Images of Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke soaring through the air in a cartoon fantasy land, mounted on carousel horses, flash through Eustace lycett's mind as he contemplates the two Oscar trophies that grace the coffee table in his Yorba Linda, California, home. Winning two Oscars for special visual effects (for Mary Poppins in 1965 and for Bedknobs and Broomsticks in 1972) was exciting for Lycett (BS '37), whose career with Walt Disney Productions spanned 42 years, but what he remembers most was the day-to-day stimulation of working with ingenious people and using his engineering skills to devise special effects never attempted before.
"There were new challenges every day," he says with enthusiasm, "and solving them was always fun."
A career in the film industry was the farthest thing from Lycett's mind when he enrolled at Caltech in 1933 to study engineering. He had grown up in England and completed high school in New Mexico, and he expected a Caltech education to lead to work in either the oil or aircraft industry. The depression was winding down when he graduated with a mechanical engineering degree in 1937, but jobs were still scarce. "A Disney representative interviewed me, and I was hired on the spot," he says. "I was delighted to get the job – even though I might never have considered it if the market hadn't been so tight. Mine was the first Caltech class in several years in which all of the engineers found employment."
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