September 4 - Francis Xavier Atencio

On this day, in 1919, Francis Xavier Atencio was born in Walsenburg, Colorado.

Xavier, who frequently went by simply X, moved to Los Angeles, California in 1937 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute. A shy but talented young man, his instructors had to almost force him to submit his work to the Disney Studio for consideration for a job. X later managed to amuse his neighbors when he went running by their houses shouting at the top of his lungs "I got a job at Disney!".

X joined the Disney Studio in 1938 and three years later he was an assistant animator working on Fantasia. By then World War II was heating up for America. X left the studio to join the United States Army Air Forces as a photo interpreter. Stationed in England, he spent over three years analyzing aerial surveillance pictures for information to pass on to the boys at the front. Serving with the 2nd Photo Tech Squadron, X attained the rank of captain before being discharged in 1945.

Upon his return to the Disney Studio, X went right to work as an animator in the shorts department. In 1953, he received his first screen credit for the Academy Award winning "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom". X also contributed to two other Oscar nominated films: the first stop motion animated film produced by the studio, 1959's "Noah's Ark", and 1962's "A Symposium on Popular Songs." He would become something of an expert on title sequences for live action movies, helping to create the openings for the likes of The Parent Trap, Babes in Toyland and Mary Poppins. You can even find evidence of his artistry in the "I'm No Fool" series that originally ran on the Mickey Mouse Club. But some of his greatest work was yet to come.

 In 1965, Walt asked X to change departments and join the team at WED Enterprises, the group that eventually became known as Imagineers. The first project he worked on was re-purposing animatronic dinosaurs from the 1964 World's Fair Ford pavilion into a scenic view for the Disneyland Railroad.  X then began not only writing scripts for some of most beloved Disney attractions of all time, he wrote music for them, too, much to his own surprise. He once said "I didn't even know I could write music, but somehow Walt did."

The next attraction of X's to open was Pirates of the Caribbean, in early 1967. He wrote the show script for it, wrote its theme song, "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)" and provided various voices for it. The next ride boasting an X Atencio script was Adventure Thru Inner Space, opening later the same year. Two years later, in 1969, another X masterpiece opened: The Haunted Mansion. Again, he wrote the script, its theme song, "Grim Grinning Ghosts" and his voice can be heard coming from the coffin in the conservatory. As an added bonus, if you ever get stuck on the Disneyland version of Mansion, X provides the emergency spiel.

X's contributions to Disney attractions continued throughout the 1970s. When the Florida Project came along, X wrote lyrics for Buddy Baker's theme music for If You Had Wings and helped design Space Mountain. When plans for Epcot began rolling out, he had a hand in Spaceship Earth, World of Motion and the Mexico Pavilion. And, just so the sun will never set on his handiwork, in 1983, X made multiple trips to Tokyo Disneyland to supervise all the recordings that went into their version of the Haunted Mansion.

X retired in 1984 after spending 47 years creating a spectacular body of work for the Walt Disney Company. He was officially declared a Disney Legend in 1996 and passed away at the ripe old age of 98 in 2017.