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.He made the whistle, flag-stands and hand rails on the lathe.He learned sheet metal work by layingout and fabricating the headlamp and smoke stack.Then [he] made numerousparts in the milling machine and learned to silver solder and braze on manysmall fittings. 43 The work had to be fitted around the shop s regular main-tenance of cameras and other photographic equipment.Diane Disney Millerremembered in 1956 that Disney  used to go over to the machine shop at thestudio at night and work there on his train and on his little miniatures. 44Roger Broggie said in 1951 that he and his colleagues were surprised byDisney s aptitude for machine work. In many ways, Walt s a temperamen-tal guy.Lots of the boys didn t think he d be much good in the shop. 45Seventeen years later, Broggie told Richard Hubler that teaching Disneyhow to run a lathe and drill press and other machinery was difficult  becausehe was impatient.So I d make what we call a set-up in a lathe and turn outa piece and say,  Well, that s how you do it..He would see part of it andhe was impatient, so he would want to turn the wheels and then some-thing would happen.A piece might fly out of the chuck and he d say,  God-damn it, why didn t you tell me it was going to do this? Well, you don ttell him, you know? It was a thing of well you learn it.He said oneday,. You know, it does me some good sometimes to come down here tofind out I don t know all about everything..How would you sharpen thedrill if it was going to drill brass or steel? There s a diªerence.And he learnedit.You only had to show him once and he got the picture. 46This was a characteristic that other people in the studio noticed. He hada terrific memory, Marc Davis said. He learned very quickly.You onlyhad to explain a thing once to him and he knew how to do it.Other peopleare 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 tbook learned but he was the most fantastically well educated man in his ownway.He understood the mechanics of everything.Everything was anew toy.And this also made him a very impatient man.He was as impatientas could be with whoever he worked with. 47Disney s lack of formal education manifested itself sometimes in jibes athis college-educated employees, but more often in the odd lapses the mis-pronounced words, the grammatical slips that can mark an autodidact. Fora guy who only went to the eighth grade, Ollie Johnston said,  Walt edu-cated himself beautifully.His vocabulary was good.I only heard him get sorees capi ng from ani mati on, 1 947 1 953 21 3about a big word once in a story meeting.Everyone was sitting around talk-ing 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. 48In the early months of 1949, Disney began exploring with increasing seri-ousness what building a miniature railroad might involve.He visited hobby-ists who included not just Ollie Johnston but people more on a par with him-self financially, like the film composer David Rose.Sharon Disney Brownremembered the intensity of his enthusiasm. Mother didn t have his greatlove 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 var-ious odds and ends of junkets in the late 1940s, like an overnight train to LosGatos 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 theirSundays with their father, Diane said in 1956. Sharon was his buddy for alonger time.but then there came a time when Shary left him.And thatwas the crushing blow, I think. After that, Disney took his poodle, DuchessDisney, with him for company.)50As Disney got more into work on his own train layout, he quickly grew moreconfident in his own judgments on such matters.Johnston remembered a visitafter Disney had started to lay track on his own property. He started lookingat my track, and he looked around for about three or four minutes, and thenhe hauled out this set of blueprints of how he was going to do his, Johnstonsaid. And he started telling me about how I could get a figure eight like hewas going to have if I d just change my plans, you know.He tried to get me todo it all the way he was going to do it.He was kind of a benign dictator. 51As he learned to work with metal, Disney also started using woodwork-ing tools.Here Disney, the son of a carpenter, was on familiar ground. Inever felt as an artist [that] I was a good artist, he said in 1956. I was neverhappy with anything I ever did as an artist. By contrast,  I loved mechan-ics.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 befun because he d bring this little piece of wood he had turned and sit thereall 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 locomo-tive and he sat this thing on the dinner table.He was being humorous aboutit but, also, he was awfully proud of this piston. 52(Disney stage-managed at least one display of uncharacteristic modestyin the face of machines demands.In 1951, after attending a preview of Alice21 4 capri ces and s purts of chi ldi s hnes sin Wonderland at the Disney studio, Hedda Hopper was escorted to the stu-dio s machine shop, where she found Disney working on what she called a toy train. She remembered Disney saying,  Hedda, every time I begin tothink myself a big shot, I come to this shop, work with my hands, and learnhumility. )53Disney had passed through a crisis in the early 1930s when his work no longerrequired him to use his hands to draw, or make out exposure sheets, or any-thing 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 what-ever seized his interest, and who tried to harness the object of his interest tosome larger purpose.There was simply no way that his new interest in trainsand 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 trackon a studio sound stage [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]