design and build a model of the Matterhorn Bobsleds ride, a 1/100th scale replica of an attraction that was a 1/100th scale replica of the actual Matterhorn in Switzerland.

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As time went on, WED Enterprises began adding more and more people to its ranks and taking on more and more projects. Designing and building four attractions for the 1964 World's Fair pushed everyone's creativity to the limit and everyone, including Harriet, showed they were more than up to the task. Harriet was part of two teams for the Fair, the one working on Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln for the State of Illinois pavilion and the one creating the Carousel of Progress for the General Electric pavilion. Both of those projects have stood the test of time. Great Moments is still running on Main Street USA in Disneyland and the Carousel is still turning in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom.

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During the same time work was progressing on the rides for the World's Fair, Harriet was also busy doing another role she played with WED: she was a figure finisher. That meant she was one of the people who carefully applied paint and other materials to both Audio-Animatronics and the sets of attractions to give them their show ready or finished look. The first attraction she did this for was the Submarine Voyage which opened in 1959. It was the next one, though, that really showed off her talents. While doing finishing work on The Enchanted Tiki Room, hand applying thousands of feathers to the shows dozens of birds. she noticed a problem. When the four main birds breathed in and their chests puffed out, everything looked fine, but when they exhaled and their chests went back to normal, their skin looked bunched, kind of like Jose and the others were suffering from mites. Harriet solved this problem one day in a meeting. Walt was wearing a cashmere sweater and she couldn't help but notice that the knitted fabric moved at his elbows exactly like the Imagineers had envisioned the birds chests moving. Four custom made cashmere bird skins later and the bunching problem was fixed.

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Harriet was deeply involved in the design Disneyland's first major expansion, New Orleans Square, and all the restaurants and attractions that call it home. She made a model of the entirety of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and was one of the attraction's main figure finishers. For anyone wondering where Imagineers get their inspiration from, it just might be you. The pirate that sits on the bridge swinging his leg and singing as guests float under him was based on Harriet's mailman at the time. She was also part of the design team that created the Haunted Mansion just a couple of years later. Sharp eyed guests will notice a tombstone at the Mansion about an opera singer who shares a name with Harriet (it's not a coincidence; all the tombstones at the Mansion honor the attraction's original designers). Walt was so impressed with her talents, he featured Harriet on several episodes of the Wonderful World of Disney throughout the Sixties, showcasing her work in the Tiki Room, Pirates and the World's Fair rides.

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Harriet was part of Walt Disney Imagineering until her retirement in 1986. Not only did she work on stuff at Disneyland but she was also influential on the designs of Walt Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland and EPCOT Center. She would continue to spend the rest of her life creating magic just on a smaller scale, doing it exclusively for her grandchildren and their friends. She also remained highly active in the Santa Barbara arts community, where she maintained her home. In 1992, she was honored with her very own window on Main Street USA in Disneyland, the first woman to ever receive one. It reads "The Artisans Loft, Handmade Miniatures by Harriet Burns." In 2000, the pioneering Imagineer was officially declared a Disney Legend. She passed away eight years later from complications brought on by a heart condition. She was 79.

July 11 - Hal Adelquist

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On this day, in 1914, Hal Adelquist was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. When he was about three, Hal and his parents moved to California, living in Oakland for a couple of years then settling in Los Angeles. While attending Los Angeles High School, he was able to develop his burgeoning talent as a cartoonist as well as hone his organizational and planning skills on the Publicity Committee. Hal graduated in 1932 and less than a year later was working at the Walt Disney Studio.

Despite his drawing talents, Hal quickly moved into the production side of animation with the studio. For much of his first few years at Disney, he served as an assistant director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, although you won’t find his name on any official credits list. After Snow White was released, Hal was put in charge of organizing classes for the studio’s stable of animators. He made sure that new hires and seasoned pros alike worked on their characterization skills and learned how to make demo reels of their art.

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By the end of the Thirties, Hal had moved into the Personnel Department. His first duties there reminded him of his days on the Publicity Committee as he planned all the company picnics and various other outings. When the animators went on strike in 1941, he was in the dubious position of being in charge of the department. Several resignation letters tendered at that time, including the Legendary Carl Barks’, were addressed to Hal. He clearly acted with both professionalism and dignity throughout the strike process, however, or he would never have been chosen for his next role.

It wasn’t long after the strike that Hal was moved into the Story Department. While there, and in spite of the fact that he was technically studio management, Walt’s Nine Old Men collectively picked him to be their spokesperson in all matters that arose between the studio and the animators. For over a decade, Hal juggled the egos of Disney’s animation superstars and balanced them with the ego of the studio’s owner, smoothing the way for the production of classics like The Three Caballeros, Cinderella and Peter Pan. His skills and charisma must have been outstanding during this period because even though he was essentially representing labor after the strike, Walt still hand picked him in 1954 to be a major part of the studio’s new television show.

