Bob Smith 0:00
How did the first woman on the US Supreme Court change your TV viewing habits forever? What was it like to work for the world’s most famous movie studio when it was just a scrappy little startup? And senior citizens are great with kids. But what kind of 90 year old has enough energy to entertain children for hours on end? answers to those and other questions coming up on this edition of the off ramp with Bob Smith?

Hi, I’m Bob Smith and welcome to the off ramp, a place to slow down steer clear of crazy and take a side road to sanity. A chance to shift gears, learn some fun facts and gain some new perspective before you have to pull back onto the express way of life. And on a regular basis, we’ll feature a potpourri of people, places and things, everything from trivia and celebrity interviews to some favorite guilty pleasures of mine from my collection of oddball audio files. Well, we asked some compelling questions in our introduction, and two of them are related. What was it like to work for the world’s most famous movie studio when it was just a scrappy little startup? And would you trust a 90 year old to entertain your friends? First? The 90 year old is this guy. everybody it’s me. Mickey Mouse say a lot of come inside my clubhouse

Well, of course that is Mickey Mouse who amazingly turned 90 Recently, he still entertaining children and adults the world over especially at theme parks. And yes, many of you do trust that senior citizen that 90 year old to entertain your kids to this day. Hence my trick question there. Mickey begat Walt Disney Studios known today as Disney, and we’re going to be hearing from one of Walt Disney’s famous animators today in our program, a fellow I interviewed back in 1980, who reminisces about what it was like to work for that multibillion dollar company back in the days when it was as he called it, a lowly cartoon studio. His name is Ward Kimball. And we’ll be hearing from him a little later. We will be starting out most of our off ramp programs with something I call trivial matter fascinating facts. And did you know trivia from all over the world and all walks of life, and occasionally my partner will be Marcia Drew and Smith my real life partner Hello. Hello Marsh. See. Marcia Knight love trivia, don’t

Marcia Smith 3:02
we? I like Trivial Pursuit. Yes. And you love all trivia. But

Bob Smith 3:06
whenever we go to a restaurant, if there’s a bar or place, they have some of those old trivial.

Marcia Smith 3:12
We just I love to try to beat you. And it’s not easy.

Bob Smith 3:15
We’d sit there for longer than the meal. Sometimes. They bring the bill we just keep playing the Trivial Pursuit cars. Okay, here’s one. All right. So I’ve got one here. It is an interesting communications question.

Marcia Smith 3:26
So you say, okay,

Bob Smith 3:29
okay. Which president was the first one to receive an instant message transmitted from coast to coast? Okay,

Marcia Smith 3:36
I can tell this is a trick because this is you’re gonna go way back. I’ll say Abraham Lincoln. Oh, my How did you know really? Oh, no, I really didn’t know that what would be the most bizarre you don’t people

Bob Smith 3:52
don’t think of the telegraph as being you know, the technology of the future. But the first instant message system ever built was the telegraph and he received the First Coast to Coast telegraph message from the west coast on October 24 1861.

Marcia Smith 4:07
What did it say?

Bob Smith 4:08
Hi. Hey, how’s it gone? That’s good. Pretty cool. Emoji. No, there was not an emoji. Okay. Marsha loves her emojis. But with the telegraph. Well, that was the first point to point instantaneous communication just like texting and instant messaging today. You probably want to know who sent it Marsh, don’t you?

Marcia Smith 4:31
Well see his wife bring home Nelkin brand Mary was calling. No.

Bob Smith 4:35
Chief Justice Stephen J. Field of California sent that first instant message from San Francisco to President Lincoln in Washington DC and using a line built by Western Union.

Marcia Smith 4:46
Oh, that’s interesting. I still like to know what it said but okay, okay. Well, I’m

Bob Smith 4:50
sure it was perfunctory or profound. Yeah.

Marcia Smith 4:53
Okay. Good one, Bob. I got one now. Okay. What’s the most popular recipe II on the website of Campbell’s Soup, Campbell Soup. They post recipes on their website. Okay, what’s the one that’s hit more than any other one?

Bob Smith 5:11
That it’s gotta be tomato soup? Or it’s got to be something with chicken noodle soup, right? You

Marcia Smith 5:16
mean something to do with it? Ya know, for the most popular recipe of all time is the green bean casserole. Recently it had 2.7 million visits during the holidays.

