The Life and Times of Ward Kimball: Maverick of Disney Animation

By Todd James Pierce

Besides Walt Disney, no one seemed more key to the development of animation at the Disney Studios than Ward Kimball (1914–2002). Kimball was Disney’s friend and confidant.

In this engaging, cradle-to-grave biography, award-winning author Todd James Pierce explores the life of Ward Kimball, a lead Disney animator who worked on characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Jiminy Cricket, the Cheshire Cat, and the Mad Hatter. Through unpublished excerpts from Kimball’s personal writing, material from unpublished interviews, and new information based on interviews conducted by the author, Pierce defines the life of perhaps the most influential animator of the twentieth century.

As well as contributing to classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, Kimball established a highly graphic, idiosyncratic approach to animation alongside the studio’s more recognizable storybook realism. In effect, Ward Kimball became the only animator to run his own in-studio production team largely outside of Walt Disney’s direction. In the 1950s and 1960s, he emerged as a director and producer of his own animation, while remaining inside Disney’s studio.

Through Kimball, the studio developed a series of nonfiction animation programs in the 1950s that members of Congress pointed to as paving the way for NASA. The studio also allowed Kimball’s work to abandon some ties to conventional animation, looking instead to high art and graphic design as a means of creating new animated forms, which resulted in films that received multiple Academy Award nominations and two awards.

Throughout his life, Kimball was a maverick animator, an artist who helped define the field of American animation, and a visionary who sought to expand the influence of animated films.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781496820976

Todd James Pierce

Todd James Pierce is professor of literature at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California. He is author of Newsworld, which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize; The Life and Times of Ward Kimball: Maverick of Disney Animation; and Three Years in Wonderland: The Disney Brothers, C. V. Wood, and the Making of the Great American Theme Park, the latter two published by University Press of Mississippi. His work has appeared in over seventy magazines and journals, including the Harvard Review, the Georgia Review, and the North American Review.

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Part One

EARLY YEARS, 1914–1939

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 Ward’s 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 wreck—so 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 son’s 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 wasn’t 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 Ward’s interest for hours.

But train love wasn’t limited to Ward’s home life. With his family, he regularly took trips to visit relatives, using the Rock Island Line.⁵ I’ve 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 glove—you know the ones with the star on the gauntlets—and 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

Ward’s 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 company’s slogan: Ives Toys Make Happy Boys.

Later in life, Ward’s mother would recount these experiences to him, saying, That’s where you get your railroading.¹¹

The second of Ward’s 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 Minneapolis Journal, and in thoughtful imitation he penciled out his own comics, clever imitations of The Gumps and Gasoline Alley.¹² He called his hand-printed publication the Little Minneapolis Journal and later claimed that it had a grand subscription list of three persons.¹³

On weekdays Ward and his grandmother would ride about town on yellow trolleys to buy groceries. From the start he was fascinated by the mechanics of these lovely yellow-skinned streetcars: I always sat on a seat close to the motorman, so I could watch his every move as with both hands he manipulated the various control levers … also rang the trolley bell with his foot. The motorman was my hero, a father figure, no doubt, especially when once he acknowledged my existence with a knowing wink and a wave of his gloved hand.¹⁴

On weekends Ward and his grandmother took these same trolleys out to the lake, sometimes for a picnic, sometimes for errands. In a scrapbook Ward collected all of his transfer stubs, a personal history of where he had gone in the world. With his weekly allowance of twenty-five cents, he bought toy trolley cars, which on the nights when his grandmother was out at a ladies’ card game, he set up on the floor, with little pieces of string tied between chairs to approximate the path of aerial wires. In all he owned eleven of these Chein & Co. miniature trolleys, which he used to push across the tile while lying on the floor, mouthing the sounds of a streetcar in action.

For a while the two of them fell into a type of happiness: Ward needed stability, and his grandmother needed to mend her past. Decades earlier she had lost her first son, Reese, who had died when he was six. Without doubt, some of the lingering affection she felt for her lost son was now directed at her grandson.¹⁵

One night while his grandmother was out, Ward fell asleep on the floor, next to his trolleys, with lines of string webbing low spaces between chairs. When she opened the door to enter the darkened room, she unfortunately caught her foot, Kimball recalls. Chairs flipped over in all directions and a small dining table crashed to the floor, scattering broken teacups.¹⁶ She came to rest on some of the trolleys, damaging them a little, which to Ward was the real tragedy.

