Dream It! Do It!: My Half-Century Creating Disney's Magic Kingdoms

by Martin Sklar

  So I did not return “the card dealer’s call.” But fortunately for me, E. Cardon Walker called again. Card Walker was the head of marketing and publicity for The Walt Disney Company. I had just been elected editor in chief of the UCLA student newspaper, The Daily Bruin. Johnny Jackson, the erstwhile executive alumni secretary of the UCLA Alumni Association, who had recently left his UCLA leadership position to join Disney, had recommended me. I had known Johnny Jackson since 1952, when I received one of the prized UCLA Alumni Scholarships. It covered full tuition—a staggering $100 per year! (By 2011, California resident students were paying more than $14,000!)

  At the Walt Disney Studio, I met with Card Walker and Jimmy Johnson. Johnson was soon to become the head of Disneyland Records, which was formed in 1956 to create albums of Disney standards by well-known artists, and to develop new material for popular Mouseketeer Annette Funicello (including songs that first brought Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman to the Disney Studio). The good news for me was that both Card and Jimmy Johnson were Bruins. Card began his forty-five-year Disney career in the mail room in 1938, and retired in 1983 as CEO of the company. When World War II began, he enlisted in the Air Force and served on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. His experiences when the carrier was attacked by Japanese kamikaze pilots would later color all of Disney’s early relationships for Tokyo Disneyland, almost killing the deal that became Disney’s first international theme park—an amazing business and cultural success.

  My interview in Card Walker’s office in the old Publicity Department building at the Disney Studio lasted only twenty minutes or so—an eternity by Card’s standards, as I would learn during the next thirty years. When the meeting ended, I had my first real job: editor of the Disneyland News, which I would soon name, write, and edit. Then I’d lay out the twenty-eight pages and supervise its printing.

  My Disney career, which lasted almost fifty-four years, had begun. A month before Disneyland opened its gates, I had become among the first one hundred “cast members” on the Magic Kingdom’s payroll.

  * * * * * * * * * *

  I was twelve years old in June 1946 when my parents moved our family from Highland Park, New Jersey, to Long Beach, California. My father, Leon George Sklar, was a highly respected teacher with fifteen years’ experience at New Brunswick High School in New Jersey. It was not easy professionally for my dad to move; California schools gave him teaching credit for only three of those fifteen years. Despite having spent nearly thirty-five years in classroom and administrative positions as teacher, vice principal, and principal in the Los Angeles schools, he retired in 1964 with only twenty-three years of tenure.

  My mother, Lilyn Fuchs Sklar, had worked at Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick until I was born on February 6, 1934. She became a stay-at-home mom thereafter. They welcomed my brother, Bob, on December 3, 1936. (More about Bob later. He became a highly respected teaching historian as professor of Cinema Studies at New York University.) In Long Beach, my parents rented and later purchased one of those little houses “à la Lakewood,” built just after the Second World War to attract the hordes of veterans who had passed through the Golden State while in military service. I still remember the sight of the first palms I ever saw, as my aunt and uncle, Frances and Bernie Dolin, drove us along Beverly Boulevard from Union Station to their Hollywood apartment, a block or two from the corner of Beverly and La Brea Avenue. (The Hollywood Freeway, from downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, wouldn’t be built for another four years.)

  My father didn’t have a job when we arrived in California. He was soon offered a position in the Long Beach school system, and it nearly dissolved our family. The job was on Catalina Island, and my mother refused to live there. Finally, just before school began in September, the Long Beach schools relented, and my dad began his California education career at Long Beach Jordan High School.

  He inherited a pretty wild bunch of students at Jordan High, and by the end of our first year in California, he moved to Phineas Banning High School in Wilmington, an urban sprawl community outside Los Angeles. My father became one of the most respected members of the community, and his career in education flourished, earning him a promotion to principal at the school from which he eventually retired—Madison Junior High in North Hollywood, at the edge of the San Fernando Valley.

