In the meantime, on June 1, 1948, Walt and Lillian Disney had bought a five-acre lot at 355 North Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hills, a luxury residential development next to Beverly Hills, northeast of the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. Once again, as with his previous two homes, Disney was building rather than buying an existing home—a pattern he observed with his weekend homes at Palm Springs as well as his principal residence. One attraction of the Carolwood lot was that it had room enough for a layout designed for trains one-eighth real size. Lillian and Diane had found another site they liked, Lillian said in 1968, “but Walt said it was too close to Wilshire [Boulevard] and [had] no place for his train.”37
In August, Disney attended the Chicago Railroad Fair of 1948, the single most important driver in his growing enthusiasm for miniature trains. “The stated reason for the celebration,” Karal Ann Marling has written, “was the hundredth anniversary of the first steam locomotive to enter Chicago, the nation’s greatest railroad center. The real reason was to revive an industry hard hit by competition and burdened with an inventory of rolling stock all but worn out by hard use during World War II. . . . Experts had put the number of railroad hobbyists and model makers at one hundred thousand; their total investment ran to some $10 million. Organizers of the Chicago fair of 1948 were eager to tap this reservoir of interest and goodwill. And so, with a perfunctory nod to tomorrow, they set out to indulge the growing American appetite for cow-catchers, pistons, smokestacks, old cabooses—and the fabled historical romance of the rails.”38
Disney invited Kimball, the Disney studio’s most advanced railroad buff, to make the trip to Chicago with him. (Kimball owned not miniatures but real locomotives, which Disney had seen, and operated on at least one occasion, on visits to the Kimball home in San Gabriel.) They left Los Angeles for Chicago by train—of course—on August 19 and spent several days at the fair. Its highlight was a huge pageant, “Wheels a-Rolling,” that incorporated any number of historic steam locomotives as well as modern diesels. Pat Devlin, an actor in the pageant, remembered persuading Disney to perform on stage one night dressed in nineteenth-century costume (what Devlin called a “Diamond Jim Brady” outfit).39
Kimball’s home movies from the trip “show Disney in a state of unrestrained bliss from the moment the Santa Fe Super Chief left the Pasadena station,” Marling has written. “The railroad knew he was coming; the engineer let him ride in the cab and toot the whistle at level crossings. The fair had acres of famous engines and working replicas thereof and Kimball’s film suggests that the pair inspected every last one of them. Disney caught Kimball at the throttle of an ancient engine; Kimball, in turn, took pictures of Disney, in a top hat and vest [evidently the Diamond Jim Brady costume], acting the part of a hungry passenger stopping to dine at a trackside Harvey House,” in the eighth of the dozen scenes that made up the “Wheels a-Rolling” pageant.40
The fair included what the official guidebook called “fifty dramatized acres of exhibits”—“themed” exhibits, in fact, in which participating railroads recreated scenes that a rail traveler might see on their lines. The Santa Fe’s exhibit was an Indian village where members of six southwestern tribes practiced traditional crafts and performed traditional dances. At a trading post run by the Fred Harvey Company, visitors could buy Indian curios as well as admire displays of them.41
Before returning to Los Angeles, Disney and Kimball also went to Dearborn, Michigan, outside Detroit, and visited a village of another kind—Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, a collection of old and reconstructed buildings that included the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop and a replica of Thomas Edison’s laboratory. Greenfield Village, which Ford established in 1929, had a strong autobiographical element: many of its buildings were there because they had been significant in Ford’s life, as with the school he attended and the scaled-down replica of his first auto plant. Greenfield was, besides, a make-believe village, a mixture of buildings spanning centuries. There was no pretense, as at Colonial Williamsburg, of re-creating the past.
