I recently had lunch with Pat Williams who is Senior Vice President of the Orlando Magic basketball team and the author of almost two dozen inspirational books including HOW TO BE LIKE MIKE (Jordan) published by the same folks who publish the CHICKEN SOUP books. Currently he is working on a book to be published in 2004 entitled HOW TO BE LIKE WALT (Disney) and he has been gathering stories from dozens of folks from Ray Bradbury to Peter Ellenshaw to Betty Kimball to Sam McKim to Kaye Malins as well as Disney historians like Paul Anderson, J.B. Kaufman, Leonard Maltin, and Dave Smith. I got the opportunity to share with Pat some of the stories and concepts I use in my “Walt’s Leadership” presentation where I talk about the differences between a leader and a manager using stories of Walt and Roy as examples and then I identify ten of the key leadership skills that Walt used backed up with more story examples.
Fortunately, I had an opportunity to interview many of the folks who worked with Walt and Roy and they shared some great stories I use in the over seventy-five presentations I do at Walt Disney World. Unfortunately, too many of those folks have passed away and Pat has been in the position of interviewing the children or spouses of some of these people. Unfortunately, some of the folks who worked with Walt can’t remember some of those experiences clearly any more as age and medication has taken its toll. Unfortunately, some of those folks have been “burned” and misquoted too many times in the past by interviewers or are just too tired to trot out the old familiar stories again and have refused to be interviewed by Pat. Unfortunately, some of the same people keep getting interviewed over and over and people forget that tens of thousands of people worked at the Disney Company over the last eighty years and many of them have interesting stories and insights.
Most people realize that Imagineer John Hench is the Disney cast member with the most longevity with the Disney Company. After a stint at Republic Studios, John joined the Walt Disney Studios in May 1939 as a sketch artist in story development on FANTASIA. He still shows up for work each day and all of us are excited about the book he has just finished writing which will be appearing soon.
However, about five years after John came on board, a young lady by the name of Joyce Carlson joined the Walt Disney Studios in 1944 as a “traffic girl” which meant she delivered mail to the various departments among other responsibilities.
She soon transferred to the Ink and Paint department and spent sixteen years inking cels. In 1962, Joyce moved over to WED as a model maker for the 1964 World’s Fair pavilions where she worked closely with Mary Blair and Marc Davis.
“I really loved working with them,” Joyce told me in an interview where she revealed that Mary Blair often wore colored contact lenses to match her outfits and that you had to get to Mary before she took her lunch because of Mary’s alcohol consumption during that time period, “I used to admire Mary from afar when I was in Ink and Paint and I would see her and Walt walking around the Studios. And Marc was wonderful. He really knew what he was doing.”
Joyce was the natural choice to help bring IT’S A SMALL WORLD from the World’s Fair to Disneyland and she eventually was also the key person involved in bringing the attraction to the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World and later Tokyo Disneyland.
For several years, Joyce has been based in Florida where she still comes in to work each week at Walt Disney Imagineering and is the resident expert on IT’S A SMALL WORLD besides working a little bit on everything including the carousel horses at the Magic Kingdom. Joyce is the one who developed new figures for IT’S A SMALL WORLD including children representing Israel and Korea.
“The people are still creative and talented and so great to work with. There’s a little of this and a little of that going on. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy what I do. As long as I can come in every day and help out, I’ll show up,” Joyce laughed.
In 2000, Joyce was made a Disney Legend. The following is an excerpt from one of the first interviews I did with Joyce in 1998. No publisher was interested in it nor my later interviews with Joyce where we focused more intently on her work with Mary Blair and IT’S A SMALL WORLD. John Canemaker will be using some of that interview material in his new book on Mary Blair. This interview gives a nice overview of Joyce’s career at Disney as well as some wonderful personal opinions and stories. For many people, despite her accomplishments and the many people she has mentored over the years, Joyce is unknown. Hopefully, this glimpse into her life will bring a little more recognition to a true Disney Legend who is still a feisty little ball of energy today.
Jim: I think probably we need to start with where you were born and some of the background before you came to Disney.