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When Walt agreed to create The Mickey Mouse Club for ABC, he turned the project over to Bill Walsh as producer and Hal as general coordinator. A simplified explanation of the two men’s relationship would be Bill made the decisions and Hal made the decisions happen. But don’t be fooled by that simplification. Hal had just as much influence on the look and feel of the show as practically anyone else. He had input on everything from the iconic mouse ears to who was hired as Mouseketeers to who the  Talent Round-Up winners were. Once filming began, Hal was production supervisor for Fun with Music Day, Anything Can Happen Day and Talent Round-Up Day, in other words 60% of the episodes.

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As the first season of The Mickey Mouse Club wrapped up filming, Hal was tasked with creating and staging the live shows of The Mickey Mouse Club Circus at Disneyland. For two months covering the 1955 Holiday season, guests could see some of their favorite Mouseketeers performing with professionals from the Ted DeWayne Circus. It was easily one of the most difficult shows to stage that the park ever undertook.

Between the launching of the television show and the running of the circus, Hal was beginning to crack under the strain of his job. His habit of an occasional steadying cocktail took a sharp turn towards alcoholism. Whether it was his growing drinking problem or something else entirely (nobody knows for sure), Walt and Hal had a major falling out in early 1956. Hal was replaced in his Club producing duties by Mike Holoboff and demoted to basically being a scout for acts for Talent Round-Up Day. In the spring of that year, Hal took a ten city tour with Jimmy Dodd to do just that, but it would be his last project with the company. Shortly after returning to Los Angeles, Hal resigned his position.

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The remainder of Hal’s life is fairly tragic and sketchy on details. About a year after resigning from Disney, he approached Walt to ask to be rehired. He was willing to take literally any job the studio had, but Walt said no. Hal then drifted to the East Coast, winding up in New York City. The New York Times interviewed him in 1977 in the common room of one of the city’s homeless shelters. He’d apparently bounced around among jobs as varied as an executive at the Freedomland Amusement Park in the Bronx to washing cars. In between jobs, he admitted that he was sometimes reduced to panhandling but considered himself to be pretty good at it and encouraged the reporter to learn how because you just never know.  From all accounts, he was still a pretty charismatic guy in good possession of his mental capabilities, which leads me to believe that he never got control of his dependency on solving his problems at the bottom of a bottle. Four years later, Hal had drifted back to the West Coast. He was living with his mother in Long Beach, California when he passed away on March 26, 1981. He was 66.

June 13 - Mary Wickes

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On this day, in 1910, Mary Isabella Wickenhauser was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Mary’s parents loved the theater and began taking their daughter to see shows as soon as she was old enough to stay awake through an entire one. She was extremely intelligent for her age, ended up skipping not one but two grades and graduated from high school when she was only 16. She graduated from Washington University in 1930 with a double major of English Literature and Political Science with the intent of going into a career in law. But (and there always seems to be a but, doesn’t there), a professor said she should try a little acting, you know, just for fun. So she did. The law career never materialized.

By 1934, Mary was on Broadway having simplified her last name to Wickes. Her first show was The Farmer Takes a Wife with Henry Fonda. She followed Farmer up with runs in Stage Door, Hitch Your Wagon, Father Malachy's Miracle and Stars in Your Eyes. Her breakthrough role came in 1939 when she originated the uptight nurse Miss Preen in Kaufman and Hart’s classic comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner. The show enjoyed an almost two year run and when it came time to make the film version in 1942, Mary and star Monty Woolley were the only two cast members to make the leap to the big screen.

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The next two years were busy ones for Mary. She appeared in eleven films including the Abbott and Costello mystery Who Done It? She slowed down slightly after that, doing eight more movies through the end of the decade, perfecting her persona of the character who appears to be stodgy at first (like a nun or a secretary) but spits out the most sassy one liners by the picture’s end. Through the same time period, Mary also appeared in six more Broadway shows, ending with Town House in 1948. It would be three more decades before she returned to the Great White Way, when she spent nearly a year as Aunt Eller in a 1979 revival of Oklahoma!