Disney had visited Greenfield Village at least once before, in April 1940, but this time he returned to Burbank with his imagination stimulated. He was thinking now beyond a miniature train for his own home. He drafted a memorandum on August 31, 1948, in which he set out in detail what might go into a “Mickey Mouse park” on the sixteen acres the studio owned across Riverside Drive. Ford’s influence can be felt in Disney’s description of an idyllic small town, anchored by a city hall and a railroad station. There would have been a specifically Disney presence in the park only through a toy store that sold Disney toys and books and a shop where Disney artists could sell their own work.42
Disney had been talking about a park of some kind, on the studio lot or adjacent to it, for years, perhaps since the late 1930s, the idea being to have something to entertain visitors to a studio that was otherwise very much a workaday place. For the studio to embark on such a project in 1948 was impractical, though, given its financial condition, and Disney’s memo had no immediate consequences.
Eddie Sargeant had translated the original blueprints for no. 173 Central Pacific into drawings of the proper scale by January 1949. Roger Broggie then parceled the work out to the shop’s machinists. When Disney implored Broggie to let him help, Broggie “cleared off one of the unused workbenches toward the rear of the shop,” his son Michael Broggie has written. “He equipped it with an assortment of basic hand tools and placed a clean shop apron on a hook nearby. The next morning, Walt came in as usual, chatting with the machinists as he worked his way through the shop. Then he spotted a hand-lettered sign on a workbench: ‘Walt’s Workplace.’ ”
Roger Broggie himself wrote in 1952 of Disney’s apprenticeship at the machine shop, which stretched into 1950, until Disney had set up a workshop at his home: “Walt Disney came into the shop and learned to operate all the machine tools by making some of the parts himself. He made the whistle, flagstands and hand rails on the lathe. He learned sheet metal work by laying out and fabricating the headlamp and smoke stack. Then [he] made numerous parts in the milling machine and learned to silver solder and braze on many small fittings.”43 The work had to be fitted around the shop’s regular maintenance of cameras and other photographic equipment. Diane Disney Miller remembered in 1956 that Disney “used to go over to the machine shop at the studio at night and work there on his train and on his little miniatures.”44
Roger Broggie said in 1951 that he and his colleagues were surprised by Disney’s aptitude for machine work. “In many ways, Walt’s a temperamental guy. Lots of the boys didn’t think he’d be much good in the shop.”45
Seventeen years later, Broggie told Richard Hubler that teaching Disney how to run a lathe and drill press and other machinery was difficult “because he was impatient. So I’d make what we call a set-up in a lathe and turn out a piece and say, ‘Well, that’s how you do it.’ . . . He would see part of it and he was impatient, so he would want to turn the wheels—and then something would happen. A piece might fly out of the chuck and he’d say, ‘Goddamn it, why didn’t you tell me it was going to do this?’ Well, you don’t tell him, you know? It was a thing of—well—you learn it. He said one day, . . .’You know, it does me some good sometimes to come down here to find out I don’t know all about everything.’ . . . How would you sharpen the drill if it was going to drill brass or steel? There’s a difference. And he learned it. You only had to show him once and he got the picture.”46
This was a characteristic that other people in the studio noticed. “He had a terrific memory,” Marc Davis said. “He learned very quickly. . . . You only had to explain a thing once to him and he knew how to do it. Other people are not the same. I think this is a problem he had in respect to everybody . . . his tremendous memory and his tremendous capacity for learning. He wasn’t book learned but he was the most fantastically well educated man in his own way. . . . He understood the mechanics of everything. . . . Everything was a new toy. And t
his also made him a very impatient man. He was as impatient as could be with whoever he worked with.”47
Disney’s lack of formal education manifested itself sometimes in jibes at his college-educated employees, but more often in the odd lapses—the mispronounced words, the grammatical slips—that can mark an autodidact. “For a guy who only went to the eighth grade,” Ollie Johnston said, “Walt educated himself beautifully. His vocabulary was good. I only heard him get sore about a big word once in a story meeting. Everyone was sitting around talking and Ted Sears said, ‘Well, I think that’s a little too strident.’ Walt said, ‘What the hell are you trying to say, Ted?’ He hadn’t heard that word before.”48