Bob Smith 5:29
Now, wait a minute, what does Campbell’s Soup have to do with green beans?

Marcia Smith 5:33
Well, if you were in the kitchen helping more you would know the green bean casserole is made with mushroom soup and those crunchy little fried onion things on top. Okay,

Bob Smith 5:44
mushroom soup guy got it. Okay.

Marcia Smith 5:47
It’s a staple at every Thanksgiving dinner. And the woman who invented it worked for Campbell’s Her name was Dorcas Reilly. She died in 2018 at the age of 92. It was in the news. Wow. All

Bob Smith 6:00
right. Well, here’s another one that was in the news. Okay. Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, unfortunately, saying she has Alzheimer’s. Here’s a question about her. She was the first woman on the US Supreme Court. Okay. How did the first woman on the US Supreme Court change your TV viewing habits? Really? Yes, I can guarantee you, you and everyone listening has changed their TV viewing habits because of Sandra Day O’Connor.

Marcia Smith 6:28
Was she the deciding vote on something that allowed 24/7 news channels?

Bob Smith 6:34
Well, you’re on the right track. She made it possible for you to time shift to record and watch TV programs whenever you want to. Oh, okay. Everybody takes us for granted now. But when Sony invented the Betamax recorder, the TV studios and the movie studios went crazy. Like what you got to be able to let people record off television. We’ve got copyrights on all this stuff. People can’t just record the shows. Well, that went to the Supreme Court with universal and Disney suing Sony. And we know now through court records that originally the court was going to favor the studios. But one vote changed that and that was Sandra Day O’Connor. She changed the vote. She changed her vote during deliberations and the decision tipped the scales favoring Sony and you by just one vote. So thanks to the first woman on the Supreme Court, you have a whole range of products and services that now let you watch what you want to watch whenever you want to VCRs digital video recorders, DVDs on demand TV, video podcasts, Netflix, video streaming YouTube, all those things came from that one vote from Sandra Day O’Connor.

Marcia Smith 7:41
Well, you go girl, so let’s go watch some DVR shows and eat green bean casserole. Bob.

Bob Smith 7:50
One more question. Okay, who put that first woman on the US Supreme Court Sandra Day O’Connor? What precedent led

Marcia Smith 7:56
precedent? I would guess harder Reagan I’ll say Reagan. You’re

Bob Smith 8:03
right. Ronald Reagan. The first president even nominate a woman for the Supreme Court was Ronald Reagan. The year was 1982. Thanks, Maurice. You bet.

We mentioned earlier Mickey Mouse recently turned 90 A real milestone in pop culture for the United States. And if you’re like me, you grew up watching the Mickey Mouse Club running home from school to make sure you could see that and watching the wonderful world of color on Walt Disney on NBC back in the 60s 70s and 80s. And then a whole new generation grew up with new Mickey Mouse clubs and some of our greatest actors and actresses today actually appeared on that show back in the 1980s and 90s. Disney is now become a huge, huge multinational diversified mass media and entertainment conglomerate. That’s exactly how it’s described by Wikipedia. Today, Disney owns the ABC television network Lucas Films producers of Star Wars Pixar producer of many of those great animated films like The Incredibles and Toy Story and Marvel Studios producers have great action films, starring people such as Spider Man. Disney also owns the Muppets, a cruise ship line and theme parks on three continents. But once it was just a scrappy little startup, a lowly cartoon studio as our next guest describes it. Here’s the interview with Ward Kimball Academy Award winning Walt Disney animator from 1980. You

Your heart is welcome Jiminy Cricket was probably his greatest creation, but he received professional rewards for other works and Oscar in 1954 for the first cinema scope, cartoon toot, whistle, plunk, and an Emmy in 1961 for a segment of Walt Disney’s man and Space series, the man is Ward Kimball, one of Walt Disney’s top animators, a man who spent his entire artistic career at the Disney Studios hired fresh out of art school. He retired to San Gabriel, California after he left Disney but he still works as a consultant for the studio. Although his personal hobby model railroading takes up much of his time. He likes to remember the Disney years and what that studio was like and its most creative period, the golden years of animation the years of Snow White and Fantasia and Pinocchio. Ward Kimball saw them all. Oddly enough, Ward Kimball was the first artist to come to Disney with a portfolio of his work have a