I cried in anguish. [But] Grandma, being such a patient and understanding person, didn’t let on that her ankle was bruised. Later, when I asked her how come she was walking so funny-like, she put her arm around me and explained that she had hurt her leg playing cards with [the ladies].¹⁷

But the trolley expeditions—and the toy purchases—didn’t stop. They continued, and even expanded. At about this time, Ward’s interest in drawing deepened as well. He was no longer interested in the daily "antics of ‘The Gumps,’ ‘Barney Google,’ [or the characters in] Gasoline Alley.’"¹⁸ He became interested in how cars and streetcars were presented in the comics, particularly an expressive cartoon trolley featured in a strip called Toonerville Folks.

Using his tin toys as models, Ward drew trolley-cars for hours, often on hotel bond, coloring in their sides canary yellow and their roofs russet red. For the duration of the year, his grandmother always made sure that Ward had enough paper for his endless drawings and homemade comics. Sometimes it was stationery and sometimes it was end-of-the-spool wrapping sheets from the butcher’s shop. With this, two of his grand passions were up and running—trains and drawing, twin hearts beating inside his boyish chest.

By the time Ward was nine, his father, who had once wanted to be a lawyer and an inventor, had fallen into a series of odd jobs: he managed an indoor swimming pool in Oklahoma; he also worked at the Good Pastry Shoppe bakery where a machine pressed dough into donuts; but eventually, he took to sales, traveling for the National Cash Register Company. He focused his efforts on territory in the Midwest, but he wasn’t a strong closer, at least not in Oklahoma. For a while he settled in Parsons, Kansas.¹⁹ But as the family grew—with a daughter, Eleanor, and another son, Webster—so did his impatience with the difficulty of finding a good life in the Midwest. We got up one morning when it was nine below zero, Ward recalls, and Dad said, ‘That’s enough of this stuff. Let’s go to California.’²⁰

They traveled by rail to the West Coast, believing the move would improve their financial prospects. I slept all the way west in an upper berth with my little brother and sister, Kimball later joked.²¹ As his parents were Episcopalians, they found connections in California through their church. The family rented a home in Ocean Park, not far from the coast, but even here his father’s luck remained lukewarm at best. Rarely did he keep a sales job for more than a year, and to find new work he moved his family from town to town.

During this nomadic period Ward’s interest in art is fairly easy to chart. After he left his grandmother, his interest slipped for a while. But in the fifth grade, a traveling art teacher came to his class once a week and rekindled his passion. During each visit she awarded a ten-cent chocolate bar to the student with the best drawing. For weeks Ward worked on his drawings, hoping for the prize. One day his father showed him how to draw an ocean liner, with smokestacks and waves and a horizon line to give the image depth. I was fascinated by this, Ward recalls, how he got this perspective. So I drew one…. The ocean liner was red [with] stripes on the portholes. And then I drew birds.²² The birds, under a light pencil, appeared as an arrangement of Vs angling through the sky. For this, he received ten cents’ worth of chocolate, a Hershey bar with nuts.

That same year Ward applied for a W. L. Evans correspondence course in cartooning and was informed that, even though he was a kid, they would accept him, so long as he sent them twenty-five dollars, which he raised by selling soda pop. He completed all of the assignments and sent them in, waiting patiently for an art instructor to offer him guidance. He also sent a few drawings to his grandmother, who did something unexpected with them.

My grandmother submitted some drawings of mine to [New York animation producer] Paul Terry. At the time, Terry was producer and part-owner of Aesop’s Fables Studio, though he is better remembered for his later effort, TerryToons, where he produced the series Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle. In his reply Terry offered soft encouragement: Yes, the lad shows a lot of talent. After he’s finished with school, you tell him to come to New York and look me up.²³

Terry’s praise, even if it was general, stayed with Ward as confirmation of some future, yet-to-be-defined success. From that point on, he would later say, there was no stopping me.²⁴

In California, beyond Ocean Park, his family lived in West Covina, then Glendale, then Baldwin Park. In all, he attended over a dozen public schools by the time he was a teenager, spending less than half a semester at some of them.²⁵ In early interviews he suggested that it was fourteen schools,²⁶ but in later interviews he suggested it was closer to twenty. He also attended about as many churches. Though later in life Kimball would sharply turn away from religion, as a boy he enjoyed stories found in the Bible, if nothing more than as pieces of historical narratives.