In the early months of 1949, Disney began exploring with increasing seriousness what building a miniature railroad might involve. He visited hobbyists who included not just Ollie Johnston but people more on a par with himself financially, like the film composer David Rose. Sharon Disney Brown remembered the intensity of his enthusiasm. “Mother didn’t have his great love for trains and Diane was older by then and was interested in other things,” she said in 1968. “So I was always getting to go along with him on these various odds and ends of junkets” in the late 1940s, like an overnight train to Los Gatos for a picnic with “a bunch of old crony-type train owners up there.”49
(When the girls entered their teens, they became reluctant to spend their Sundays with their father, Diane said in 1956. “Sharon was his buddy for a longer time . . . but then there came a time when Shary left him. And that was the crushing blow, I think.” After that, Disney took his poodle, Duchess Disney, with him for company.)50
As Disney got more into work on his own train layout, he quickly grew more confident in his own judgments on such matters. Johnston remembered a visit after Disney had started to lay track on his own property. “He started looking at my track, and he looked around for about three or four minutes, and then he hauled out this set of blueprints of how he was going to do his,” Johnston said. “And he started telling me about how I could get a figure eight like he was going to have if I’d just change my plans, you know. He tried to get me to do it all the way he was going to do it. . . . He was kind of a benign dictator.”51
As he learned to work with metal, Disney also started using woodworking tools. Here Disney, the son of a carpenter, was on familiar ground. “I never felt as an artist [that] I was a good artist,” he said in 1956. “I was never happy with anything I ever did as an artist.” By contrast, “I loved mechanics. I mean, I got to be a pretty good carpenter working under my dad. . . . I can still go and make anything in a cabinet shop.”
Diane Disney Miller remembered that “this is when dinners started to be fun because he’d bring this little piece of wood he had turned and sit there all through dinner and be so proud of it. He’d pass it around for inspection. I remember one evening . . . he brought a piston to dinner from a locomotive and he sat this thing on the dinner table. He was being humorous about it but, also, he was awfully proud of this piston.”52
(Disney stage-managed at least one display of uncharacteristic modesty in the face of machines’ demands. In 1951, after attending a preview of Alice in Wonderland at the Disney studio, Hedda Hopper was escorted to the studio’s machine shop, where she found Disney working on what she called a “toy train.” She remembered Disney saying, “Hedda, every time I begin to think myself a big shot, I come to this shop, work with my hands, and learn humility.”)53
Disney had passed through a crisis in the early 1930s when his work no longer required him to use his hands—to draw, or make out exposure sheets, or anything else. Now he was working with his hands again. This “work” was a hobby, but his history was that of a man who became intensely involved with whatever seized his interest, and who tried to harness the object of his interest to some larger purpose. There was simply no way that his new interest in trains and woodworking and related activities could remain a modest avocation.
Disney’s locomotive, which he dubbed the Lilly Belle in honor of his wife, had its first “steam-up” on December 24, 1949, on three hundred feet of track on a studio sound stage.54 But its eventual home was to be on a half-mile track encircling the Disneys’ huge new home on Carolwood (more than five thousand square feet, plus a two-story building that housed a garage and a recreation room), which was then nearly finished.
Even though Sharon accompanied her father on train trips, the three Disney women regarded Walt Disney’s enthusiasm for his new hobby skeptically. That was made clear in 1953, in the McCall’s article that appeared under Lillian Disney’s name (it speaks at one point, with chilling wifely condescension, of Walt’s “caprices and spurts of childishness”).
“I wasn’t being entirely selfish when I argued against having the railroad on our grounds,” the article’s Lillian says. “In the first place, although Walt adores the train now, I am not sure his enthusiasm will continue after he has done everything possible to it. And putting up miniature tracks entails a formidable outlay of money, because there has to be so much expensive grading. In the second place our girls are growing up. When they marry we may not need or want such a big house. And if we should ever decide to sell our house there won’t be many prospective buyers who’ll want a place with a yard full of railroad track.