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Mary’s career television career practically began with the medium itself. Though NBC had been broadcasting television since 1939 (CBS started a couple of years later), it wasn’t until after World War II that people began buying sets and actual content was needed. Mary’s first appearances came in 1948 on two episodes of Actors Studio on the brand new ABC network. She continued showing up on various anthology shows, including an episode of Studio One in Hollywood in 1949 as Mary Poppins (preceding Julie Andrews by fifteen years!). Her first series as a regular cast member came in 1953 as part of The Danny Thomas Show. She spent the first three seasons playing Liz O’neal. Over the next four decades, Mary would guest star in dozens of episodes of show ranging from whatever Lucille Ball’s latest series was to M*A*S*H to Punky Brewster to a Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation of The Man Who Came to Dinner in which she reprised he role of Miss Preen. She appeared as a regular cast member on eight more series, including Mrs. G. Goes to College (which earned her an Emmy nomination in 1962) and the show she’s probably best known for, Father Dowling Mysteries with Tom Bosley. She also had a few dozen supporting roles in films over the remainder of her career, including a turn as the housekeeper of the inn featured in White Christmas, Mrs. Squires in The Music Man and Aunt March in the 1994 version of Little Women.

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Mary enjoyed a number of positions in the Disney family during her career. She first worked for the company on two of its early television shows. She was Katie, the housekeeper, for the serial Walt Disney Presents: Annette which aired during the third season of The Mickey Mouse Club and she played Dolores Bastinado in three episodes of the first season of Zorro, both in 1958. She then played a pivotal, if entirely unseen, role in 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians as the live action model for the classic villain, Cruella de Vil. Thirty-one years later, Mary delighted audiences as the crusty old Sister Mary Lazarus in Touchstone Pictures’ Sister Act and its sequel, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. Her final role with Disney (her final role with any studio for that matter) was as a wisecracking gargoyle named Laverne in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

As Mary got older, she suffered from the usual list of illnesses that plague us all. Unfortunately for her, she fell during one of her hospitalizations and broke her hip. Complications from the resulting surgery proved to be too much for her and she died on October 22, 1995 at the age of 85. She was one recording session away from finishing her work on Hunchback; if you listen carefully, you might be able to pick out the six lines that Jane Withers had to record in her place. She never married nor did she have any children, so, besides the millions of laughs she left behind, her legacy was to use her estate to establish a $2 million memorial fund in her parent’s names at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, thereby honoring the people who planted the seeds of her remarkable career so many years before.

May 23 - George Bruns

On this day, in 1983, George Edward Bruns passed away in Portland, Oregon. Born on July 3, 1914 in Sandy, Oregon, George took plenty of music lessons as a child. His innate talent was evident early on as it didn’t take him long to master the piano, the tuba and the trombone. He began attending Oregon State Agricultural College (now known as Oregon State University) in 1932 and played with the ROTC band in order to afford the tuition. For some reason, George was an engineering student but he didn’t stay one for terribly long. By the age of twenty, he’d decided to drop out of school to be a full-time musician (every parent’s dream). Luckily for George (and ultimately the rest of us), that plan worked out for once.

For the rest of the Thirties and the first half of the Forties, George played with various local groups in the Portland area. Following World War II, he started his own band (which included Doc Severenson of The Tonight Show fame) and began playing gigs all over the Northwest. The group had to remain based in Portland because George’s regular job was musical director of radio station KEX. He also served as the bandleader in the ritzy Rose Bowl room at Portland’s Multnomah Hotel and would occasionally play trombone on recordings with the Castle Jazz Band.

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In 1949, George moved to Los Angeles craving a bigger music scene than Portland could offer. He played tuba in a jazz band (you heard that right, tuba and jazz in the same sentence), created a night club act with his wife, singer Jeanne Gayle, and got the break of a lifetime. In 1953, George was asked to write the music for a short over at United Productions of America, Little Boy with a Big Horn. His work was impressive enough to grab some attention over at the Walt Disney Studio and he was hired the same year to arrange Tchaikovsky’s ballet music and write new score for the upcoming feature Sleeping Beauty.

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During production on Sleeping Beauty, Walt discovered he had a small problem in one of the shows that was being created for the Disneyland television show. There was a three and a half minute gap in an episode about this famous frontiersman. Did George think he could maybe write a song to take care of that? So George sat down with lyricist Tom Blackburn and churned out a little ditty called The Ballad of Davy Crockett. The success of that one song would have been more than enough to cement George’s place in Disney history (it certainly was enough to make him the studio’s musical director), but it was only the beginning.

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Over the next twenty years, George would score more than forty Disney films and television shows, starting with the remaining episodes of Davy Crockett. He wrote several songs for the first two seasons of The Mickey Mouse Club, including Talent Roundup (with studio nurse Hazel George) and I Want to Be a Fireman. In one four year period, he would receive three Oscar nominations, first for Sleeping Beauty in 1959, then for Babes in Toyland in 1961 and finally for The Sword in the Stone in 1963. His most famous composition (in spite of what fans of Davy Crockett think) is hands down a song that plays on continuous loop at all times somewhere in the world: A Pirate’s Life for Me, penned with the legendary Imagineer X Atencio. His other highlights include the scores of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, The Absent Minded Professor and The Love Bug. In 1973, George was nominated for an Academy Award a fourth time for a song he wrote with lyricist Floyd Huddleston, Love from Robin Hood.