Ward Kimball 10:54
Santa Barbara art school at the time, that used to be a private school in existence. I figured well, that’s the way it did it to put together a portfolio because when you went back to get a job, which I hope to do big magazines in New York, you want to have a portfolio. So I assumed that you would do the same even though it was a lowly cartoon studio. And I guess it impressed him that I would landscapes portrayed illustrations, so forth. Prop that was a good idea that everybody should be asked to submit a portfolio. What happened. Now,

Speaker 1 11:40
Disney made the Mickey Mouse film sort of as potboilers just to keep money coming into the studio, but the silly symphonies that was where the artwork went

Ward Kimball 11:49
course the making it’s very hard for people to put themselves back in a theater late 20s and early 30s See what an impact and make your mouth silly symphonies had an audience we tend to lump all of the old farmer alfalfa fields together as period of time, at the time they were was a bark contrast between they had been I want to make your mouse came out because here we have new gags and we had stories well constructed. And it was like a day to see a make a silly Symphony now the silly symphonies were the first things but Technicolor that’s live action and in fact, they decided that at the very beginning that they would go along with technical expense give it that quality of color the gags were a little different. Making stuff was a little more basic pie throwing an early attempt to get the quality that we later got and parts

Speaker 1 13:15
you worked on Fantasia yourself with that was considered to be very far out in left field at the time wasn’t it?

Ward Kimball 13:24
Was a bomb and it was in the red for years. Beginning of the 5050s Nobody looked at it nobody wanted it.

What happened was so called assets generation, hippies or whatever you might call it in the early 60s, more or less discovered it. And they were it began to be shown around college. At the beginning, that private is taken off continuously somewhere all over the world

Speaker 1 14:39
that you described as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs says the gun with the wind of the cartoon. It

Ward Kimball 14:46
was the biggest thing. It was the first feature that had to be set up that way I’m comparing it to the press Well, writing proper city directors Gone with the wind came out because it was such a big heavy book.

Speaker 1 15:10
The Disney Studio sank an awful lot of money into that one too. That was one of the big the bigger risks.

Ward Kimball 15:16
We didn’t have the money, he couldn’t get a bank loan. And roughly speaking the only one that would advance the money it was key in any the head of Bank of Italy, which was

he was the only guy that would come forth and he seemed to have a lot of faith

Unknown Speaker 15:44
in me I own my own home.

Ward Kimball 16:03
Everybody today, we’re still talking about a car, a little trailer with little jumpy characters going. To do something with quality. Everybody said, Well, you can’t sustain a story for an hour and a half. And he always says you can’t have another group says, cartoons are too hard on the eyes that I saw before the hour and a half. So things were wrong. He proved he had a good solid story. And you believed in it, you know? It’s sort of a naive approach to life and everybody treated it as a cartoon, but it’s the real thing.

Speaker 1 16:50
You indicated when you came out of art school and you went to work for as you said, it was a lowly cartoon job. And I got the impression you might have been a little embarrassed to work for them at the time. Did you gain a lot more respect for the art of cartooning and animation?

Ward Kimball 17:03
I don’t think at the time I came there was quite a world famous. Three Little Pigs was the inspiration kind of made me realize that along with Father Noah’s Ark, compared to the other studios, it was a quality operation. Remember that nobody could get a job. I was terrible. All my friends are hopping roaming around the country. You just couldn’t get a job. And this was the solution because they were looking for artists to expand, which was very unusual. So I went down there to get a job to get some money. Very excited because we were all young. That was he was exactly 30 years old. I was 20. You know, it was all so new. And it was exciting, because Mickey Mouse by them was world famous and being shown parts of China, India, and because of its pantomime all the first because you know it didn’t have any dialogue. They’re all musical. It was like Chaplin, you could run them anywhere. So Mickey Mouse by the time I came there, and it was just the same. Charlie Chaplin who was the king of Comedy.

Unknown Speaker 18:40
That you left the studio? When did

Ward Kimball 18:42
you leave the studio? 71. And

Speaker 1 18:44
I would imagine things have changed quite a bit in all that time. Oh, yes.

