July 26 - Buddy Baker

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On this day, in 2002, Norman Dale Baker passed away in Hollywood, California. Born in Springfield, Missouri on January 4, 1918, Buddy, as most people called him, learned to read music before he could read lyrics. He began playing the piano at the age of 4, learned the trumpet at 11 and had formed his own band by his teen years. He studied music at Southwest Baptist University, eventually earning his doctorate in it before moving to Los Angeles in 1938.

Buddy began his professional career as a trumpet player and musical arranger on the radio programs of the day. He started on The Bob Hope Show before moving on to Jacky Benny and Eddie Cantor's shows. When World War II started, he returned to Bob Hope and became his show's musical director. Buddy brought big band leader Stan Kenton to the show and arranged Ken's first big hit, And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine. Following the war, he added Professor to his resume taking a job at Los Angeles City College in their school of music. He wasn't above helping out his students though. In 1954, he composed the hit jazz song Journey into Love with drummer Louis Bellson. And then one day later that same year, he got a call from another former student, George Bruns, who worked over at the Walt Disney Studio.

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George was looking for someone to compose some music for a couple of episodes of the Disneyland television series and he thought of his former professor. Buddy agreed to spend a couple of weeks at the studio coming up with something for Davy Crockett and the River Pirates. It ended up being a really long two weeks as Buddy wouldn't retire from Disney until 29 years later. In those three decades, he became the studio's musical director and one of the most prolific composers Disney ever had.

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Buddy wasn't as flashy as his contemporaries at the studio. Most people have at least heard of the Sherman Brothers, and don't get me wrong, Robert and Richard Sherman produced some fantastic work over the years, but even though you might not know Buddy's name, a walk through any of Disney's theme parks would be awfully quiet if none of his work existed. The first category we'll talk about is movie scores. He did dozens of them for Disney but a short list of his live action work would have to include Summer Magic, The Monkey's Uncle, The Gnome-Mobile, The Million Dollar Duck, The Apple Dumpling Gang, The Shaggy D.A. and Hot Lead Cold Feet. In 1972, he earned an Oscar nomination for Napoleon and Samantha, which also happened to be Jodie Foster's screen debut. On the animated side of things, Buddy scored several shorts including the classic Donald in Mathmagicland and all three of the original Winnie the Pooh shorts (including additional material for the 1977 Winnie the Pooh feature). In 1981, he made his second foray into animated features providing the score for The Fox and the Hound.

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As impressive as Buddy's film work is, it's in the category of music written for theme parks that some of his most recognizable tunes occur. His most famous song has to be Grim Grinning Ghosts which he wrote with fellow Legend Xavier Atencio for the Haunted Mansion. He also scored the eerie music that can be heard throughout that same attraction. Buddy and Xavier also wrote the original music that is used in the classic Country Bear Jamboree show and the song It's Fun to Be Free for the World of Motion pavilion at EPCOT. Buddy's other music written and arranged for attractions includes The Universe of Energy, America Sings, If You Had Wings, Kitchen Kabaret, Impressions de France, the American Adventure and Tokyo Disneyland's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Sinbad's Seven Voyages. Buddy also came out of retirement briefly in the nineties to arrange his own music for the various Winnie the Pooh rides that popped up in Disney theme parks at that time.

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By the time Buddy retired in 1983, he had over 200 Disney credits to his name. Much of the background music you hear just walking through areas of parks like the Mexican Pavilion at Epcot or Tomorrowland in Disneyland is arrangements of his compositions. When he left Disney, Buddy also had the distinction of being the last composer at a major Hollywood studio. They literally don't make them like him anymore. Buddy didn't stay retired for very long, though. In 1987 he became the director of the University of Southern California's Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television program and taught courses there for the remainder of his life. He received the ASCAP Foundation Life Time Achievement Award in 1999 and having already been declared an official Disney Legend the year before. Three years later, Buddy would pass away from natural causes at the age of 84.

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. 

January 2 - World of Motion

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On this day, in 1996, the last guests rode the World of Motion attraction in Future World at Epcot. Built as one of Epcot's opening day attractions, World of Motion had some heavy hitters behind its development. Animator Ward Kimball, one of Walt's Nine Old Men, actually designed the attraction. If you didn't know that Ward dabbled in ride creation that would be because this was the one and only time he ever did. His brand of humor was evident throughout, from cavemen blowing on their overheated feet to the world's first traffic jam involving a horse and an ice truck.

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Ward got some help from a couple more Disney Legends for the ride's theme song. Buddy Baker composed the music and Imagineer Xavier Atencio wrote the lyrics to It's Fun to Be Free. One of the unique aspects of Free is that unlike most attractions where the same version of a song might get repeated at different points (think about Pirates of the Caribbean), for World of Motion the song kept changing to suit the changing periods in history. It had a ragtime feel for one scene, an Asian sound in another and at one point was played exclusively on a kazoo. All due to the genius of Buddy.

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The ride itself took guests on a tour through the history of transportation narrated by Gary Owens, best known as the announcer on Laugh-In. World of Motion boasted on of the largest casts of Audio-Animatronic figures ever assembled with a total of 188 characters. At the end of the line, literally taking a page from the Haunted Mansion, guests saw their Omnimover vehicles transformed into cars of the future through a Pepper's Ghost illusion. After disembarking, guests moved into a mini Innoventions type area dedicated almost exclusively to cars. Exhibits spanned topics on everything from how wind tunnels help make cars more fuel efficient to an Audio-Animatronic show about assembly lines. The most popular part was, as always, the concept cars on display.