Joyce: Sure, Well I was born in Racine, Wisconsin and in 1938 my mother and father decided to leave Wisconsin to California. That was before the war, and we decided we wanted to move to maybe San Diego but when my mother saw those sailors down there she said ‘We’re not living here” so we moved back to Santa Monica and that’s where I lived since 1938.
Jim: Did you have any background training in art either in high school or collage?
Joyce: High school. I used to carve drawings and make things so it was a natural thing for me. Of course my family, too. There’s alot of talent on my mother’s side, so I must get a little of it from them. (laughs)
Jim: You joined the studio in 1944, what made you decide to come to Disney?
Joyce: A girl I went to high school with moved to Burbank and she worked for Disney and kept saying “Why don’t you come out to Disney?” I said “I’m not a cartoonist, I don’t want to work for Walt”. And my mother kept telling me to work for Disney, and my friend said to come on out, she worked in traffic, and I said “okay.”
Jim: So you got a job in traffic. Now, allot of people don’t understand what traffic is, what was traffic at the Disney studios in 1944?
Joyce: Well, we had traffic on every floor, four floors, and the animators would need pencils, brushes or coffee so we would run down and pick them up and take it to them in their room and that’s sort of traffic. You’d also deliver the mail, I gave it right to the animator, I never gave it to the secretary, right to the animator. So I didn’t last too long in traffic. (laughs)
Jim: How long were you in traffic?
Joyce: Oh, about 6 weeks. (laughs)
Jim: And from there you moved to ink and paint?
Joyce: Well, my boss Ben Mosley and his wife, Violet, said “Bring some of your work in. They’re hiring in ink and paint” and I thought “Ink and paint? What am I going to do over there?” So I went home and sketched about six drawings with pen and ink, y’know and so Ben took my work over to Grace Bailey. She was just taking Ink and Paint over, and she was my boss, and he took my work over and I guess they decided that maybe I’d be good for inking. So they kept saying “Your only 18?” and I said “No, I’m 21” they said “You look 18” and I said “Oh, I’ll bring my birth certificate tomorrow.” But uh, I was hired for ink and paint. They programmed me for two weeks practice, and after two weeks they put me on production and we were doing alot of the war insignias and the shorts for the army and training films. That was fun.
Jim: Some people often confuse ink and paint. Inking was often a separate craft than a painter.
Joyce: Oh yes, we had three quarters of inkers, upstairs and two or three quarters of painters and of course we had checkers, final checkers. The checkers were in the quarters where the inkers were. Each quarter in inking had about 20 girls. And then we had two checkers up front and then we had a supervisor and an assistant supervisor, that was in each quarter.
Jim: Now, didn’t you even have charts where they had examples of ink lines, because you had to match the lines?
Joyce: Well you’d call for work and they’d give you six drawings of whatever feature you’re on, like CINDERELLA. I always seem to get the main character and there’s about 12 colors on each drawing, each cel. And that’s what takes time, I had to watch the girl that was before me to ink the line, because there’s a fine line, a medium line, and a heavy line, so you had to follow her lines so it runs smoothly. Otherwise, it’d jump, and that’s what we did.
Jim: Now, did you use a quill pen or did you use a brush, or both?
Joyce: They had quill. I still got some of my old pen holders and pens, and they still have ink on them. (laughs)
Jim: I understand that the ink department was on the second floor, paint was on the bottom floor but there was a tunnel connecting the building to the animation building?
Joyce: Yeah, they had ditto down there and, uh, you could go over to the animation building. So when it was raining, it was kinda nice, you didn’t get all wet. Yeah, we had that underground.
Jim: Now, there was quite a separation between male and female, right? There was supposedly no fraternization, right? That could cause instant dismissal if the woman ended up in the men’s building?
Joyce: Oh, well, I don’t know about that. We’d get a talking from the boss “You’re not supposed to fraternize with the animators” but we’d go over and see what they were working on. But we’d have fun doing that. But, uh, we were known as the “nunnery.”
Jim: Why were you known as the “nunnery?”
Joyce: All women. Just women. We had one fella, Lloyd, who punched the cels. (chuckles) He was sort of feminine himself, so he fit in with the girls. But he was the only fella that was in the ink and paint. He was a nice fella, we enjoyed Lloyd. (chuckles some more)