Todd James Pierce - The Life and Times of Ward Kimball: Maverick of Disney Animation

The Life and Times of

WARD KIMBALL

The Life and Times of

WARD KIMBALL

Maverick of Disney Animation

Todd James Pierce

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a
member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright 2019 by Todd James Pierce

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pierce, Todd James, 1965 author.

Title: The life and times of Ward Kimball: maverick of Disney animation / Todd James Pierce.

Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018035615 (print) | LCCN 2018037547 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496820976 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496820983 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496820990 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496821003 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496820969 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Kimball, Ward. | Walt Disney Productions. | AnimatorsUnited StatesBiography. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC NC1766.U52 (ebook) | LCC NC1766.U52 K567 2019 (print) | DDC 741.5/8092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035615

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

With no royalties being paid to animators and artists, recognition was all they would ever end up with, if they could get it. And yet the animators who created and gave life to the characters were often forgotten.

Mel Shaw, Disney Artist

[My philosophy of life] is like the license plate I had on my Porsche Yes No. Thats what life is. It is a compromise. Sometimes it is yes. Sometimes it is no.

Ward Kimball, Animator

CONTENTS

Part One

EARLY YEARS, 19141939

I always believed there are two paths you take: I chose the artist path.

Ward Kimball

Chapter One

The Three Passions of Ward Kimball

The three passions of Ward Kimball are easy to define: art, antique vehicles, and music. Though he is best remembered for his animated contributions to the Disney canon, in the 1950s and 1960s he was far better known as the front man for the Firehouse Five Plus Two, a revival Dixieland band that became a national sensation. Also as the only person in America to establish a full-size working railroad in a residential backyard. The railroad had, at its peak, 900 feet of track zippered across the scrubby two-acre lot. Ward is the one man who works for me, Walt Disney once said in an interview, I am willing to call a genius. He can do anything.1

The first of Wards passions, according to his mother, Mary Kimball, arrived slightly before his birth, in the early days of March 1914, as she struggled with a difficult labor. My mother always said I was a marked baby, Ward once explained, because when she was in labor she could look out the hospital window [and watch]e a very slow freight train going across a high trestle.2 The bridge, she knew, had been condemned. It worried her that she might be witness to a catastrophic train wreckso much so that she believed her anxiety must have traveled into the body of Ward, not yet born.3 She felt such a strong connection to the baby she gave him her name. Her maiden name had been Mary Nancy Walrath, and her son would be Ward Walrath Kimball. To friends, she would later explain that her sons first experience with trains somehow entered him as she watched that engine grind across that high, perilous bridge, passing from her eyes to his tiny mind.

As a boy, Ward grew up in a train family, with two of his uncles and his grandfather working for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. At his first Christmas, when he was only nine months old, he received a model train, a Hafner clockwork engine, a toy that worked with a windup motor. The Hafners were equipped with a large key, probably large enough for a toddler to grasp, but the train wasnt so much for Ward as it was for his father, Bruce Kimball. So here I was, a nine-month-old kid, having to be held up to stand, and all these [adults] were on their hands and knees playing with my toys.4 Around the Christmas tree, his father set up the track and even made a tunnel out of a white bedsheet, a sight that likely held Wards interest for hours.

But train love wasnt limited to Wards home life. With his family, he regularly took trips to visit relatives, using the Rock Island Line.5 Ive even ridden on a train by myself, Ward said, with a note on my sleeve so the conductor could put me off at the right station.6 During summer months, he rode the rails with his father, a salesman, through the Midwest, from Minneapolis to Kansas City and down to Oklahoma. Even as an old man, at the age of seventy-six, Ward vividly remembered the first time he met an engineer on a steam train: There was this great grimy guy, his clothes covered with grease and his face covered with soot. He took off his gloveyou know the ones with the star on the gauntletsand then he lifted his goggles up and put them on top of his hat. Finally, he looked at me with those big, raccoon eyes, grinned, and shook hands with me.7

Wards first recognizable drawing, his family told him, completed when he was three, was of a choo-choo.8 The following year, Ward made a complete train out of empty strawberry boxes, on which I drew windows and wheels.9 During his youth his family owned a small O-gauge tabletop electric train, with a little cast-iron engine made by the Ives Manufacturing Company. But Ward wanted something larger, the type of train in the front pages of toy catalogues, a train his family could never afford: How many times I opened and opened the catalogue and dreamed of having a big standard-gauge Ives set, with real lights in the cars.10 He would gaze at the catalogues for hours, the engines and coach cars, the advertising images almost always accompanied by the companys slogan: Ives Toys Make Happy Boys.

Later in life, Wards mother would recount these experiences to him, saying, Thats where you get your railroading.11

The second of Wards passions appeared when he was six. His parents, struggling through hard times, sent him to live with his widowed grandmother at the Hastings Hotel in Minneapolis. On Sundays young Ward loved to read the funny pages in the