When Disneyland was developed in 1954 and 1955, Walt employed dozens of art directors, architects and designers, many of whom came from other studios—Twentieth Century Fox in particular. In the early 1950s, Fox was having financial difficulties, which gave Walt a unique opportunity to hire high-quality talent for his outdoor amusement park. Some of the men—such as Dick Irvine and Herbie Ryman—had previously worked for Disney but since moved on to higher paying work at other studios. And other men—such as Stan Jolley, Sam McKim, Bill Martin and Gabe Scognomillo—were new to Disney. In the 1950s, studio talent mostly worked on a project-by-project (or film-by-film) basis. These artists didn’t expect to find lifelong work with Disneyland, but a few did. Long ago, while sitting in art director Bill Martin’s kitchen, I first noticed that there was a fundamental difference between the people that Walt retained and those he didn’t.
Bill Martin’s wife explained that her husband was rarely attune to workplace gossip and tended not to pay much attention to conflicts at the studio, instead choosing to minimize individual ambitions for the sake of group unity. It was then that I realized that I’d seen this quality before—in many of the designers who’d built Disneyland, the ones that Walt retained.
In today’s article, I’m going to begin the story of Ruth Shellhorn, a woman whose ambitions illustrate this division.
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