July 31 - Casey Jr Circus Train

On this day, in 1955, the Casey Jr. Circus Train ride finally opened for business in Fantasyland of Disneyland. With Walt Disney's love of trains, it's almost amazing that there was only two train attractions when Disneyland opened on July 17, 1955. The major one was the Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad, with narrow-gauge steam driven locomotives that circumnavigated the park and made stops in three (now four) different lands. The smaller ride was not only designed with smaller riders in mind (who might be afraid of the bigger train) but would capitalize on existing Disney characters as well.

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Even though it's an inanimate object, the Casey Jr. Circus Train is really just as much of a character in Dumbo as anyone else involved with the circus. He has his own theme song and everything. So he naturally translates into an attraction with character of its own. The Circus Train runs on a two foot wide track as opposed to the three foot wide track of the Disneyland Railroad. While being a third smaller might not seem like a lot, anyone of the adult persuasion will have no trouble feeling the loss of space. Which is okay, since Casey isn't really designed with adults in mind. Small pints love it and the ride is short enough that their parents don't mind. Too much. Especially if you get to ride in the cage car. That is pretty fun.

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There are two trains that can run at a time, one loading while the other is zipping around the track. Each train consists of an engine, a calliope car, two open cars with seats, two wild animal cage cars and a caboose. The engine however is not what powers the train. The calliope car is what runs the whole shebang. It houses a diesel engine that runs the calliope, creates the steam pressure for the whistle and brakes and moves the train around the track. At one point, Casey chugs his way up a hill and can be heard chanting "I think I can, I think I can" just like in the movie. For anyone who is a fan of Dumbo, or mini trains in general, it's a sweet ride.

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And Casey is one of those rides that's been around since Disneyland's opening day. Sort of. It was available to ride on July 17, but it was experiencing a lot of operational troubles (much like the park in general). Not many people actually got to ride it that first day. When the park opened for paying guests the next day, Casey was not one of the things they could do. The circus train was the first ride to be closed for future enjoyment. Safety checks were run that second day in the hopes that Casey could open but it would be almost two weeks before all the kinks were worked out and the first paying guests got to tour Storybookland from a train instead of a boat.

July 8 - Ward Kimball

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On this day, in 2002, Ward Walrath Kimball passed away in Los Angeles, California. Born on March 4, 1914 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ward was the son of a travelling salesman, which meant he spent a good deal of his childhood living with his grandparents. His first recognizable drawing as a child was a sketch of a steam locomotive, revealing that his love of trains was indeed a lifelong passion. After graduating from Covina High School in Covina, California, Ward enrolled at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts with the intention of becoming a magazine illustrator. Around the same time Ward saw one of the Walt Disney Studio’s shorts, The Three Little Pigs, in the theater (which awed him with its artistry) one of his teachers suggested he submit his work to Disney and become an animator. In March 1934, he applied for a job at the Burbank studio and a month later he was hired as an inbetweener.

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A brilliant draftsman, it didn’t take long for Ward to be promoted to assistant animator, working under the Legendary Ham Luske. He lent his talents to Silly Symphonies for the most part, earning credits on such classics as 1934’s The Wise Little Hen and 1935’s The Tortoise and the Hare. He did get to spend a little time working with the studio’s main breadwinner, though, as part of the team that produced the Mickey Mouse short Orphan’s Benefit. By 1936, Ward had more than proven his talent and was allowed to be called the prestigious title of Animator.

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As with all of the animators the studio employed in 1936, Ward was put to work on Disney's first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As someone who preferred to work on comedic characters rather than the more realistic portrayals of people, he worked for several months on a sequence involving the dwarfs eating (or trying to eat) soup. Don't remember that part from the movie? Maybe because it was supposed to come right after the hand washing bit, but was deemed to slow things down and got cut. It worked out for Ward anyways. His work was recognized for its brilliance and following Snow White he became a supervising animator, the position he would hold for the next 37 years as part of the elite group known as Walt's Nine Old Men.

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The list of characters Ward brought to life is impressive (as are the lists of all the Old Men). It started with Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (he also designed the little conscience). He was then in charge of the Crows who sing When I See an Elephant Fly to Dumbo. He did the Bacchus sequences of Fantasia, Faline in Bambi and the sequence with the title song in it from The Three Caballeros. Next was most of the characters in Peter and the Wolf and Willy the Whale (who wanted to sing at the Met) in Make Mine Music. Melody Time brought Pecos Bill and the three birds (Donald, Jose, and the Aracuan) in Blame It on the Samba. Ward animated Ichabod Crane in his movie, all the mice plus Bruno and Lucifer for Cinderella, and a whole slew of characters for Alice in Wonderland: The White Rabbit, the Tweedles, Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, the Walrus and the Carpenter. His last feature film was Peter Pan where you can see his work in the Lost Boys, the Indian Chief and all three Darling Children (Wendy, John and Michael).