Without doubt, the frequent moves left identifiable marks on Ward: he was a small, spritely boy, a boy drawn to art and trains. In a more stable environment, his personality might have settled toward solitude, but with his nomadic family, he developed strong skills as an extrovert. He knew how to make friends quickly. He was funny, sometimes subversive. People described him as a ball of energy, a puckish youth who was impossible to ignore, a student whose name occasionally graced the newspaper. At one school, likely in Tustin, he was pigeon-holed as a poor kid, an outcast, a boy not special enough to have a part in the school play or other artistic productions.²⁷ When asked if his childhood was difficult, he replied, Well, it was because sometimes silently I would cry. But also he was learning how to project the image of a likeable, funny boy when in public.²⁸

In 1928 Ward designed many covers for his school’s weekly paper. I mastered the use of the stylus on those waxy mimeo sheets where if you pressed too hard you made a hole, and if you didn’t press hard enough, you got nothing.²⁹ For his work, the Los Angeles Times listed his name, along with a dozen other junior high students, as making the honor roll for the art workers club.³⁰ That same year he created lanternslides for a local theater in Baldwin Park.³¹ He also earned a little money lighting smudgepots in local orange groves to save the fruit from frost.³³

But when jobs soured in the area, his father went north, hoping to find work in appliance sales.³³ They settled again, in Ventura, California, a beach town filled with farms and oil fields. It was there that Ward’s eyes first lifted with interest from the funny pages to cartoons at the local theater. Perhaps in December 1929 and surely by 1930, each week he attended meetings of the local Mickey Mouse Club. These meetings were held at theaters throughout the country, dozens and dozens of them showing matinee performances of cartoons and live-action comedy shorts, such as the Our Gang series, with additional sponsorship by local stores and restaurants. Kids, accompanied by their parents, needed to visit one of the sponsoring businesses to obtain a Mickey Mouse Club membership card that would admit them into the theater. Regular weekly meetings will be held at 2 o’clock every Saturday, one ad began.³⁴ Beyond the films, matinees often featured local talent, such as a band or a singing act, to create a full program of family-friendly entertainment. But Ward himself was primarily interested in the cartoons, the Mickey Mouse shorts in particular, as he felt the drawing style in them was more sophisticated than in other cartoons, such as Felix the Cat.

He also felt that the Disney cartoons were more technically advanced than other efforts: "To take advantage of the frantic switch to sound so many of the other studios were reaching in their bag of old silent [cartoons] and quickly re-releasing them out with new [jazzy] soundtracks [with] a few ratchets and honks and slide whistles, and that was supposed to be a sound cartoon. But Disney cartoons made a real honest attempt to integrate sound and picture. So these early Mickey and Silly Symphony cartoons really began to impress me."³⁵

Inspired by the movies, Ward entered an art contest that pitted his work against that of high school students from all over Ventura County, including seniors planning to attend art school in the fall. Yet Ward, as a freshman, walked away with first prize in cartooning.³⁶ The accomplishment told him that he had more talent and determination than older boys, those with money and private tutors. At best, his education in art was intermittent, lessons from correspondence schools and occasional encouragement from a teacher. Yet here he was, first-place winner in the category of cartooning.

