it's a small world

This is Part Four of a Four-Part Series. Click Here to Read Part One.

We had handstand-walking contest, you know, in the middle of the model shop. When I was in animation, that was the rage to be able to walk coming down the hall on your hands. I thought it was pretty cool, yeah, I could do that. And all of a sudden our lawyer came in and I said, "We're having a handstand-walking contest." "Well, can I enter?" And I said, "Why, yes." So he took his jacket off. I didn't realize that he had been a gymnast in high school - All-City. He jumps into a handstand and just goes all over the room. And that was our lawyer. We had some fun with that.

We played Frisbee. I want you to know that Blaine Gibson, who was our head sculptor, was the finest Frisbee player that we had. We had yo-yo contests at break times. I had to give magic shows at break time. And we just had a marvelous, marvelous time.

There was one little gal, Leota ... it's her head that is in the ball in the Haunted Mansion, and Lee was an absolutely gorgeous creature, absolutely gorgeous. And when I was doing Adventureland Bazaar, Lee was hired. And when I came back to do the Tiki Room, she had been there for about six weeks. And you know, I was just playful, having a lot of fun. She was kind of a shy little thing. And she told me later, she said, "You know, Rolly, if you had been here when I started, I would have quit."

In fact, she and I had a lot of fun. We were painting one day, we were working on the birds for the Tiki Room and I reached over and I painted a little heart on her and she reached over and painted a little heart. So we were sitting there painting, we were painting each other, and she was kind of "healthy" so I painted this little line that kinda went underneath her blouse and I had her lift her leg and I painted a line all the way down to her big toe. I said, "When you go home tonight, show this to Harvey, your husband, and say, 'Look what Rolly did.'" And she did. So again, this is the part of never letting go of your sense of humor.

Okay, now, once we finished the Tiki Room and we got that all done, I was in charge of the bazaar, which is over in Adventureland, when you first come in, it's the little one on the right. And they said, "Okay, Rolly, we're going to let you have the chance at doing your own thing." And I said, "Okay, fine." And they said, "You've got to re-do this bazaar and you've got six weeks and that's it." And I said, "Okay, fine."

So what they did was, what they said, "We're going to give you six carpenters, six painters, and we're going to rent a soundstage over at Allied Studios and build that there." I said, "Great." I didn't have a clue as to what I was going to build or what I was going do and I had six weeks to do it in. And so I came down to the boneyard here, I collected old ticket booths. They were out in the dump. I got columns that were in the dump. I got streetlamps in the dump. And all that stuff shipped up to the soundstage that I was in.

And I worked off an applebox and I had a bunch of crates and stuff. And so I'm doing sketches and I'm giving the sketches to the carpenters. And I'm working out what the colors are going to be and I've got my little stack of books. One day the carpenter comes up and says, "I got your sketches, Rolly, but what's the scale?" I said, "Scale? What's scale?" And he says, "Well, do you have a scale ruler?" And I said, "What's a scale ruler?" I didn't have ... this get's back to not knowing what you are doing, you just do it. So he and I took, and I said, "Well, this is about 8 feet tall and this is about 6 feet." So we actually made a little cardboard scale ruler. He had one and I had one. And what it was was one inch and a quarter or a sixteenth, equaled a foot. And so I came to learn about this little scale ruler. So I went back to WED, one day I said, "Do you know what a scale ruler is? Show me what it's all about." And they showed me and I said, "Ew, I like my little cardboard one better." So anyway, what happened, when we got finished the carpenter stuck his head in and said, "If we ever work together again, I'll be all ready for you."

They were naïve years. We just did it and we had a lot of fun. The interesting thing about it is I wasn't ... my boss, Dick Irvine ... never told me that this particular design I was working on, he gave me a week's lead time. So it was really opening a week after he said it was going to open. Then I found out through the grapevine that the reason he lied to me is because he didn't believe in me. And we had it done.

Every Friday, I'd go up and I'd meet with him and I'd tell him exactly where we were and what was going on. So I went up one Friday and I said, "Tonight at midnight the trucks are arriving to pick it up and they'll be delivering it probably at 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock in the morning tomorrow." And he just went pale. And he didn't tell me that he hadn't put the floor in yet. And so he had to get on the phone and call Dick Fowler, who was running Disneyland at the time, and he didn't, he was embarrassed to say anything in front of me, and he said, "What do you mean the floor's not in? Oh, it was on schedule? Oh, okay. Well, the truck is arriving tomorrow night at 3 o'clock in the morning so that floor had better be in." So they did. The guys worked all night long to get the floor in. And I never told Dick that I knew he was playing with me. I had a lot of fun with Dick too. He was a marvelous administrator. He wasn't a very good designer but he was a good administrator.

Once we finished doing the Tiki Room, that's when the World's Fair projects came along. Walt called us in one day and said, "We have one piece of real estate left over at the World's Fair," and he said, "I've got a little idea for a boat ride." A little boat ride? What was this all about? We had done Mr. Lincoln. We had done Carousel of Progress. We had done all of this high technology, of making Lincoln stand up and all this good stuff. And he wants to do a little boat ride. What we were thinking was maybe the boat ride is like Storybook Land and we were thinking, "Oh, that's kinda corny."

Anyway, nine months to the day that Walt said I have this idea for a little boat ride; we installed Small World at the World's Fair. And nothing has ever been done in that time frame, that quickly. And that was because we had Walt. If you were asked to do something by Walt, everybody stepped away - management stepped away. It was between you and him to get this thing done. So, we did. We got it done.

We actually had it constructed in Los Angeles; we had all of the animatronics figures made at the machine shop at the Disney Studios. And then we built the sets, lit them and put in the sound system. Then we set it up dry in one of the soundstages at the studio and we pushed Walt through in a boat on wheels at the right speed so he could look at it like he was really on the ride. And once he bought off on it, off to the World's Fair it went. And so away it went to the World's Fair.

Well, we all got shipped off to help install it at the World's Fair, which was kind of an exciting time frame. Because back there, we didn't realize it, that the guys that were helping us put this together had a sense of humor. And so one morning we came in, and they had put super suds into the trough and we had foam like this going through the ride. So we had to spend the whole day to clean the foam out and then about two days later we came in and it was filled with Koi. In the middle of the night, they had gone next door to where Kodak was and stole the Koi and brought them over and stuck them in the big trough.

So anyway, we had our fun, and it was a marvelous time - a very, very exciting time.

-Photos and transcription by Matthew Walker
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