  Years later, after my dad had passed away from a heart attack soon after retiring, my mom told Bob and me some of the stories about the school environment in the 1940s and 1950s at Banning High and Wilmington Junior High. Reluctantly, Dad would tell Mom about the guns and knives he took away from students, and the clothes—even underwear—he bought for kids whose parents could not afford them. In fact, my dad was so committed to serving that community of immigrants that he returned to Banning at night to teach English to Hispanics and Asians striving to become American citizens. Although I have little personal memory of this, I’m sure it established the example that informed my own commitment to community service when I became a parent and, among other community positions, was elected president of the school board in Anaheim, president of the Orange County School Boards Association, and served on Anaheim’s parks and recreation and cultural arts commissions. For me, that tradition continues to this very day: my wife, Leah, and I are cofounders of Ryman Arts, a program for talented young high school artists that has served more than four thousand students in Southern California during the twenty-two years since it was created.

  One day in the late 1980s, when Disney was negotiating with the city of Long Beach to build a park in the harbor area, I was approached following a meeting by Jim Hankla, then city manager of Long Beach. “The reason I’m here today in this position,” Jim said, “is because of Leon Sklar. I was not a good kid at Banning High…in with the wrong crowd, not a good student. But somehow I got into your father’s speech and debate class, and it changed my life—motivated me to go on to college and do something positive with my life. I’ll always thank your father; I wouldn’t be here without his encouragement.”

  My father’s high school experience also rubbed off on my brother and me. In the fall of 1951, Dad became advisor to the Banning High student newspaper. At the same time, Bob—a ninth grader—became editor of his junior high newspaper, and I was named editor of the Long Beach Poly High Life. It was a portent of things to come; two years after I was elected editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin, Bob was chosen chairman of the board of the Daily Princetonian at Princeton University.

  But it was my mother who really and truly propelled the family’s writing careers. In 1946, I had entered a college football pool and somehow picked nine out of ten games correctly. I won a cash prize, which became the Sklar family’s first television set. I think my mom decided then and there that if a twelve-year-old could do it, imagine what she and my dad could do in the contest world! In those days, contesting was actually skill-based, versus today’s blind drawings. Most contests required you to write twenty-five words or less about something. My mom and dad became so proficient at the contest game that we learned never to be surprised when the U.S. mail delivered another prize. And these were not just trinkets: Mom and Dad won a car, cash, vacation trips, furniture, household appliances, and television sets.

  Meanwhile, Bob and I were beginning to build on the foundations in education, values, and ethics our parents had created. I headed off to UCLA on that $100 Alumni Scholarship in 1952. Two years later, my brother received full tuition scholarship offers to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton valued at $1,300 each in 1954. Suffice it to say that on a teacher’s salary in 1954, Dad and Mom could only have dreamed of sending Bob to Princeton without that scholarship.

  As it was, I had to earn a good part of my UCLA education. The summer after high school graduation, I was fortunate to be hired at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach, bucking rivets being installed on (and inside) the wings of C-124 military transports. (Riveting was a manual operation in 1952.) Another summer I scooped ice cream at a 19-cent hamburger d
rive-in; one evening between 5:00 and 7:00 P.M. I made seven hundred malts! During the Christmas season, I caught on as a seasonal temp delivering packages for the U.S. Postal Service, only because Dad let me use the family car (you had to have your own wheels to get the job). And during my last year at UCLA, I worked for a West Coast version of Advertising Age, a successful weekly called Media Agencies Clients (MAC Publications) in Los Angeles. I became assistant editor before resigning to rejoin the Disneyland staff in September 1956.

  Today scholarships are still based on a variety of elements—academics, extracurricular activities, community service, athletics, need, and a live competition with other nominees. I’m not sure, after observing the UCLA Alumni Scholarship selection process as an Alumni Association board member, how my credentials of 1952 would hold up. Editing the school newspaper and captaining the high school tennis team, as I did, would certainly help. But as a loyal Bruin, when I was asked in May 2010 to speak at the luncheon where the UCLA Alumni Scholarships were announced, I couldn’t help but poke fun at our crosstown rivals by reciting the questions “purported to be asked” on the “Application for Admission” to the University of Southern California:

  “Have you read a book this year? If yes, why?”