At home, Kimball looked to combine his various interests into unique projects. In 1930 he set about to build his own wooden streetcar, large enough to seat five or six kids. It was modeled after a car he’d once admired in the newspaper comics—the Toonerville Trolley—yet it also touched on memories of the year he spent with his grandmother in Minneapolis and also his general interest in trains. With scrap metal and wood, as well as parts from a discarded washing machine and a few old shipping crates, he set about to build a dimensional, rolling version of a funny-page icon. Bicycle oil lamps provided summer night sidewalk illumination, Kimball remembers. Cash register bells gave passengers inside convenient signal devices.³⁷

All summer long Kimball loaded up neighborhood kids to coast down a nearby hill. The kids sat inside, while Kimball pushed and another kid guided the front wheels. Sometimes Kimball would even let the local kids, most of them younger than him, play with his cartoon trolley by themselves. It was then that the accident happened: with the trolley loaded up, a neighborhood boy working the front wheels lost control as it careened down a hill. With no one piloting the car, the homemade vehicle took on significant speed until it hit the root structure of a large tree, flipping the trolley on its side and sending a few children onto the dirt. I apologized left and right, Kimball recalls. The adults were understandably upset…. After the tragedy I learned that some of the parents in the neighborhood admonished their little accident victims to stay away from that weird Kimball Kid. ‘If he ever invites you to take a ride in his trolley again, you just say, No, they warned.’³⁸

That same year Ward did one other important thing: he approached the Disney Studio to inquire about future employment. In Ward’s words: I had been drawing since I was three and wanted to work for Walt Disney.³⁹ The exchange in all likelihood took place by letter. The reply was predictable: Walt told me I was too young.⁴⁰

As a boy in the Midwest, Ward had been surrounded by music: his mother played ragtime tunes on the piano and, on half days, with a dime in his pocket, he would run down to the local theater to see the vaudeville shows. He always sat in the front row to take in the comedians, magicians, and traveling bands. Later he’d claim that he saw endless vaudeville shows, years of them.⁴¹ But music didn’t wrap Ward deeply in its melodies until he was a teenager. While a sophomore at Ventura High, during a school assembly, he was introduced to the music teacher, Harold Wright. Mr. Wright explained that he was looking to add students to the school orchestra and that he would personally instruct them as to how to play an instrument. With this, he set horns and woodwinds across the gym stage, then demonstrated. He performed a few notes on the trumpet, then squeezed out a melody on the clarinet. Ward wasn’t much interested, but then he heard the sonorous tones of the trombone, a horn that could slide between notes. Sitting there at the school assembly, he thought: I can have fun with that.⁴²

With this, Kimball’s third grand passion slowly entered his life.

Under Harold Wright’s guidance, Ward learned to play the trombone, memorizing the various slide positions and developing his embouchure to produce deep, heavy tones. The following year, Ward’s father found yet another job, selling washing machines a little farther up the coast, in Santa Barbara. Already Kimball defined his life by his three passions: antique vehicles, art, and music, with the latter two dominating his final years of high school.

When he was fifteen or sixteen, he applied to an advanced correspondence course in art through the Federal Schools. After a pleading letter of serious intent and enthusiasm to my good ol’ grandmother, Ward explained, she came to the rescue with the money.⁴³ With skills learned in this course, Ward produced elegant pen-and-ink illustrations for his high school paper and yearbook, but his interest in art was expanding beyond drawing. He was now interested in oils and watercolors. As for music, he was a member of the Santa Barbara High School band. On weekends, to raise spending money, he directed his own jazz combo, which was called The Fox Hunters.

In his new town he found cultural opportunities not available to him in Ventura: he was a member of the local symphony, led by Roderick White, a violinist with a national reputation, and he took high school art classes from Amory Simons, a sculptor who had studied in Paris with Auguste Rodin. As Ward found stability, attending the same school for two consecutive years, his grades improved: Even though I was regarded as a lousy student in grade school, I managed to become an honor student in high school.⁴⁴

For Ward, it was here, in 1931 and 1932, that art defined itself as central to his identity. He started to dress in bohemian clothes, like those worn by art teachers in town. Moreover, his ideas about art changed. He was shrugging off his early interest in cartooning as he was beginning to see that it might be a childish approach to art, something that lacked sophistication. Cartooning would also not be a path that led him toward any meaningful personal expression. Already, he was beginning to understand that expression was the center of true art, far from funny drawings and simple caricature.

In social realms he fell in love with a millionaire’s daughter, only to have his interest rebuffed—a predictable outcome because his family was poor.⁴⁵ He also began to move away from his family’s religion—and any religion—though he maintained a distant fondness for the story material found in the Bible.

Though Kimball originally planned to attend either Stanford or Santa Barbara State College (later called UCSB), on the basis of his outstanding cartoonist and freehand skills, he was awarded a partial scholarship to attend Santa Barbara School of the Arts, a relatively new but well-respected institution.⁴⁶ The duration of the scholarship, however, was only for a single year, not long enough to complete a program of study. His father, working intermittently, didn’t think much of Ward’s plans. He also didn’t think much of Ward’s appearance, as his son now paraded around town in black turtleneck sweaters, old jeans, and J. C. Penney devil-may-care work shoes. Even more troubling, his cheeks and chin were spotted with a rusty stubble.⁴⁷

For years Ward’s father had been reasonably supportive of his son’s interest in cartooning, as he thought Ward might somehow make a living from it, perhaps by drawing advertisements for newspapers. But Ward’s new interest in the fine arts—landscapes, portraiture, and the like—was a pursuit that couldn’t possibly lead to a regular job. A traditional college education, his father believed, would likely guarantee steady employment. Moreover, Ward’s Uncle Paul had offered to cover tuition at a traditional college—but this offer didn’t extend to art school, not even after the one-year scholarship ran out.⁴⁸

The disagreement over Ward’s future often erupted into family arguments, in which Ward’s parents explained that they were very suspicious of this fine art track he wanted to pursue.⁴⁹ Moreover, they often reminded Ward of his grandmother’s efforts to help him become a cartoonist or a newspaper illustrator. They kept throwing up [the old letter from animator Paul Terry] to [him] as proof that jobs existed in cartooning.⁵⁰ But in the end, Ward chose art school, with a fine arts track.

Located downtown, near State Street, the Santa Barbara School of the Arts didn’t simply teach the visual arts. They also taught music, dance, and drama. It was a city block of buildings, with students receiving studio space in old adobes. Kimball, one of a couple hundred students, enrolled in a variety of courses: he painted street scenes and portraits. He worked on illustration. He developed interests in illustrators and caricaturists like Hirschfeld, Daumier, and Beerbohm. He also continued to play trombone in the local symphony.

Some days, as part of a field trip, he went with his classmates up to the natural history museum, where they studied local wildlife—birds, in particular. In groups they examined the bone structure of local specimens as well as the way feathers lay over their bodies. [We would] sit there and make sketches, Kimball recalled, trying to understand how to represent these small animals in flight.⁵¹

There was one watercolor class, however, to which he took a special liking, a class taught by Dick Kelsey. Kelsey offered a no-nonsense, commercial attitude toward art, taking his students on field trips, such as to the Lompoc Valley, where they studied atmosphere and environment.⁵² He asked his students to paint landscapes in full light. When they were finished, he asked them to paint the same landscape with a layer of fog. I was ravenous about painting portraits, Ward said, sloshing watercolors of California vistas, and smearing oils of eucalyptus trees.⁵³ Most of all, though, Kimball admired Kelsey’s ideas about technique: how to balance a painting, how to develop nuance, and how to let an image grow with complexity. It was Kelsey, more than the other teachers, who moved Ward away from drawing and interested him in more sophisticated expressions, showing him how to manage brushes instead of pencils.

Beyond craft lessons, school lectures solidified Ward’s ideas about the role of the true artist. An artist’s job was to have a unique vision of the world—a way of seeing that was expressed in paints, pastels, and charcoals that communicated something of the artist’s individual soul. An artist’s job was also to particularize the world into objects of visual meaning. Though the artist may have to lower himself to work a regular job after graduation, the best jobs were those that kept one’s artistic vision pure and allowed one free time to pursue personal projects. Most of his teachers believed that a career in illustration, particularly for New York magazines, was an excellent way for artists to support themselves. These jobs were highly competitive. Also, they paid well.

Lastly, his teachers and peers at art school changed his mind about Hollywood: [They] thought it was beneath us to consider a cartoon studio. We thought of them as trash.⁵⁴ In part, this admonition likely spoke to the commercialism and sentimentality of Hollywood films, but it also gestured toward the nature of studio work. Studio work was often collaborative, a process that diminished the ability of an artist to express a personal vision or even an individual style. In Hollywood an artist often became a skilled craftsman who directed his efforts not at his own vision but at that conceived by someone else.

With this in mind, Kimball started to put together a portfolio that would showcase his abilities as a magazine illustrator, a career where artists had more control of their final work. These artists were often called on to illustrate short stories and essays. Knowing this, Kimball created illustrations that might accompany classic short stories, including those written by Edgar Allan Poe.

With abandon he absorbed the lifestyle and tattered dress of a struggling artist. He stayed out late. His complexion turned pasty. He hung out around seedy bars and looked a little like a drifter. The Santa Barbara Police watched me for two weeks on suspicion of peddling dope. I found out later that I had been observed passing very close to a known dope fiend who used to hang around the art school.⁵⁵

The cost of art supplies—and later board—was substantial. At night he covered his watercolors so they wouldn’t dry out. Whenever a student dropped out of the program, particularly local girls who came from wealthy families, he tried to scoop up their leftover paints, brushes, and other materials.⁵⁶ Beyond this, to support himself, he picked up a number of part-time jobs. He worked as the school’s janitor, cleaning classrooms at night. At the local Safeway he held multiple jobs: he came in early to hack lettuce that had been shipped in climate-controlled railcars: [I’d] pick up ice-cold lettuce and take the leaves off the outside and freeze my fingers.⁵⁷ He also painted signs for the front windows, lettering out advertisements that read Pork & Beans 5 Cents a Can and Chicken 15 Cents a Pound.

Whenever he could, he hired out his services as an artist, designing logos for a high school team and painting a mural inside a local hamburger shop, a mural that featured mascots from a number of West Coast college football teams: the Huskies, the Trojans, the Golden Bears, and so on. Lastly, he picked up a few dollars leading a children’s band at the Fox Arlington Theatre, where the local chapter of the Mickey Mouse Club gathered each Saturday to watch cartoons and sing a couple songs.

The Arlington Theatre, recently opened, was a 2,000-seat showcase venue for the Fox West group, with an elaborate Mission Revival exterior and a terra-cotta courtyard. Inside the auditorium the ceiling was painted to look like the nighttime sky, and the side walls featured images of streetlamps and stone roads, creating the effect of an open Spanish plaza. The Mickey Mouse Club in Santa Barbara, Ward once explained, had a little feature where about ten kids who played instruments did a short band-march number at the start of each meeting, which Ward rehearsed and directed each week.⁵⁸ While the band performed, the crowd was supposed to sing the official Mickey Mouse song, as the lyrics flashed onto the screen, but most weeks Ward’s group was greeted with anger instead: The minute the curtain would go up, the whole audience of kids would boo when they saw us on the stage. The kids would all be sitting there in their white duck pants and white shirts. We’d struggle through one march, all out of tune, and when we finished there would be this big, resounding boo, because the kids really wanted to get on with the cartoons.⁵⁹ But Ward would stand there, with his conductor’s baton, and make the best of it. It was a weekly bring down but it was worth it because I got four dollars for it. And I got to stay and see all of the cartoons.⁶⁰

Sitting there in those plush seats, week after week, Ward, transformed by his art school training, viewed animation through new eyes. He noticed different levels of creative achievement in the various cartoons: Betty Boop, Felix, Krazy Kat. I began to see that the Disney product was far superior [to other cartoons] and even artistic.⁶¹ The Disney style, he observed, was beginning to move from broad caricature to storybook illustration. These Disney cartoons were gesturing, albeit subtly, toward classical art, which interested him. When Three Little Pigs was released, Ward was mesmerized. I saw this amazing cartoon six to ten times, he would later admit, coming back to the theater in the afternoons and at night.⁶²

Another cartoon that piqued his interest was Father Noah’s Ark, especially the scenes in which the animals paraded two by two across the screen. The animals were expertly observed, both in form and movement: The giraffes lope[d] along like giraffes, and the hippos lumber[ed] along like hippos.⁶³ There was a visual integrity in these cartoons—or at least some of them—in which characters were presented with an outstanding sense of mechanical handling.

Beyond the strong drawing style, Ward also understood that the Disney cartoons were more effectively absorbing new technology—specifically color—to artistic ends, just like the studio had done with the addition of sound years earlier: he felt a tremendous impact [from] these first full-color cartoons when all [feature-length] movies were black and white. Rarely did you see many Technicolor live-action [short-subject] pictures … but here was this full-color ‘Father Noah’s Ark.’ Wow! I began to see that, Jesus, this was no ordinary run-of-the-mill cartoon stuff.⁶⁴ Though cartoon color tended to be bright, often slanting toward primary tones, Ward could see that the Disney studio was exploring interesting palette combinations, that color was more than a visual trick: it was part of the narrative mood. With this, Ward began to suspect that there might be something more to contemporary animation than mere amusement—that this new medium, still in its infancy, was moving itself, if only in small ways, toward the world of art. Sitting there, in the Arlington Theatre, with electric stars stippled across the ceiling, with a thousand kids around him, he could feel a small stirring in his chest, the early pinpricks of his future beginning to change: old dreams from childhood were beginning to return, pushing aside those high-minded aspirations he’d nurtured for the past three or four years.

Chapter Two

Disney at Hyperion

Though in interviews Kimball occasionally claimed to have been in art school for two and a half years, he was likely adding all of his art courses together, including high school experience and perhaps those correspondence courses paid for by his grandmother. He was a traditional full-time art student for just over a year, at most. In his final month his work was selected for a student exhibition at the Santa Barbara Art Museum. For Kimball, art school ended shortly after his scholarship ran out.

In one interview, Kimball laid it out directly: When I quit [art school], I was disowned by my folks. They kicked me out of the house, but two weeks later my mother softened and took me back.¹ No longer a student, Ward needed to find full-time work, especially as his parents now saw him as an adult. You’ve got to get out and get a job, they told him. You can’t stay around at the house the rest of your life.²

Upset, Kimball fired back: How am I going to get a job in the Depression?³

Kimball, however, didn’t search much for regular full-time work. While keeping his part-time positions at the grocery store and theater, he hunted for jobs that involved art. He painted mailboxes. He created interior wall illustrations for a downtown bar and received as payment a dollar-a-gallon jug of wine.⁴ An art school classmate, Channing Peake, seeing him suffer, advised, You ought to go down there to Disney’s because I hear they’re paying money.⁵ He also predicted that Ward might do well there because he had a flair for caricature. As if to reinforce the possibilities of Hollywood, a few days later Kimball happened across an ad in Popular Mechanics: Walt Disney, creator of Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies, offers exceptional opportunities to trained male artists.⁶

Kimball, however, wasn’t much interested in the easy glitter of Hollywood. He still imagined a future in which he rose into the world of New York illustration, working for magazines and finishing his own art at night, the same as his art school teachers had done during the previous decade. "I was aiming at The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall’s, that sort of thing.⁷ Here was Ward’s largest goal: he wanted to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his teachers, one day demonstrating that his paintings rivaled their own. But also he was forced to examine the practicality of his ambitions. His family lived in a rented house surrounded by a thin border of dirt. He had no car, no money: The Depression, he explained, was pretty tough on my family."⁸

Aside from watching finished cartoons at various theaters, Ward knew next to nothing about the process of Disney animation. He understood that some men drew the characters, while others painted the backgrounds. He believed he could make do as a background painter until something better came along or until he saved up enough to get himself to New York. A strong portfolio, that’s what he figured he’d need to land a job at Disney’s, the same as he would for any magazine. So he filled a folder with watercolors, charcoal drawings, and sketches he’d completed in a life drawing class. He also included many landscapes, as he thought these might showcase his potential as a background artist.⁹ Now to drive all the way to Los Angeles during the Depression was rough, Kimball recalled. Gas was twelve cents a gallon!¹⁰ Even though money was tight, his mother agreed to drive him to the Disney studio, roughly two hundred miles there and back, but she let him know that this was a onetime opportunity: with the family finances in near ruins, there was no possibility of a second trip.

On Friday, March 30, 1934, Kimball’s mother drove him in their old Buick down to Los Angeles. On the drive he believed that he was starting his adult life, the first real step away from home, with some books, clothes, and art supplies packed in the back of the car. They passed through the busy downtown streets with their nodding palm trees and continued into a Silver Lake neighborhood, where vacant hills surrounded low buildings used