On Nov. 22, 2013, I met Marty Sklar – Disney Legend and former head of Walt Disney Imagineering – in front of Town Hall in Disneyland.

It was unusually cool that day and a light rain was falling as we made our way up Main Street, U.S.A. toward Club 33 in the New Orleans Square section of the park.

With my wife Janet and our friend Mike Splitstone following behind, I chatted with Marty on a wide range of Disney-related topics as we walked along the fabled thoroughfare.

About halfway up Main Street, I asked Marty for his thoughts on the passing of Diane Disney Miller, Walt and Lillian Disney’s daughter, who died a few days before on Nov. 19.

“Her health had deteriorated since she fell back in September,” Marty said with a tinge of sadness in his voice.

In the years prior to her death, he added, “She had devoted so much time and energy to telling her father’s story and preserving his memory at the Walt Disney Family Museum.”

Marty went on to say how much he loved his trips to the museum and suggested – in not-so-subtle terms – that my wife and I should make plans to visit what he called “a real gem.”

“It means a lot to me to preserve Walt’s legacy,” Marty added. “Diane was always intent on doing just that. I’ve always appreciated what she tried to do … to focus on Walt the man, and what he accomplished. That was always her goal.”

It took more than a decade (one scheduled trip was canceled because of wildfires in northern California and another was called off thanks to COVID-19), but we finally found our way to the Walt Disney Family Museum in January.

Our time at the museum was, to paraphrase Marty Sklar, a real gem of an experience. What we discovered was a loving tribute and a true testament to Walt Disney’s life and career, just as Diane Disney Miller had intended.

The Walt Disney Family Museum is located in the beautiful Presido section of San Francisco, with the Golden Gate Bridge as a stunning backdrop.

The Presidio occupies the northern section of the San Francisco Peninsula and is a former U.S. Army base. Its sprawling grounds are part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and feature stunning views of the San Francisco Bay.

The Walt Disney Family Museum opened in 2009 and was the culmination of a years-long effort by Diane Disney Miller and her son, Walter E.D. Miller, to honor a man who meant so much to so many people around the world. The museum is owned and operated by the Walt Disney Family Foundation, a non-profit foundation.

According to exhibition co-curator and animation historian Don Peri, “Diane Disney Miller was a warm, generous, and compassionate person who had a vision for The Walt Disney Family Museum that she followed tenaciously as she and her son Walter led this family enterprise.

“She initially considered locations for the museum in southern California, but fortunately for us in northern California, they located it here in the Presidio of San Francisco.”

I’ve visited Walt Disney Presents, the walkthrough attraction at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and I’ve experienced the traveling Disney 100: The Exhibition. Both are well done and quite enjoyable.

The Walt Disney Family Museum, however, takes a more thorough, more extensive, and deeply personal look into Walt’s life, his family, and his career, and delves into the fascinating story of how his “amusement enterprise” was born, grew, struggled … but ultimately flourished.

It’s also much more detailed than the previously mentioned exhibits. For example, whereas Disney 100 had a scale model of the ground-breaking multiplane camera, the Walt Disney Family Museum features one of three surviving devices.

The museum also features a Universal camera, propped up on a wooden tripod, that Walt used during the early days of his movie career, as well as an innovative Circle-Vision 360 camera and the special water-tight device used to film underwater scenes for the Disney classic 200,000 Leagues Under the Sea movie.

Your journey begins in the museum’s lobby – one of 10 themed lobbies – where the 248 awards and citations Walt received during his career are prominently displayed.

Among them are the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the key to the city of San Francisco, and numerous Academy Awards … including the now-famous honorary Oscar Walt received for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (one regular-sized statue alongside seven smaller ones).

Once inside the expansive 40,000-square-foot complex, you’re immersed in the Disney family history, which is traced back to Ireland. There are never-before-seen photos and artifacts related to the Disney family, dating back to the 1800s.

There are photos and exhibits delving into Walt and his brother Roy O. Disney’s early years in the Midwest … as well as their trials and tribulations getting their fledgling animation studio off the ground.

There’s even Walt and Lillian Disney’s marriage certificate on display.