Ward Kimball 18:50
That was a great thing about it. It was continuously changing. Had of ideas and he was always stirring things. That’s what I liked about it. At the time, it would go against your as an employee, but he couldn’t deny that it was an exciting problem is when something like that stops, you go to a corporate structure becomes more conservative. You have a rule by committee all the time that was alive. It was a one man decision. He made a decision. Yes or No. Give it a try. You do where you stood because if you went to him with an idea, he would say, Well, I don’t think we should try that this time or he’d say hey, I want you to do a treatment on it. Which is what I liked and when you when the thing dissolves into a corporate structure, committees, people who are unsure themselves vaping It’s much easier to say no or say, Well, I don’t think we should. Because it’s safer. Nobody has to go out on a limb. If you say yes, let’s try it, boy, he goes wrong

Unknown Speaker 20:28
it won’t take long

Speaker 1 20:53
do you think animation will ever get back to that type of state of the art that you had back in the late 30s, early 40s? It certainly seems to me to be much superior to what we see on the say the Saturday Well,

Ward Kimball 21:05
first of all, you do it to make money, right? We did more than anybody else for profit back here. But as always, to make the product better, which in turn would bring in a bigger income and he was right. People don’t just make the big scale for last. A hobbyist you’re doing it to make money. And the only way to make money times like these with something that’s so personal. So much based off piecework. Labor’s job of making these drawings is kind of crazy, because you had to be like Hanna Barbera and set up a system that really is animation. And that’s the only way you could cut it. And what happens is that it’s both the animation is that early Saturday morning schlock which you can’t compare to the full animation. But it’s a hell of a lot less expensive.

Unknown Speaker 22:14
Do you do much art today at home or anything of that nature.

Ward Kimball 22:17
Right now I am going in part time riser for another arm of Disney, which is called when we build the ride for Florida. Disneyland is designed to ride General Motors transportation building, which is in Florida in the world trade. It’s sort of a target history of transportation you ride through cars like having the final audio animatronics put together. I go ahead and oversee all the way from figure three, the color of a Roman chariot to the size of an Egyptian temple.

Unknown Speaker 23:07
Sounds like it’s I want to thank you very much for letting me talk to you just a little bit this morning.

Ward Kimball 23:17
Why not?

Unknown Speaker 23:20
I’m glad you feel that way.

Bob Smith 23:22
Ward Kimball, one of Walt Disney’s top animators, a man who speaks freely and frankly about his craft. This is Bob Smith.

Word Kimble passed away in 2002 at the age of 88. But fortunately, he lived long enough to see the resurrection of Disney. As you heard us speak there. We were talking about what animation had become in the 1970s and 1980s. It was pretty substandard. A lot of things were being outsourced by cartoon studios to Asia. And the work that was coming back just didn’t have a whole lot of imagination. And then computers came into the picture. And Disney seized on computer technology and ran with it producing incredible creative animated films such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King and many others. Ward Kimball in a 1978 interview said we thought we were always going to be 21 years old. We thought we would always be putting goldfish in the bottle drinking water balancing cups of water on the light fixtures, changing the label on cans of sauerkraut juice. We were 21 years old Walt was 30 leading the pack. Working at Disney was more fun than any job I could ever imagine.

Here’s a good question. I like asking people at parties, it gets an interesting response. What’s one thing most of your friends don’t know about you? Now think about that for just a moment. What’s one thing most of your friends don’t know about you? It might be something you don’t want anyone to know about. Or it could be something you did as a kid or a job. You had places you’ve gone, maybe people you’ve met for me because I’ve lived in five states in my life. And most of my friends today didn’t know me in my 20s my friends don’t know about all the famous people I met. When I was just starting my career people I interviewed and recorded conversations with. I was working in Iowa at a station called Katie th and their thanks to wonderful managers and some terrific circumstances. The town had just built a brand new Civic Center, I was able to meet, interview and rub shoulders with some of the top entertainers touring in the 1970s and 80s. These interviews were conducted in airports, limousines, backstage dressing rooms, hotel suites, and by telephone, they came fast and furious over four short years, from 1978 to 1982. Here are some of the voices you’ll be hearing in the weeks and months ahead. On the off ramp. George Burns,

Speaker 2 26:22
shaking things up funny. No, pickles are funny. Cucumbers is a funny word. There are certain things that are funny. Schenectady, Schenectady is very funny.