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After Peter Pan, Ward stopped doing feature work almost entirely and focused on award winning shorts. He was the co-director for Melody (the studio's first 3D animated film) and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (a 1954 Oscar winner).  He wrote the script for Eyes in Outer Space, a 1959 featurette that explained how weather predictions were made. Continuing in the space theme, he wrote and directed three episodes of the Disneyland television series on space exploration. Man in Space, Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond, all produced in the late Fifties, long before Kennedy's promise to get to the moon, were praised for both their scientific grounding (Wernher von Braun was a consultant) and the interest they generated in humans actually going to space. The Man and the Moon episode is also a rare opportunity to see Ward himself as served as its host.

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Ward continued working on various projects throughout the Sixties. He was one of the screenwriters for Babes in Toyland. He was in charge of animating the Pearly Band for Mary Poppins. He directed the short It's Tough to Be a Bird, winning another Academy Award in 1970. As the Seventies came around, he directed the animated parts of Bedknobs and Broomsticks and ended his career creating the series and directing 43 episodes of the syndicated television show The Mouse Factory. He officially retired from The Walt Disney Company in 1974, although he stuck around for a while to consult on various things. His last actual contribution to Disneyana was designing the World of Motion attraction for the opening of EPCOT Center.

As much as Ward was an incredible animator, writer and director, there are two other aspects of his life that must be mentioned. The first was alluded to earlier, his love of trains. This was a trait he shared with the boss, Walt, and the two of them cemented their friendship over greasy engines on shiny rails. Not only did Ward help Walt destroy his wife's flower beds building a miniature railroad in the backyard, the two would go on trips together to train exhibitions and conventions as far away as Chicago. His train mania led to a hosting gig for the 1992 season of the PBS show Tracks Ahead. The second is that Ward was an accomplished jazz trombonist. He formed a dixieland jazz group, The Firehouse Five Plus Two, and released 13 albums, toured the country for three decades and even appeared in a movie, Hit Parade of 1951. Ward remarked once that Walt didn't care about his second career as long as it didn't interfere with his animation work. One final note about Ward's accomplishments is that he is the only one of the Nine Old Men who produced a piece of animation outside of Disney. In 1968, he directed a two minute short criticizing Lyndon B. Johnson and America's involvement in the Vietnam War called Escalation.

In 1989, Ward was lauded along with the rest of the Nine Old Men when he was declared an official Disney Legend in the second class of honorees. Ward and his wife of 66 years, Betty, continued to live life and make occasional public appearances until the summer of 2002 when he contracted pneumonia and passed away at the age of 88. Three years later, he was honored again when Disneyland acquired a fifth engine for its railroad, an attraction Ward was instrumental in designing and implementing, and named it the Ward Kimball. 

December 6 - Delmer J. Yoakum

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On this day, in 1915, Delmar James Yoakum was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Del's mother was an artist and her friends were artists, so, growing up he was constantly surrounded by them. In the late Thirties, he was fortunate enough to get a scholarship to spend four summers in a row studying at the Kansas City Art Institute under famed muralist Thomas Hart Benton. When World War II broke out, Del joined the United States Navy as an ensign. When fighting concluded, he relocated himself to Los Angeles, California. There he studied under cubist artist Henry Lee McFee, Italian artist Rico Lebrun and spent time taking classes at Chouinard Art Institute, Jepson Art Institute and the Roski School of Fine Arts at USC.

Starting in 1952, Del began a two decade career as a motion picture scenic artist. He created backdrops and dioramas for use in films like The King and I, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and the Mount Rushmore scene in North by Northwest. His work can be seen in several Marilyn Monroe films (like 1959's Some Like It Hot which was nominated for a Best Set Decoration Oscar). His creation of the city of Jerusalem for 1953's The Robe helped clinch a Best Set Decoration Oscar win for that movie.

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For the Walt Disney Studio, Del's artistry was used in a new medium. Walt hired him to paint the backdrops for several of the attractions built at Disneyland over the years. The most famous of these works can be seen from the Disneyland Railroad. The Grand Canyon and Primeval World dioramas are the result of Del and his team using over 300 gallons of paint to depict a typical day in that part of the world at that particular time. He also created portions of the scenery for Pirates of the Caribbean, It's a Small World and the Haunted Mansion.

Throughout his life, even more so after his retirement from Hollywood in 1972, Del also created fine art in both watercolors and oil. He won numerous awards for his paintings and some of them can be found in places as diverse as the San Diego Art Museum and Coventry Cathedral in Coventry, England. In spite of his obvious talent, Del once quipped "Painting became my life. If I had to do it all over again, I'd do the same thing, but I'd be better at it." Del quietly passed away on October 25, 1996. He was 90 years old.