  “Name five of the United States (for instance, California, New York, Texas, etc.)”

  “Are you a football player? If yes, skip to the last line of this application.”

  To all my Trojan friends, “Just kidding!” (At least, that’s what I told the Bruin Alumni Scholarship recipients.)

  “FAILURE TO PREPARE IS PREPARING TO FAIL.”

  —COACH JOHN WOODEN

  In my first year at UCLA, I joined my Zeta Beta Tau fraternity brothers in a Bruin tradition, the annual Spring Sing competition. We performed pretty well singing George Gershwin’s “’S Wonderful,” but it was one of Tom Lehrer’s unmistakable songs that brought out the best in our male chorus. The Harvard math professor turned lyricist and nightclub performer created such satirical tunes as “The Old Dope Peddler,” “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,” and “The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz.” In the Spring Sing we performed “Be Prepared,” the Boy Scouts marching song.

  We didn’t win any prizes at that Spring Sing, but it was part of my introduction to university life. At UCLA, we freshman were often in classes with veterans who had just returned from the Korean War. And graduate schools, like the UCLA Law School, were often populated by those who had fought in World War II; their undergraduate years, aided by the GI Bill, began in 1946 or 1947.

  For me, a key reason to join a fraternity in 1952 was to have a place to live within walking distance of the campus. There were no, zero, men’s dormitories at UCLA at the time (the first was opened in 1959), and only one women’s dorm, Mira Hershey Hall. UCLA in the 1950s was definitely a commuter campus.

  I wanted to be a sportswriter. When I entered Kerckhoff Hall in hopes of becoming a staffer at The Daily Bruin, I brought with me some high school newspaper credentials. I was editor of the paper at Long Beach Poly High School and also wrote a sports column called “Sklargazing.”

  You have to pay your dues as the kid reporter; my first assignments were covering swimming and water polo. But I soon graduated to track and field, and, in 1954, to football in the fall, followed by basketball for the 1954–55 season. What an amazing opportunity.

  The 1954 UCLA football team, coached by Henry “Red” Sanders, was co-national champion with a 9–0 record. They were “co” because sportswriters for the Associated Press and United Press International split the vote between Ohio State and UCLA. I traveled with the team to Lawrence, Kansas; Corvallis, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Berkeley, California, to report on Bruin victories that season by scores of 61–0, 67–0, and 72–0. And 34–0 over our crosstown rival, the Trojans of USC at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

  But it was the opportunity to cover basketball and get to know Coach John Wooden that became the touchstone of my UCLA years. I learned about being a leader from the very best. Yes, the Bruin hoopsters were good; in the 1954–55 season, Coach Wooden’s team had a 21–5 record, 11–1 in the Pacific Coast Conference—and split two games with the eventual NCAA champion, the University of San Francisco, with their two dominating stars, Bill Russell and K. C. Jones.

  Coach Wooden’s remarkable record of ten national championships in twelve years would not begin until ten years later, in 1964, but what I learned by observing Coach as a teacher (his preferred term) has lasted a lifetime. At practice, the organization was obvious; Coach Wooden planned out every minute each day, and after each drill—no matter how long or short—an assistant blew a whistle and the team moved on to the next planned teachable moment. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail is one of Coach Wooden’s best-known lessons, but there were so many more contained in the myriad of popular books Coach wrote before he passed away in 2010 at age ninety-nine. Many of these gems were contained in The Wisdom of Wooden, written with Steve Jamison and published by McGraw-Hill after Wooden’s passing: Be quick, but don’t hurry… Don’t let making a living prevent you from making a life… Be true to yourself…and, of course, Make each day your masterpiece.