Bob Smith 26:32
Funny, Loretta Lynn,

Helen Hayes 26:34
I’ve had people come to the shows that said, Hey, I never did like country music. And since I’ve seen Coal Miner’s Daughter, you sold me on country music.

Bob Smith 26:42
Tony Randall. It was

Tony Randall 26:44
all the live TV, all live and in front of an audience. We had 3000 people in the audience every week had come to you in the last 10 minutes and say, cut scene 40. Do. You just did it. You didn’t even know what they’re talking about. You just they realized they were long. They had to cut three minutes out of the show. But they wouldn’t realize that the last 10 minutes of the show. Oh, it was madness. It was madness. And every show

Bob Smith 27:09
is like that Merle Haggard.

Tony Randall 27:11
I’m not the type of person who sits down and tries to sweat out a song. You know, I’ve always been lucky. They’ve always come when I needed it. Hopefully it will be very shortly because I have some sessions to do. Helen Hayes

Helen Hayes 27:22
is about 99 or 10. They set up the camera on the tripod. It was one of those hand crank cameras, the cameraman would rush out and we actors would rush up to the door of this house and come out and be walking away from our beautiful home while they cranked it and then that we get out of there just as the butler or the maid

Unknown Speaker 27:42
without permission then Oh sure.

Helen Hayes 27:45
We stolen we use bank buildings for our homes and all kinds of things. Great, noble, rich people.

Bob Smith 27:53
Hank Williams Jr.

Hank Williams Jr. 27:54
You don’t need me. He’s a legend. He’s an American hero superstars. He’s like, Sam John Wayne height Williams, you know, and it was fun for a 14 year old but it wasn’t for a 21 year old to go out there and clone your your legendary father

Bob Smith 28:11
you didn’t even know bless these voices. Bob Hope I

Bob Hope 28:14
travel a lot. I run into my old pictures and get the study and then study my mistakes. Very few people have that chance wait one more

Unknown Speaker 28:22
time I recognize when I start to talk.

Unknown Speaker 28:26
That voice that voice.

Bob Smith 28:29
Bobby V I met Carole King back in the early 60s And she wrote a number of songs for me take good care of my baby. It was one of those right Harry cheap it

Harry Chapin 28:36
Yes, I have been accused of writing so many songs about loneliness, but it’s the basic human subject matter. I mean, we’re the only living organisms that know of our own existence. And as a corollary to that gift is the curse of loneliness was Stanley brothers

Speaker 3 28:50
on a box of facial tissues, and we liked it and said, Hey, that’s a good name. So

Victor Borge 28:56
Zig Toubro again, then it is no professional has better stories, or more hilarious incidents than the music profession. But it’s never told understate the dude band.

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band 29:07
We started as junk band. Yeah, we played all kinds of old dirties tunes, you know, with a few bluegrass tunes thrown in there. And somebody said, Hey, let’s put this little group together and go play at this coffee house for fun, rich little extra

Hank Williams Jr. 29:18
never knew what I was doing. I mean, when I shipped my lobby. I want to make this perfectly clear. He just said to Pat, why is that young lad speaking in that strange way?

Bob Hope 29:30
Mel Tillis don’t know if I’m a singer or if I’m a comedian, you know, because I love to do both of them.

Bob Smith 29:39
Wolfman Jack.

Unknown Speaker 29:41
Bob Smith just like you got it was so corny.

Speaker 1 29:47
Why would a person with a perfectly good name like Bob Smith change it to work magic Alan Freed in New York City at WNS.

Unknown Speaker 29:55
He started out he called himself Moon dog. Anyway, he was the man who coined the phrase rock and roll and he’s right Listen

Bob Smith 30:07
well, that’s it. Gee, I hope you’ll join me in the coming weeks and months ahead as we played those interviews and many, many other fun things here on the off ramp. But right now looks like it’s time to get back on the expressway of life and maybe get into the fast lane. This is Bob Smith. I hope you’ll join me next time on the off ramp.

The off ramp with Bob Smith is produced in association with CPL radio and the Cedarbrook Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai