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.