October 24 - Lucille Martin

On this day, in 2012, Lucille Martin passed away in Studio City, California. Some people become legends through grand gestures of bravery or touching fits of public creativity. Others become legends by quietly doing what they were born to do, just out of the limelight, making it possible for the other kind of legend to burn even brighter. Lucille is a legend who belongs to that second category.

Born on August 10, 1922 in Zeigler, Illinois, a small town at the southern end of the state, Lucille's dream in life was to be a teacher. To accomplish that goal, she went off to the big city of Carbondale to get her teaching certificate at Southern Illinois Normal University (now known as Southern Illinois University Carbondale). This would have been in the early Forties. The details of how she spent her life for the next couple of decades, as with most people who aren't celebrities, are sketchy at best.

Here's what we do know. Lucille gave birth to two daughters, Janet and Sue. Given the era, we can assume that she was married at the time, but by the time her girls were 5 and 10 years old, only the three of them moved to Southern California. I can't confirm whether as a widow or a divorcee, but Lucille was a single mother at that point. A single mother who would get the bad news that her Illinois teaching certificate was useless in the Golden State.

 According to Lucille, her children were not happy with the fact that mom was going to have to go to work to support the family until she said "What if I worked for Disney?" Since that seemed a reasonable trade off to the girls, Lucille decided to brush off her secretarial skills, typed up a resume and on a Friday in September 1964, stopped by the Disney Studio to see about that job. Her timing was impeccable and she was hired, on the spot, into the secretarial pool. The following Monday, she showed up for work and was immediately assigned to the Publicity department. Next, she moved to the office of the vice president of Labor Relations and by the beginning of 1965, Lucille got the call that would set the course of the rest of her career.

When Lucille had been told that her new assignment was as a personal assistant to Walt Disney, she wasn't sure she'd understood what was said. But, upon arriving at the head of the company's office, she knew she was in the big leagues now and quickly stepped up to the plate. Lucille did have a little period of adjusting to Walt's idiosyncrasies. She insisted on calling her new boss "sir" instead of "Walt". To fix that, Walt drew a sketch of Lucille carrying a sign that said "Down with Sir" and gave it to her. Lucille kept that sketch in her office until the day she retired. And she stopped calling him sir.

After Walt's death, Lucille spent nearly a year putting everything in Walt's office into some semblance of order. She then became personal assistant to Walt's son-in-law, Ron Miller. She stayed with Ron as he became President of the company in 1980 and CEO in 1983. When Michael Eisner was brought in as CEO in 1984, to Lucille's surprise he kept her on as his personal assistant. In 1995, she was promoted to a vice presidency as a special assistant to the Board of Directors, serving mainly as a liason between the Board and company management. Lucille would serve in that role until, after 42 years of greasing the wheels for everyone officially in charge, she retired in January 2006.

The following year Lucille was declared an official Disney Legend for her wizardry and genius in all things related to administration. At the ceremony, Bob Iger praised Lucille's compassion and dedication, calling her a "treasured friend." Lucille's career stands as one of the few people to bridge all the way from the company's founder to it's current leadership.

Also on this day, in American history: Blanche Scott