 |
| Image courtesy cobbles.com |
On this day, in 2004,
Harry Tytle passed away in Rancho Bernardo, California. Born on August 9,
1909, Harry couldn’t be described as a great artist (or even a middling one,
truth be told) but he did do something else that would help him start his
career: he played polo. He actually went
to the Pennsylvania Military College on a polo scholarship and was at one point
the youngest 2-goal handicap player in the country. By the mid Thirties, he’d
already played with the likes of Will Rogers (in what turned out to be Will’s
last game) and he was friends with Harold Helvenston, an employee of the Walt
Disney Studio. One night in early 1936, Harold invited Harry to a dinner that
included other Disney employees and everyone got along splendidly. By March of
that year, Harry was working at the studio himself in the Traffic Department.
When Harold introduced him to Walt, a certain emphasis was placed on Harry’s
polo skills, that being a game that Walt loved to play, even if he wasn’t the
best of horsemen. Harry soon found himself riding a horse on a team with the
big boss and being encouraged to teach others around the studio how to play. At
one point in 1938, he headed up a team that Walt brought all the way down to
Mexico City to play. He figured they won that match because they had Donald
Duck emblazoned on their jerseys and the other team simply underestimated their
abilities. At any rate, when Walt was forced to stop playing his beloved sport
a few years later because of injuries, the bond he shared with Harry would last
for the rest of his life.
 |
| Image courtesy lapolo.in |
As I mentioned, Harry started out in the Traffic Department
and that doesn’t mean he spent his time in the parking lot making sure cars
flowed in and out efficiently. He was part of the crew that made sure
information (in the form of sketches, paint samples and just about anything
else) flowed between all the studio’s different departments efficiently. It’s
an important job that at the same time is pretty entry level. It didn’t take
long for Harry to move into the Camera Department or to move up from there to Scene
Checking and then the position of film cutter. By the end of the Thirties, he
was an assistant director in the Shorts Department. Near the end of 1941, just
as the country was getting pulled into World War II, he was made Production
Manager of the whole studio and, unofficially of course, became known as Walt’s
right hand man. A few years later, Harry began keeping a detailed daily diary
of everything he saw going on at the studio, including over 200 meetings he had
with Walt. That diary became the basis of an autobiography he would publish
decades later called One of “Walt’s Boys”
chronicling the studio during the last two decades of Walt’s life.
 |
| Image courtesy picclick.com |
As the studio transitioned into the Fifties and the age of
television, Harry became instrumental in the studio’s new pet projects. He presided
over numerous episodes of The Mickey
Mouse Club, the Disneyland
anthology show and Zorro. When those
shows began winding down their runs, he moved into the realm of live action
movies, which were just beginning to heat up for Disney. He would occasionally
return to television, producing and even directing one episode of The Magical World of Disney right up to
his retirement in 1976.
After just over 40 years with the Walt Disney Company, you
might think Harry deserved to relax during his retirement. While I’m sure he
did a fair amount of that, he also became a philanthropist and served on the
boards of several organizations. He served a term on the Board of Governors of
the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences (the people in charge of the
Oscars) as well as stints with the Los Angeles History Museum and the Greater
Los Angeles Zoo Association. When he passed away in 2004, just ten days after
his 95th birthday, there may not have been many who could have
remembered his name in association with Walt Disney, but the mark Harry left on
his company, and the Los Angeles community in general, is undeniable.
No comments:
Post a Comment