“It’s hard to get past the first section of the museum, it’s so enticing,” Marty Sklar said. “There’s a lot of early Disney memorabilia, things that Walt had recorded. All of us who knew and worked with Walt can really appreciate those things. They didn’t whitewash anything. It’s the whole story of Walt in a direct and interesting way.”

The deeper you go into the museum, the more sophisticated the presentations become. The museum features interactive galleries, animated shorts, movie clips, music, and listening stations to enhance the overall experience.

The story of the innovative Alice Comedies short films from the 1920s, which combined live action and animation, is explored, as are the challenges Walt and Roy faced in mastering synchronized sound and the use of color in their short films.

The story of the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs receives special attention (as it should, given the fact that it was the first-ever full-length feature animated film and represented a true turning point in the motion picture industry – which explains the special Oscar).

And, in keeping with Diane Disney Miller’s vision to present a truthful depiction of her father’s life, we see a display delving into the infamous Disney Studios animators’ strike in 1941.

The animators’ strike dragged on for months, adding to Walt’s personal crises at the time: His mother Flora died in 1938, and his father Elias passed away in 1941. Walt called that period of time “the toughest in my whole life.”

Also during the early 1940s, Walt and a small band of colleagues (known as El Grupo) toured South America as part of a U.S. government-sanctioned goodwill trip to shore up relationships with our southern neighbors.

The latter stages of the museum tour are perhaps the most fascinating.

You leave one section of the museum and walk through a glass-enclosed breezeway, which offers a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

At the end of the breezeway is the actual park bench Walt sat on while his daughters enjoyed the park’s rides … inspiring him to build a new kind of theme park “where parents and their children could have fun together.”

Upon entering the next gallery, you’re greeted by the actual Carolwood Pacific Railroad … Walt’s miniature, rideable train which ran through his property in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles.

Walt would take daughters Diane and Sharon, his daughters’ friends and even members of his staff on coveted rides along the winding Carolwood Pacific route.

The display is located to the left as you enter, at eye level, so you can take a good look at all the details Walt personally put into his beloved railway, including the red cushions that his guests sat on.

Above the train is a scale model of Walt’s property, showing the track layout surrounding his house.

As you walk down a winding ramp, a 12-foot diameter scale model of Disneyland catches your eye. You could spend hours looking at the intricate details that were put into the model, which depicts The Happiest Place on Earth in the 1960s.

I even spotted a model of the unique Monsanto House of the Future, which was on display in Tomorrowland from 1957 to 1967.

The final gallery display focuses on the latter stages of Walt’s life and career, from Disney’s participation in the 1960 Winter Olympic Games in Squaw Valley, California, to the company’s pivotal involvement in the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, to the failed attempt to build the Mineral King ski resort, to the creation of Walt Disney World, to Walt’s final days.

In fact, there’s an entire wall devoted to all the moving tributes that appeared around the world in newspapers, magazines and on television following Walt’s death on Dec. 15, 1966.

I was bitten by the Disney bug at the tender age of 5 in 1955. Throughout the decades, I have expressed my appreciation of all things Disney through newspaper features, on-line blogs and in my seven (soon to be eight) books.

Along the way, I was fortunate to be a Disney cast member for more than a decade, all while cultivating special friendships with numerous Disney Legends and Legends-in-waiting.

Our visit to the Walt Disney Family Museum served to further solidify my already strong affection for Disney’s wonderful world. As Marty Sklar said, the museum is a real gem.

For information on the Walt Disney Family Museum, visit https://www.waltdisney.org/.

***********

Special thanks to our friends Dorene and Mike Splitstone, who drove us from Disneyland through the scary Hughes wildfire near Santa Clarita on Jan. 22, to a wonderful and quaint Mexican restaurant in Santa Barbara, and then up the California coast to San Francisco. The Walt Disney Family Museum (and the city of San Francisco, for that matter) wouldn’t have been as enjoyable without their special brand of kindness.

Chuck Schmidt is an award-winning journalist and retired Disney cast member who has covered all things Disney since 1984 in both print and on-line. He has authored or co-authored seven books on Disney, including his On the Disney Beat, The Beat Goes On and Disney’s Dream Weavers for Theme Park Press. He has written a regular blog for AllEars.Net, called Still Goofy About Disney, since 2015.

Comments (1)