I got the opportunity to sit down with Disney Legend Bob Matheison (who spent roughly 34 years working for Disney) and his wife Arra Mae (who spent more than two decades working at Walt Disney World) at a special Disneyana Fan Club World Chapter event on October 10, 2015.
The Disneyana Fan Club is a national organization, formerly known as the National Fantasy Fan Club, that was founded in 1984. It has an annual multi-day convention in Anaheim each July with guest speakers and activities. Robbie Sherman, the son of Disney Legend Robert Sherman, recently wrote a theme song for the club. The club has 25 chapters in the United States, Canada, Japan and Australia that each publish their own newsletters, have meetings and events. The Orlando chapter is known as The World Chapter, and there are eight chapters scattered throughout California. One of the most active chapters is located in Dayton, Ohio, and has a terrific two-day Disneyana Show and Sale event each year with some celebrity guests. I have been a guest twice at their event and have loved it both times. In 2016, their event will be held June 11 and 12.
I spent a good deal of time at the event trying to convince Matheison that it is time for him to write his memories of working for the Mouse.
At the event was also his longtime friend and Disney Legend Tom Nabbe, who has recently released a book of his own memories titled From Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer to Disney Legend: The Adventures of Tom Nabbe.
As a teenager, Nabbe was personally hired by Walt to play Tom Sawyer on Tom Sawyer Island, but many forget what an impact he made as an executive at Walt Disney World (WDW) where he had a key role in the construction of the Monorail system and the operation of WDW’s warehouses.
It was while working on the Monorail that Nabbe created the famous “Nabbe Grabbers” to reach down to grab things that fell in between the monorail beams.
These handy devices that Nabbe had Central Shops build from his design are still in use today to pick up trash in the parks by executives. Unlike some of the other old-timers, Nabbe has his own website.
I also talked at the event with Bob Woodham, who was the first Walt Disney World Monorail pilot hired in August 1971 for the Magic Kingdom and, by 1982, he was in the role of operations coordinator and worked Bob Matheison for some of his Disney career. Woodham remembers:
“He was the type of leader who never raised his voice at those who worked under him. If something was not right, he would use it as a teaching experience.
“One time he was riding on the WDW monorail to get to the Magic Kingdom where he had his office, and he noticed that as he approached the station, there was some trash very visible nearby so he gave me a call to point it out. I called maintenance and told them that Bob Matheison had seen trash near the Magic Kingdom station and it needed to be cleaned up right away. About a half hour later, I got a call from Bob’s secretary telling me that Bob wanted to see me and I wondered what it could possibly be about. In his office, he said, ‘You know that trash by the monorail…’ and I jumped in, ‘That is all taken care of. I called maintenance about it.’ “He replied, ‘I know. They just called me. In the future, you don’t have to tell people that Bob Matheison said something. We are all in this together. It is the job of all of us to keep the park clean. That’s what Walt taught me. No matter what our job is, part of that job is to help keep things clean.’
“And that made a big impression on me. Not just that I didn’t have to use a bigwig’s name as a club to try to get things done but what the job of all Disney cast members really was. The job was to keep the park clean, friendly and operating no matter what our official job title was.
“Like all those early WDW leaders, like Dick Nunis and Sully, Matheison walked the talk. They didn’t just hide in their offices. They went out into the park and respected those who worked there. You saw them getting involved and doing things themselves if they needed to get done. They were trained by Walt and they were as close to Walt as some of us would ever get.”
Matheison was born January 30, 1934 in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in Telecommunications. He then served two years with the U.S. Army at Fort Hood, Texas where he was the chief of the radio-television branch of the information office.
Following that, he worked at radio station WFAA in Dallas, Texas, broadcasting news, sports and special events. Later, he was the radio announcer “voice” of the California Angels, and the USC Trojans football team. After he joined Disney and moved to Florida, he emceed the Disney's Community Service Awards each year, an activity reflected on his window on Main Street at the Magic Kingdom.
In 1960, Matheison received a call from an old college friend, Tommy Walker, who was in charge of Disneyland Entertainment, and offered him a job at Disneyland as a sound coordinator. Matheison was in the process of doing an interview with Senator J. William Fulbright when the call came from Walker.
Disney Legend Bob Matheison and his wife Arra Mae both worked at the Disney Company for more than 20 years.
He accepted, becoming responsible for programming anything audible to guests, ranging from recorded music to teaching Jungle Cruise skippers how to speak into their microphones to be understood clearly. Matheison then became manager of what was then known as the Customer Relations Division that handled the tour guides, but also Entertainment. It later evolved into the more familiar Guest Relations and a separate Entertainment department.
“I always laughed that it was called Customer Relations because it was pounded into us that we didn’t have customers; we had guests,” Bob told me. “The first time I met Walt was on top of the MO8 building at Disneyland in the dark,” Matheison said. “Tommy was my boss and he had brought him up there to see the fireworks. I was on the microphone cheerleading the crowd into doing 'rahs' and 'oohs' over the P.A. system. I had never been to Disneyland before I was hired. I had left California just as it opened and here I was responsible for producing radio and television broadcasts from the park among other things.”
