June 3 - Wally Boag and Betty Taylor

On this day, in 2011, Wallace Vincent Boag passed away in Santa Monica, California. Born on September 13, 1920 in Portland, Oregon, Wally was a professional dancer by the age of nine. By the time he was 16, he ran his own dance school. When he turned 19, Wally added comedy to his resume and his career was off and running. Like many performers of the time, he became part of the vaudeville circuit, honing his act on the tough crowds of Poughkeepsie and other Peoria. But Wally had that certain something that tends to be elusive in show business (I like to call it talent) and he not only played the smaller venues of America but he was invited to places like Radio City Music Hall in New York City and the Palladium in London, England. During a show at the London Hippodrome, Starlight Roof, he brought a 12 year old girl onstage to assist with his balloon act. Part of the act involved a little singing and the young lady’s voice wowed the audience so much she became a regular part of the show (her name, by the way, was Julie Andrews).

Image courtesy wikipedia.com

In 1945, Wally’s talents brought him to the attention of Messrs. Metro, Goldwyn and Mayer. They offered him a contract and he began a brief career in movies. He appeared in exactly two for MGM and went uncredited in both: as a soldier in Without Love with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and as a Canadian flier in Thrill of a Romance with Esther Williams. While his turn on the Silver Screen didn’t exactly pan out, Wally didn’t stop performing. He continued to appear on stages across America and around the world. In the early Fifties, Wally was in a musical revue in Australia when he met a tenor by the name of Donald Novis. A couple of years later, Donald convinced Walt Disney to give Wally an audition for a new show that was being developed for his soon to be open theme park. Walt loved him and that’s how Wally signed a two week contract to open The Golden Horseshoe Revue at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon in Frontierland of Disneyland.

Image courtesy nytimes.com

I think it’s probably unnecessary to say that Wally’s Horseshoe contract was renewed and for a little bit longer than just two weeks at a time. Wally’s character of a travelling salesman eventually morphed into Pecos Bill which he would perform three times a day. Over the course of the next 27 years, Wally logged almost 40,000 performances. His routines included songs, dancing, the ability to spit out a seemingly endless amount of teeth, rapid fire jokes and balloon creations he called Boagaloons. In 1963, he was joined onstage by an old co-star, Julie Andrews, for a press event for Mary Poppins. The duo recreated their first meeting by singing By the Light of the Silvery Moon together.

In 1971, Wally travelled to Central Florida to help get the Diamond Horseshoe Saloon up and running for the opening of the Magic Kingdom. He spent three years performing Pecos Bill for Walt Disney World guests before returning to California to finish out his career. He finally retired in 1982, quipping that before his contract with Disney, the longest he’d ever worked a gig was 54 weeks, who knew two weeks was going to last so long?

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In the Sixties, while Walt was still alive, Wally also did a handful of other projects for the company. He had small roles in The Absent Minded Professor (as a television newsman), Son of Flubber (the father in a television commercial) and The Love Bug (a flabbergasted driver). His second biggest contribution to Disneyana (yet, ironically, his longest lasting) is as the voice of Jose in The Enchanted Tiki Room, for which he also wrote a big chunk of the script. Walt was reportedly considering Wally for the voice of Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh shorts, but the role ultimately went to Paul Winchell. After Walt’s death, with his biggest cheerleader no longer championing him, Wally’s involvement outside of the Saloon dried up. Until 1981, that is, when he was the special guest star on an episode of The Muppet Show, bringing bits from his Pecos Bill persona to a worldwide audience.

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In 1995, Wally was declared an official Disney Legend for his decades of thrilling audiences in the Horseshoe Saloons and leading the show in the Tiki Room. As a deeper honor, he also received his own window on Main Street USA in Disneyland that reads “Theatrical Agency – Golden Vaudeville Routines – Wally Boag, Prop.” In 2009, he published his autobiography, Wally Boag, Clown Prince of Disneyland and lived out the rest of his life in Santa Monica with Ellen, his wife of 68 years, until he succumbed to Alzheimer’s in June of 2011. He was 90.

Image courtesy waltdisney.org

Coincidentally, on June 4, 2011, the day after Wally died, his longtime costar at the Diamond Horseshoe Revue, Betty Taylor, also passed away in Coupesville, Washington. Born in Seattle, Washington on October 7, 1919, Betty began her professional singing career at the age of 12. Over the first twenty four years of her career, she shared the stage with folks like Les Brown, Red Nichols and Frank Sinatra. In 1956, a year after the Golden Horseshoe Revue opened, it became necessary to recast the Saloon’s feisty female proprietor (and Pecos Bill’s sweetheart), Sluefoot Sue. Betty auditioned for and got a four week contract to play the character (twice as long as Wally’s); she spent the next thirty years working through it.

One of the highlights of Betty’s years with the Golden Horseshoe came in the mid Sixties. Walt had decided to mark the 10,000 performance of the Revue as an episode of The Wonderful World of Color and asked Betty to not only play Sue but to emcee the program as well. She initially demurred but Walt insisted and the episode remains one of the classics. Betty remained with the Revue all the way until it closed on October 12, 1986, making her the longest continuous cast member (beating out Wally by a little more than three years) and logging in over 45,000 performances. She was declared an official Disney Legend right along with her perennial beau in 1995. She continued to enjoy singing for the rest of her days and would frequently serenade visitors, even after she moved into a nursing home. When her last note finally faded away, she was 91.