As the son of a mason, building things was just part of Don's DNA. Which makes it ironic that, after graduating high school, he joined the Army Air Forces and flew more than 45 combat missions in World War II blowing stuff up. Upon his return home after the war, he made up for that by getting married and earning a degree in civil engineering at the University of Southern California. The first thing allowed him to start building a family. The second took him on an adventure he never dreamed of.
In 1954, Don worked for a company called Wheeler and Gray when he was assigned to a little project in Anaheim called Disneyland. Wheeler and Gray had been hired to work on the structural design of the park and also to assist with many of the more technical aspects. Don was assigned the role of an on-site Chief Project Engineer. Apparently his work was pretty impressive to Walt and Don in turn was impressed by the Disney company. In 1961, he came to interview with the company. As Don loved to tell it, Walt casually dropped by the interview, asked him some questions about the Swiss Family Treehouse attraction currently under construction, and hired him on the spot. For the next 26 years, Don would be the major problem solver for the Imagineering department.
The first problem Don solved actually happened before he became an Imagineer and it involved the Matterhorn Bobsleds. Most engineers at the time said it wasn't feasible to put a roller coaster, a sky ride and waterfalls in a hollow mountain like that. Don said it was challenging but not impossible. And the fact that he made it happen probably contributed to his easy interview.
In 1963, Don became part of the team working on the company's attraction for the Ford pavilion at the upcoming World's Fair in New York. Between animatronic dinosaurs and a continuous line of Ford cars that automatically moved on a fixed track, Don helped create innovations that influence Disney rides right up to today. For instance, just substitute bouncing Tiggers for the dinosaurs and honey pots for the cars and, voila!, you have the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh attraction.
The next major obstacle came when Walt decided that Pirates of the Caribbean would change from a walk-through attraction to a boat ride after construction had already begun. Suddenly Imagineers had to figure out how to take the existing show building deeper underground and make it larger. Don's enthusiasm for the project earned him the nickname Yesman Edgren, not because he automatically agreed with everything Walt suggested but because he had the ability to turn other people's nos into yeses.
Throughout the 1970s, Don managed to keep himself busy. First he became the Vice President of Engineering, Orlando and helped develop the master plan for the Florida Project. In 1972, he returned to California as the Engineering Vice President for Imagineering, still known as WED Enterprises back then. He supervised the crew that created Space Mountain. At the end of the decade, he began coordinating the engineering for the first international park, Tokyo Disneyland. He once said that living in Japan was one of the most enjoyable experiences of his life.
By 1987, Don had been a part of the creation of almost all the Disney park real estate that existed, in one way or another, so he did what anyone else would do after two and a half decades of frenetic problem solving, he retired. In 2006, Don was named a Disney Legend and he also has a window on Main Street, USA in Disneyland that reads "Yesmen Engineering Associates, No challenge to big for our yes men!, We know no 'no', Don Edgren, Chief Engineer". Don passed away in December of that year after suffering a stroke while visiting relatives in Eugene, Oregon. He was 83.
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