By 1965, Matheison was assigned to manage operation of “it's a small world” and to supervise the technical assistance staff for the Ford Magic Skyway, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, and the Carousel of Progress areas at the New York World’s Fair. Disney Legend Bill “Sully” Sullivan was his assistant and Matheison recalls his old friend fondly.
Sullivan’ book of his own memories was recently published: From Jungle Cruise Skipper to Disney Legend and it includes some other adventures with Matheison not told in this column or next week's:
“I probably have 150 Sully stories but most of them I can’t tell and some of the others are filled with ‘colorful’ language. Sully told me that his wife wanted some of that language removed entirely from his book but he was able to keep in some ‘damns’ and ‘hells’. After all, Walt would use that casual profanity as well. It was common at the time and no one thought anything about it but it is different these days. Here’s one story that still makes me laugh.
“The gals who worked at Small World had to move to New York for the World’s Fair on their own where we hired them. Disney didn’t pay any relocation fees for them in those days. We hired them in New York but we did try to help when we could. Some of them spoke different languages which was a huge help on the attraction.
“Some of them found housing at the LeFrak Towers buildings in Queens, New York. There were two buildings next to each other and they each had a regular elevator and a freight elevator.
“We went searching for furniture so that these ladies had something to sit on and a table to eat off of and that sort of thing. Something like finding a convertible sofa bed was considered pure gold. You know, the type of sofa where you could pull out a bed and then fold it back in during the day. We found one in one building but the ladies who needed it were in the other building.
“So Sully, Bill Hoelscher and I go over to the first building and, of course, the freight elevator isn’t working so we struggled to put the thing upright in the regular elevator, stopping it on the floor for quite some time so we could load it in. Sully who was a short guy is in the back of this thing and Bill and I are in the front holding it upright.
“So we get down to the ground floor and there are some irritated New Yorkers who have been waiting for the elevator for quite some time to come down. Bill and I jump out and the sofa springs opens in the inside of the elevator.
“Remember Sully is in the back and he is trapped by the sofa pushing him against the wall and he lets out this string of profanities that would make a sailor blush because he is trapped in the back.
“Bill and I think this is hilarious, but no one else does. So we had to struggle to fold this thing back up and get it out of there so people could use the elevator. So when people think that a Disney Legend is really something and knew what he was doing, they are wrong. We are all just regular people. We were making it all up as we went along, tried to have some fun, and made plenty of mistakes.
“Few Disney fans know about Hoelscher. He had a wild sense of humor. He would go into a deli in New York and the first thing he would do is order milk. You just don’t do that in a New York deli.
“One time we were taking the subway back from the fair to our apartments and he bought a bouquet of flowers. So he sat there on the subway seat in the train just looking forward, holding these flowers and quietly mumbling, “I am so sorry, dear. I don’t know why I ever did it” and so on. Every now and then he would turn to the person sitting on either side of him and shout “Isn’t that right?” and they would shoot right up to the roof. You know the work was so hard that we had to find things to help blow off some steam.
“Walt maintained show control over everything in his pavilions even though they were sponsored by other companies. Van France came up with this training program so we could get all these people we hired in New York to understand the Disney way of doing things and we ended up with some fine people. New Yorkers have their own ways of dealing with the public but we got them to do it the way Walt wanted people treated.
“People sometimes don’t know that in front of 'small world' was this massive structure called the Tower of the Four Winds. It had all these big different things on it that would spin in the wind. You can get some strong winds in New York and sometimes the things on the tower would spin so fast that they would fly off and embed themselves in the wall of the 'small world' building. That caught our attention.
“It was cold there as well and the old manual typewriters the girls were working on inside would freeze up. So we got them some portable heaters and sometimes they would blow out the power to the attraction temporarily.
“Guests would take pictures with those cameras that had the flashbulb cubes where they rotate on top of the camera and you can take four flashes. Well, when they had taken the four shots, they threw the cubes into the water trough of Small World and we had quite a time trying to keep that waterway clean and clear.
“When Walt came to visit, he never wanted to be ‘back-doored’ into any of the attractions. Sometimes the lines would be two hours long and we would stand with him while all the people in the line were whispering ‘Is that him? Why would he be standing in line?’ Walt wanted to see what the experience was like for the regular guests, not V.I.P.s. He was always like that even at Disneyland. It was important for him to see what the regular guests were experiencing and if they were being treated well.
“I believe it was on the Ford exhibit that the girl hostess recognized Walt and tried to lead him backstage and he refused. She came back twice more to try to do it and that last time you could hear the grumble in his voice when he politely said ‘no,’ so a couple of us went to her to try to explain he really didn’t want the celebrity treatment and it would be best for her health for her to back off.
“When it came time to take down the pavilions, we found that much of the copper wiring had disappeared from the exhibits. We talked to security and they shrugged their shoulders and said they had been there all night and never saw anything. We never found out who took that stuff.
“One truck driver took one of the cavemen who was in the Ford exhibit and there was no more room in the back of the truck so he wedged it into the passenger seat of his cab. He told me he got plenty of odd looks from other drivers going down the street and when he stopped at a truck stop everyone was gathering around to look and he said, ‘I have to let him ride. He is good friends with the guy who owns the truck.’”
Next week in Part Two, Matheison shares stories about Walt Disney World, including being on the research and development team and a handful of memories of people he worked with at Disney.
