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The 2002 Winter Olympics have drawn to a close in Salt Lake City, with style and elegance and a share of controversy.

Squaw Valley Olympics

What does this have to do with Walt Disney? Even though many of his most fervent fans may not know this, Walt was in charge of staging the Winter Olympics ceremonies in Northern California's Squaw Valley back in 1960. He did so in traditional Disney style, with an eye on making this the biggest and best show the Olympics had ever seen. These were the first games held in the Western United States and also the first to be televised.

Walt's proposals included ice sculptures throughout the valley, an enormous band for the opening ceremonies, entertainment nightly for the athletes, and much more.

Naturally, all this was pretty expensive. Recalls Ron Miller, Walt's son-in-law and one of the executives who worked most closely with him on this effort, "We were told that we had so much money to put on all these things. And we were way over budget. And Walt asked the gentleman who was running the Olympics to increase our budget because it shouldn't be costing the studio that much money. And word got back to Walt that, he had said, 'No, you agreed to come on at a set price and that's the way it's going to be.' So Walt called for a meeting. It was a tough meeting. To make a long story short, more money was forthcoming."

Squaw Valley Olympics

Art Linkletter, the television and radio celebrity and a friend of Walt's, helped him pull off the show. As he recalls, "He wanted to entertain the athletes and the officials in the athletes' village. This was not for the public and it was not a paid performance. It was a gratis performance by stars and entertainers and singers that we brought up from Hollywood. And every night, we had a small spectacular. We would have Roy Rogers and a bunch of cowboys staging a fight with stuntmen in a saloon that was made up on the stage. We would have singing by famous musical stars like Danny Kaye, or fashion shows. And they were all flown up from Hollywood and flown back the next day."

Walt at the Squaw Valley Olympics

Walt's efforts for the opening ceremonies were almost thrown off track by the weather. Walt had planned an amazing program, with two thousand doves released into the air and 4,000 high school musicians accompanying skier Andrea Meade Lawrence, who was to bring the torch to Kenneth Henry, who would light the Olympic flame. Linkletter: "But a blizzard had blown up the night before and it snowed steadily all night. We were on the air at ten o'clock in the morning on CBS coast to coast. The roads were so full of snow that some of the CBS announcers couldn't even get up to the location in Squaw Valley and I had to be pressed into service to do some of the broadcasting.

Walt and Lilly

"But Walt was unfazed by it. He says, 'We'll just go right ahead and with any kind of luck, the weather will clear and we'll get it on the air.' I would say that five minutes, to ten minutes of ten, it stopped snowing and it began to lighten up. We went on the air, we did a thirty-minute broadcast and five minutes after we were over, it started to snow again.

"And I said, 'Walt, you have a connection.' He says, 'No, it's just if you live right, things happen right.'"

 

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