After scoring Herbie Rides Again, George retired from the Walt Disney Studio in 1976. He moved back to the Portland area, became a part-time music professor at Lewis and Clark College and continued to compose and play all of the instruments in his repertoire. He did record a new album of jazz music, but it never got much more than local play time. In May of 1983, George suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 68. In 2001, for composing a large chunk of the soundtrack guests hear snippets of all around Disney theme parks in every corner of the world, he was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend.

May 14 - Richard Deacon

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On this day, in 1921, Richard Deacon was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, Richard’s family moved across the state border to Binghamton, New York where he would finish his childhood years. After graduating from Binghamton Central High School, alongside the other future Binghamton star Rod Serling, he would serve in the Army Medical Corps during World War II. Following the end of the war, Richard returned home, began working as a lab technician at Binghamton General Hospital and started taking courses at nearby Ithaca College with the intent of becoming a doctor. Along the way, he was bitten by the acting bug, though, and he never become a actual doctor, but he did get to play one on tv several times.

Richard began acting in the late Forties in college productions which naturally led to regional theater stages. He eventually crossed paths with Helen Hayes, who told him that while he would probably never become a leading man, he should definitely pursue a career as a character actor. He took the advice to heart and built a massive body of work on it.

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Richard’s film and television careers both started in the Fifties. His first film role was as an MP in 1953’s Invaders from Mars, which also featured future co-star Barbara Billingsley. Over the next five years, before his debut on the small screen, Richard appeared in 34 films, ranging from comedies like Abbot and Costello meet the Mummy (pictured) to dramas like The Power and the Prize to musicals like Carousel. He would grace the cast list of over 100 movies before his career was over, but it wasn’t until he started making weekly visits in everyone’s living rooms that he became someone everyone knew.

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Richard made his television debut on The Jack Benny Show in 1954 but his first recurring role was on the venerable sitcom Leave It To Beaver.  He spent six years as Fred Rutherford, father to Lumpy Rutherford, one of Wally Cleaver’s friends. His most famous role started in 1961 (and actually overlapped his Beaver gig for a year). Richard was cast as Melvin Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show (pictured). For five seasons, he masterfully played the butt of Morey Amsterdam’s jokes, occasionally also doing producer duties for his brother in law Allen Brady on the show within a show. Following the end of that series, Richard had recurring roles on The Phyllis Diller Show, The Beverly Hillbillies and The Mothers-In-Law. In 1969, he returned to the stage, making his Broadway debut as a replacement Horace Vandergelder in Hello, Dolly, reteaming with Phyllis Diller for almost a year.

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Richard joined the Disney family early in his career. In 1958, he starred as Uncle Archie McCloud in the serial Walt Disney Presents: Annette on the original Mickey Mouse Club (pictured). He later appeared in a string of films for the company throughout the Sixties, including That Darn Cat!, Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN, The Gnome-Mobile, Blackbeard’s Ghost, and The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. His final Disney appearance came in 1984 when he was part of the cast of The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, a film that aired on the newly minted Disney Channel.

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Throughout the Seventies and into the Eighties, Richard made dozens of guest appearances on everything from Maude to The Love Boat (of course) to a recurring role as Sheriff Masters on BJ and the Bear. He even continued to land a handful of big screen roles in films like The Man From Clover Grove, Rabbit Test (Billy Crystal’s debut) and The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood (pictured). He was also something of a gourmet chef in his private life and hosted a microwave cooking show in Canada, publishing a companion cookbook to go along with it. In 1983, twenty years after Leave It To Beaver went off the air, Richard reprised his role of Fred Rutherford for a made for tv reunion movie, Still the Beaver. The reunion was so successful that a new Beaver series was developed (which would air its first season on the Disney Channel) and Richard was slated to be a part of it, but it wasn’t to be. Before filming could start, he suffered a heart attack on August 8, 1984 at his home in Los Angeles, California. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival. He was 63.

