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Bob Gurr, a vigorous, engaging man, began working for Walt back in 1953, when the effort to build Disneyland was going full steam forward. The relationship began when Bob's one-man company, R.H. Gurr Industrial Design, was employed to help design the Autopia attraction for Disneyland. As always, Walt knew a good thing when he saw it, and Bob quickly became a full-time employee at WED.

Over the course of a three-decade career with WED, Bob helped design over 100 attractions, including the Autopia, the Matterhorn Bobsleds, the Disneyland Monorail, and the Ford Company Magic Skyway ride at the 1964 World's Fair.

His post-Disney career continued to be enormously exciting, including work with Steven Spielberg designing the T-Rex for the film "Jurassic Park."

The following are some excerpts from an interview with Bob conducted for the film "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth." To see some film of Bob, please visit the Theater.

Bob Gurr

 

Q. In the early days of WED, Walt's plans weren't always clear, were they?

A. In those days, Walt was sort of gathering people almost like instruments in an orchestra and he put us all together but he never passed out the music. Oddly enough, I think he was the only one that knew where he was going to go and he knew the different skills that all the different folks had and I think that was the method he used to pick people -- put them all together and only he knew what the outcome was generally going to be and none of us knew the outcome until we would go to an opening of a new attraction and find out how it all worked.

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Q. Was it frustrating not understanding the full picture of what Walt had in mind?

A. In hindsight you'd think yeah, we should have known where we were going, but I don't ever remember being frustrated about not knowing the outcome. I just had a sense of trust because I saw everybody else had a sense of trust in whatever it was we were doing.

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Q. Do you remember the first time you met Walt?

A. I went over on Saturday mornings to start working on the body for this little Autopia car for Disneyland. When you have a whole automobile with no body on it, there's tires and guys will walk up, put their foot on a tire and then lean with their elbow on their knee. And we had a spare tire available and this guy walks up, unshaven, and I remember he had a, like a Roy Rogers belt on with little silver painted fake bullets and a funny-looking tie, and I thought he was probably a father or one of the night guards, because he just sort of oozed into the conversation. Then I noticed the other guys were calling him Walt and then when everybody walked away I thought, "Gosh, that's Walt Disney."
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Q. You were friends with one of Walt's earliest collaborators, Ub Iwerks. Can you tell us a little about him?

A. Well (as a kid), Ub Iwerks was on my paper route and I became friends with the rest of his family and particularly one of his sons because we went to the same high school, and all those years that I knew Ub Iwerks he never told me he [worked with Walt to start] the studio. He was such an easy going, natural guy, had this little shop in his garage and he would show me how guns are built and how you take care of things and he had neat cars and whatever neat car he had, he'd say, "Hey Bob, you want to go for a ride?" And I'd go out and go for a ride. Not until I was at the studio did I find out who Ub Iwerks really was. Because he was just such a regular guy.

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Q. When you were working on designing the cars for the Autopia, was Walt involved?

A. I wouldn't say Walt was looking over my shoulder as much as the fact that he was paying attention to what everybody was doing. For example, anything that was really interesting to him in any given building on any week, he would be in there looking to see what you're doing but not with the idea of looking over your shoulder. It's like, he was really curious to see how the ideas were coming.

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Q. On opening day, there were some troubles with the Autopia, weren't there?

A. On that day, my assignment was to keep all the Autopia cars running. And it was a day where all the cars were getting vapor lock and stalling and I was running around trying to keep all the cars restarted. . .  By the end of the first day we had, about half the cars were out of commission and within a week, I think two out of the 40 cars were the only ones left running.

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Did Walt get very upset about the problems with the cars?

A. I was out in the field with my own tools and my own Cadillac, sitting outside the Autopia ride trying to fix these cars as fast as they would fall apart. And after a week and a half or so, Walt came by and he just sort of sat there in the shade and just sort of looked at the whole thing, not any real strong emotion or anything but he indicated, well we got to do something. In other words, he wasn't critical. He wouldn't jump on you and say, you'd designed junk, make these things work. He just observed and knew something needed to be done.

I indicated that we had no mechanics because they were all over fixing the other attractions which were breaking faster, and I said we don't have anything designed here to maintain the cars with. So he went away and about a half hour later, here comes a guy with an old tractor dragging this little wooden building on a sled down the dirt road and pulled it up and he said, "Where do you want your damn garage? Walt just sent this over here. Tell me where you want it." So I kind of knew that Walt would see something, and he wouldn't be really critical, but he'd go make sure it got fixed.

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Q. How specific was Walt in his instructions to you?

A. I don't ever recall Walt come up to somebody and say, "Now I want this and I want you to do it and you do it this way and it's got to be done by such and such time." You know a typical order-giving thing. It'd be more like, he'd be in a meeting and he'd say, "Do you know what we need?" And you'd see that little mischievous twinkle in his eye and an eyebrow go up and he'd start to describe something to do with the future or an attraction that he wanted. And at that moment your brain would start racing. You'd see all the possibilities in your mind, just from the few words that he had said. Then he would come around and follow up what you were doing and it was like this sort of, I take a step, he takes a step, he looks at my step, I see his reaction. That kind of an ongoing thing -- massaging these ideas for these attractions till they were up and running.

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Q. What if you were going in a different direction than the one he had in mind?

A. You had to be on a parallel railroad track with Walt, or you were going to get it. And I think that is the classical illustration of the clash of egos in the entertainment world. I accidentally was on the right track because I was the car guy, the only guy in the orchestra playing cars and I was headed to where he wanted to be so I didn't get jumped for that. But other guys who had their own ego, I could sure see that there would be a big clash.

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Q. You were also involved in bringing a monorail to Disneyland. Tell us how that all began.

A. Well, serendipity really drives the world. Walt really wanted a monorail in Disneyland. And he and Lilly are driving along in a car in Germany, and just at that moment a monorail car drives from one side of the road to the other side of the road through the trees and Walt sees it. And he stops and chases the monorail over to a service yard where nobody speaks English. They send him back across the road to the administration building and Walt now walks in through the front door of a company that builds monorails. He'd discovered his monorail. Thirty seconds one way or the other, we might not have had a monorail in Disneyland.

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Q. In 1966, you were with Walt on a meeting with Westinghouse, followed by a memorable lunch. Tell us that story.

A. After we had a day at Westinghouse, with them showing us all their research and development center stuff, they gave us a really nice lobster lunch. We all got back in the limousines and we were going back to the hotel, and I was with Joe Potter and Walt, and Walt says, "Gosh, that wasn't a very big lunch, let's go get a cheeseburger."

So the three of us walk into the drug store at the Sheraton Hotel in Pittsburgh to get a cheeseburger and going into the store, Walt noticed that the merchandise rack had the Disney merchandise down on the bottom rack. So he said something like, "Come on boys, let's fix this."

And if you can imagine the three of us, fully grown men down on our knees, picking up the Disney merchandise and the sales tags off the bottom racks, and putting them up on the top and then putting whatever merchandise was up there and putting it back down on the lower one and a sales lady comes over, and very obstinate says, "May I help you?" And Walt says, "No, fine, we're all done here." And then we went over to get our cheeseburgers. But I was amazed that Walt's attention to detail and reality, in that Disney merchandise is not going to be on a lower shelf anywhere in the world, and he'll personally fix it.

 

Thank you very much.

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