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The whole shebang was sponsored by General Motors from its opening to its closing. After Ford's successful sponsorship of the Disney produced Magic Skyway ride at the 1964 World's Fair, GM wasn't about to miss out again. They signed a 10 year deal just to begin with, renewed several times and still sponsor the replacement attraction today.

Speaking of the replacement attraction, it was GM who would ultimately spell out the demise of World of Motion. In the early Nineties, sales began to slump for them and they felt a new attraction devoted to cars and cars only, not the whole of transportation, would be a better use of their sponsorship money. Since World of Motion was beginning to show its age at that point, Disney agreed and Test Track was created. Even though I personally miss the charm of the old ride, it was ultimately a smart move. While Test Track was plagued with problems and delays in its early days, it is now one of the most popular rides in all of the Florida Project, although the concept cars at the end are still, arguably, the best part.

October 4 - Yale Gracey

On this day, in 1975, Imagineer Yale Gracey retired after 36 years with the Walt Disney Company. Yale  was born on September 3, 1910 in Shanghai, China. As the son of the American Consul there, he was educated at an English boarding school. After graduation, he moved to the United States and would attend the Art CenterSchool of Design in Los Angeles. In 1939, Yale became an animator at the Walt Disney Studio as a layout artist. But his real talent wouldn’t emerge until years later.

Yale was fascinated from an early age by two things: building gadgets and magic. Popular Mechanics magazine had published a set of books called The Boy Mechanic in the early 1910s. The books contained hundreds of projects boys to build (the only picture of a girl in any of the books was of one building a lampshade). One page might feature a tie rack, the next would explain how to build your own coal furnace. Some of the plans, like the ones requiring sulfuric acid, would never be shown to boys (or girls) today. But those books fostered the tinker in Yale and resulted in some pretty spectacular effects in Disney attractions.

Yale worked on Pinocchio and Fantasia before creating layouts and backgrounds for the Shorts Department. During his lunch hours, he would work on various little gadgets and always had several cluttering up his desk. One day, when Walt was poking around the offices, looking at what everyone was working on, he saw a setup on Yale’s desk that gave the illusion of falling snow. Walt was impressed and basically gave Yale carte blanche to work on creating more effects. When the Shorts Department was phased out soon afterward, Yale was one of the few people who stayed with the company.

From 1959 on, Yale was a member of WED Enterprises, the division of the company that later became Imagineering. He frequently teamed up with Rolly Crump, updating effects in rides like the volcano scene in Peter Pan’s Flight. His contribution to the Carousel of Progress for the 1964 World’s Fair was something he called a pixie dust projector. It blocked out everything on stage during  scene changes and was used again in Space Mountain to make the coaster’s structure disappear. He created the illusion of fireflies for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, even though he'd never actually seen a firefly. His most beloved effects, though, were of a spookier nature.

One of the projects in The Boy Mechanic was for an illusion called “Pepper’s Ghost.” It had been developed in 1862 by Henry Pepper for his magic act. Yale would perfect this illusion for the Haunted Mansion. All the ghosts in the dining room area, that appear and disappear, are done using this simple yet highly effective method. The original Hitchhiking Ghosts at the end of the ride were also done that way. From the skeleton trying to escape from the coffin in the conservatory to the single floating candlestick in the infinite hallway, Yale and Rolly created enough eerie effects to fill a Haunted Mansion twice as big as what was built, even though most of them would never be used. When the attraction was changed from a walk-through to a ride-through, a lot of their effects had to be cut because they had cycles that were too long. Years later, Rolly still lamented the loss of a room with a skeletal sea captain and the bride he’d bricked into the fireplace. And while Yale enjoyed the comedic haunts he helped create, he always wanted to do a really scary attraction saying “Some of the illusions that weren’t used in the Haunted Mansion would send chills through anyone I know.”

Now anyone who is a fan of the Haunted Mansion might be saying to themselves “Wait. I’ve heard that name Gracey before. Isn’t that the former owner of the mansion whose portrait hangs in the foyer?” The answer is yes, you have heard that name in connection with the Mansion before but no, he is not the man in the Dorian Grey-like picture just inside the front doors. This is a myth that I myself have been guilty of perpetuating. To honor all of Yale’s contributions to the attraction, Xavier Atencio, lead Imagineer on the project, did give him a gravestone in the queue. It reads “Master Gracey, laid to rest, no mourning please, at his request.” The word master, however, is not designating him as lord of the manor. Instead it means a boy who isn’t old enough to be called a Mister. This is a reference not only to Yale’s boyish enthusiasm but to the fact that his obsessions with magic and gadgets as a boy made the Haunted Mansion what it is today.

Following his retirement, Yale, like a lot of folks integral to the early years of Disney, continued to consult on projects for years to come. He would even add effects to attractions at EPCOT Center, including the “CenterCore” finale to World of Motion. His life, though, would meet a tragic end. On September 5, 1983, two days after his 73^rd birthday, he would be murdered in his sleep, his wife critically injured. No motive or suspects were ever uncovered. In 1999, Yale would become an official Disney Legend, fondly remembered as the self-taught gadget guy who could make the impossible come true.

Also on this day, in American history: John B Kelly Sr