April 8 - Annette Funicello

On this day, in 2013, Annette Joanne Funicello passed away in Bakersfield, California. Annette was born in Utica, a city of around 60,000 near the middle of the state of New York, on October 22, 1942. It should come as no surprise that she inherited an Italian lineage from both of her parents. When she was four, the Funicello made a cross-country move to Southern California. Throughout her childhood, Annette took dance lessons to try to help alleviate the almost painful shyness she experienced. By the time she was twelve, she was good enough on her feet to be chosen to perform the role of Swan Queen in Swan Lake for a recital that took place at the Starlight Bowl in Burbank, California. As luck would have it, there was one member of the audience for that Spring 1955 performance who knew Annette was just what he'd been looking for.

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Plans were coming together for the Disney Studio's new television show, The Mickey Mouse Club, but Walt felt that it wasn't quite right yet. When he saw Annette dance, he was intrigued enough to ask to meet her. Once he met her, he loved her and offered her a seven year contract that would start with becoming a Mouseketeer. Annette was, in fact, the final kid chosen to wear the coveted mouse ears and one of only a few that were handpicked by Walt. Not only was Annette frequently featured in the talent portions of the daily show, she was cast in many of the serials as well. After appearing in Adventure in Dairyland and Spin and Marty, there was one in the final season simply called Walt Disney Presents: Annette (not that he was biased or anything).

As the seasons of The Mickey Mouse Club progressed, Annette went from being Walt's favorite Mousketeer to America's favorite. By season two, she was receiving over 6,000 pieces of fan mail every month, more than several of the other Mouseketeers combined. When she sang the song "How Will I Know My Love" during the Annette serial, the studio was inundated with so much mail that the studio decided to release it as a single. Walt also managed to coerce Annette into signing a recording contract (which didn't thrill her, but could she really say no to Uncle Walt?). Plans were made to film an adaptation of the Wizard of Oz stories starring Annette and Darlene Gillespie, another popular Mouseketeer, but they ultimately fell through.

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Following the end of The Mickey Mouse Club, Annette still had a few years left on her contract and Walt didn't waste them. She was given a multi-episode story arc on Zorro. She starred in 1959's The Shaggy Dog with Fred MacMurray and Tommy Kirk. And she was finally put into a full blown musical, 1961's Babes in Toyland, but that venture turned out to be fairly disappointing. Annette and Tommy would reteam for two more pictures following Toyland, 1961's The Horsemasters and 1962's Escapade in Florence.

On the recording front, Annette reluctantly sang a string of pop hits, many of them written by the studio's in house composers, the Sherman Brothers. People of a certain age will remember Tall Paul, O Dio Mio, First Name Initial and Pineapple Princess. She also had several hits that were written by a young Paul Anka, like Train of Love and It's Really Love. Paul supposedly had a huge crush on Annette, but Walt wouldn't allow any shenanigans on his watch, so the crush went unfulfilled. Paul's big hit Puppy Love is said to be inspired by his interest in Annette.

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When her contract with Disney finally came to an end, Annette transformed from the girl next door to teen heartthrob. She starred in a string of beach party themed movies with fellow teen idol Frankie Avalon. The first one, Beach Party, was so successful that the film's distributor, American International Pictures, signed Annette to their own seven year contract. The resulting series included Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, Ski Party, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. The return on investment dropped with each subsequent movie (shocker!). By 1966, API decided they needed a new formula so they added Fabian to the team of Frankie and Annette and put all three in a racing film, Fireball 500. It did well enough that a second stock car movie, Thunder Alley, was made the next year but that's as far as it went.

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During her beach phase, Annette found time to return to Disney for a couple of projects. She reunited with Tommy Kirk for The Misadventures of Merlin Jones in 1964, which became a surprise hit. The next year, they made a sequel, The Monkey's Uncle. Not only did Uncle score well at the box office again, Annette sang the title song with the Beach Boys backing her up and that became a modest hit as well.

By 1967, Annette's career essentially came to an end. She spent most of the Seventies raising her three children, making very occasional guest appearances on television shows. In 1979, she began appearing in a string of commercials for Skippy peanut butter. She made a television movie for Disney in 1985, Lots of Luck, and had a return to the big screen with Frankie Avalon in 1987's Back to the Beach.

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It was during the concert tour connected to the latter project that Annette began to experience dizzy spells. It wasn't until 1992 that she was officially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the same year she was declared an official Disney Legend. A year later she started the Annette Funicello Fund for Neurological Disorders as part of the California Community Foundation. In 1994, she published her autobiography, A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes: the Annette Funicello Story. A made for television movie was produced with the same name a year later and marked the final appearance for Annette. Already using a wheelchair at that point, she completely lost the ability to walk by 2004 and couldn't speak five years later. It would take another four years after that for the disease to take her life altogether at the age of 70. If you ever find yourself visiting Disneyland Paris, you can always pay homage to America's Favorite Mouseketeer by stopping in to Annette's Diner.

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.

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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.