  I had two favorite experiences with Coach Wooden—neither of which were on the basketball court. The first occurred in 1954, when a quirk in the NCAA rules allowed an incoming student from San Pedro, California, eligibility to play either varsity or freshman ball; frosh teams were the first step in an athlete’s college career at that time. This student was no ordinary athlete; he was the player of the year in the Los Angeles high schools. One day I received a call at The Daily Bruin from Coach Wooden, asking me to come to his office. His message was clear; he had decided that Willie Naulls, the player in question, would play immediately for the varsity. To paraphrase Coach’s message: Marty, I would never tell you how to write your story for the student newspaper. But please remember there are four newspapers in Los Angeles and all the sportswriters will write about what an impact Willie will have on our team. He’s going to have tremendous pressure from every one of those newspaper reporters. (In 1954, Los Angeles sports coverage appeared in the Times, Mirror News, Examiner, and Herald-Express. Today, only the Times survives.)

  Coach didn’t have to tell me how he was hoping I would handle The Daily Bruin story. It was emblematic of how his first concern was always for his players.

  Small wonder that all those All-Americans and pro all-stars who came along later—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, et al—continued to come to him for advice even thirty and forty years after their playing days ended. (And Willie Naulls did become a star: all-American, first-round NBA draft choice, three-time pro all-star, three-time NBA champion with the Boston Celtics.)

  The second event was a talk Coach Wooden gave as part of a wonderful series called “My Last Lecture” at the University Religious Conference in October 1955. By then, I was editor in chief of The Daily Bruin, and wrote this editorial urging my classmates to attend his lecture:

  Fifty-five years later, I was a member of the board of directors of the UCLA Alumni Association. Ravi Doshi, the president of the Alumni Scholars Club, approached me with some questions about the “My Last Lecture” series. He had seen my 1955 editorial, and was intrigued by the following idea: “What would the great teachers at UCLA in 2010 tell their students if they had but one lecture to give—their final lecture on this earth?” he asked me. A fellow Alumni Scholar, Max Belasco, had heard online a speech by that title delivered by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was dying of pancreatic cancer. I had yet another connection: that professor, Randy Pausch, had worked as a consultant at Walt Disney Imagineering.

  Ravi and the Alumni Scholars put their own twist on the idea: they conducted a popular vote in which two thousand students selected the professor they most wanted to hear deliver a “last lecture.” In April 2010, Dr. Asim Dasgusta, professor and vice chairman of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics, launched a new Bruin traditio
n based on a fifty-year-old idea, when a sold-out lecture hall of students heard him talk. “I just wanted to tell students what I’ve learned through the years of my life as a scientist for thirty years,” Dr. Dasgusta said.

  * * * * * * * * * *

  UCLA in the early 1950s was sometimes referred to as “the little red schoolhouse.” It was the time of McCarthyism, and the UCLA administration shared many of the senator’s views. One day Dean Milton Hahn called me to his office. He was standing at the window when I arrived, and his first words amazed me: “Anytime you look over campus,” he said, “there are five hundred homosexuals wandering around.” Some things you just don’t forget. The administrator was paranoid about active political protests.

  What worried the administrators was the fear that the student newspaper might be taken over by left-leaning campus reporters and editors. Freedom of the press was not in their vocabulary when they made sure my friend and fellow Daily Bruin associate Irv Drasnin became editor in chief in the spring of 1955. When student elections took place before the school term ended, Irv was elected student body president—and I was “elected” editor of The Daily Bruin. An election by the student body may have seemed like freedom of choice. I had served my apprenticeship—two terms as sports editor and one as city editor—so I had all the requisite credentials for the top job at The Daily Bruin. But it should never have been a popularity contest for a position that the student body at large was truly not knowledgeable enough to fill.

  My education at UCLA, by the way, also happened in classrooms and lecture halls. I remember well professors like George Mowry in history and Currin Shields in political science. And I will never forget the opportunity to know the brilliant philosophy teacher Abraham Kaplan, or listen in on a lecture by the demonstrative education professor Frederick Woellner. (“Text,” he almost shouted, “from context is pretext!”)