“So the girls and I, using our best female wiles, tried to persuade Father to keep his train at the studio, where he could play with it at noon and run it all over the lot to entertain visiting firemen.” The Disney women admitted defeat after Walt brought home a “right-of-way contract for his railroad” and insisted they sign it as a condition of building the new house. “We were quite prepared to put our names on the dotted line, when Walt picked up the contract and said he’d trust us.”55
The Disneys moved into their new home in February 1950,56 but it was not until December, after months of grading, that the first track was laid—a total of about twelve hundred feet that “consisted of a complete loop with a figure 8 inside, one passing track, and one siding,” Roger Broggie wrote in 1952. The balance of the track, about fourteen hundred feet, was laid in May 1951. This new and longer loop crossed a sixty-five-foot-long trestle, passing nine feet above another piece of track, and ran through a ninety-foot tunnel. There were other, shorter bridges, too. The combination of track, bridges, and tunnel was “necessary because of the contour of the land and to enable the train to run in either direction over any part of the track,” Broggie wrote. Disney could ride for almost a mile “without going over the same track in the same direction twice.”57 The total cost, of layout and rolling stock, was around fifty thousand dollars—a huge investment in a hobby in 1950.58 The size of the investment, coupled with Disney’s celebrity, attracted a great deal of attention, especially among other railroad hobbyists, and Disney eventually recouped much of what he had spent by selling castings and construction drawings through advertisements in Miniature Locomotive magazine.59
Disney worked on a highly detailed, fully furnished caboose throughout 1950; it was the only car he intended as purely a display piece. He began working at home after equipping the “barn” that housed controls for his new railroad—which he dubbed the Carolwood Pacific (CP)—with woodworking and metalworking tools. Lillian said in the McCall’s article: “Now Walt has something to interest him that doesn’t drive him crazy. He stays home weekends. Once in a while he even comes home early to run the train a while before dinner.”60
Once the train was operating, Roger Broggie said, “there was a thing of going out there on weekends and running the train for guests and so on.”61 Guests would ride the freight cars while the engineer, usually Disney himself, sat directly behind the locomotive, on the tender. The guests were plentiful, and Disney did his best to dazzle them. Ward Kimball remembered one striking feature of the new house: “He’d say, ‘Let’s put the train away and go up to the party house and I’ll make chocolate ice cream sodas.’ He’d get behind the counter of his soda fountain, which was his boyhood dream come tr
ue with all these different flavors of ice cream, and he’d make these long tall things with whipped cream and cherries. They’d be a mile high and he’d bring them to Jules Stein [founder of the MCA talent agency] or whoever his guests were. He was excited because he was doing something he liked to do.”62
As Lillian had predicted, the CP did not have a long life. Although a miniature, the Lilly Belle was powerful enough—and its “live steam” hot enough—to pose a hazard to the unwary. It was, in other words, a more dangerous toy than it appeared to be. Roger Broggie remembered “a few problems involved with, let’s say, motion picture celebrities, being shown, well, ‘you pull this lever and it makes you go forward; this is the throttle; this is what we call the junction bar; that’s forward, this is reverse, this makes it go.’ . . . But that thing is capable of about thirty miles an hour if you want to open it up. . . . No problem, except that there’s some tight curves in the thing because it had twenty-six hundred feet of track, and a couple of times it turned over.”
Broggie or another machinist was sometimes on hand to keep the train running properly, but on other occasions Disney “would fire it up himself [and end up] being, say, a combination of host, a bartender, an engineer, and a fireman, all at once. And it doesn’t work. Because it’s a little tricky to keep [the proper steam pressure] in a boiler and keep it fed with water and fire and either not let it blow up or not let it run out of fire. You can’t do both, and he found this out. You can’t be a host to a group of people and run a train at the same time.”63
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