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Jack Lindquist


Jack Lindquist was Disneyland's first advertising manager. He performed the job with equanimity (at a time when that wasn't such an easy virtue to come by) and he later moved up through a series of positions in the company's marketing department. By 1972 he was named marketing director of both Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

Lindquist, who became a Disney Legend in 1994, is a warm and charming man with a special ability to see humor in the world around him - and to laugh at himself. His memories of the early days of Disneyland contain both great stories and important insights.

Following are some excerpts from an interview done with him for the production "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth," now available in DVD

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Q. How did you get the job as first advertising manager for Disneyland?

A. The title was much bigger than the position. See, there was no ad department so I was an ad manager over nobody. I did a fantastic job of managing my staff. . . One of the first things I remember is coming to work every Monday we had a meeting in Card Walker's office at the studio with our ad agency. And both the ad agency and this massive advertising department presented creative concepts for the following week's advertising. And it got to the point where one time Card brought in the gardener who was trimming a hedge outside his office and he made the decision on which ad ran. And he made a good choice.

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Q. When did you first encounter Walt Disney?

A. The first time I really had any meaningful, personal contact with him was the dedication of Sleeping Beauty's castle, which Shirley Temple was down to do. And it was about four months after the park opened, and we were opening an attraction inside the castle. My boss was out of town so I was asked to write some remarks for Walt to make at the dedication. I wrote it, sent it up to the studio, never heard a word about it. The afternoon of the dedication, we were standing back in the castle with Shirley Temple and Walt looked at me and he said, "Who wrote this stuff?"

He waved the paper in front of me and I thought, well, this is the end of a wonderful career. But I owned up to it. I said, "I did." And he didn't say a word.

But at the dedication he read it verbatim, word for word, and that was probably, at the time, the proudest moment in my life. I'd written a page of copy and Walt Disney read it just the way I wrote it

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Q. Walt had a peculiar problem with your name, didn't he?

A. Any time I had any dealings with Walt, he always called me Bob. Now, I was wearing a name tag that said Jack but it really didn't make any difference. He'd say, "Bob, this is what we're going to do here, what do you think of this?" And so forth. Finally one day, we were at a meeting with Card and Dick Nunis and Walt, and Walt asked a question and said, "Bob, what's your opinion on that?" And Card turned to him and said, "Walt, his name is Jack." And he looked at me, and the famous eyebrow went way up in the air, and for a couple of seconds he just stared at me, then he turned back to Card and said, "Looks like a Bob to me." So it was fine with me. If Walt wanted to call me Bob, that was my name.

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Q. What did you call him: Mr. Disney or Walt?

A. From the start, everybody made it very clear and very plain that Disney, from top to bottom, from one end to the other, was a first-name company. I think for a lot of people it took a little getting used to. I came from an ad agency and, you know, the agency head was Mr. So and So as were heads of different departments. But it became a very comfortable thing very fast. There was never any pretension. You'd get in meetings and people just talked back and forth. So it was Walt, and Card, and Dick, and Don, and everybody we dealt with, Roy and so forth. It wasn't difficult.

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Q. Walt was intent on high quality in Disneyland, wasn't he?

A. There were many things in Disneyland that could have been created for less money. With less attention to detail. Walt never would stand for that. Whatever he did in the park was always done with the utmost quality. The maintenance and the care and the cleanliness and the landscaping, all those things which made Disneyland a very different and a very special place in 1955, and still today. I think the standards that were set and what Walt taught us in those early days still are taking place in the park that exists today.

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Jack Lindquist

Q. Tell us about his concern with cleanliness.

A. I think the best example I ever saw of that was when we took a group of journalists through just a week after Disneyland opened and we were going across the moat into Sleeping Beauty's castle and Walt was pointing the swans out to them and one of the reporters said, "Well, it looks beautiful now but you've only been open three or four days. Wait until the crowds really come and this moat is filled with cigarette wrappers and paper cups and floating Coke bottles and so forth."

And Walt said, "It'll never happen." And they said, "Well, why not?" And he said, "Because we're going to make it so clean, people are going to be embarrassed to throw anything on the ground." And I saw that happen continuously. I'd see people putting cigarette ashes in their hands and carrying them, or snuffing a cigarette and carrying it until they could find a trash container to put it in. Now, they could be on Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue or Regent Street, London, no matter, they'd never think twice about throwing a cigarette butt on the ground. At Disneyland, they thought about it. Because there wasn't any litter, there wasn't any dirt on the ground.

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Q. Others have commented that Walt thought that if you gave people the right information, they'd behave well. Can you comment on that?

A. A lot of it is more than giving them the information, it's showing them by example. It was never heavy-handed. There weren't then, and there aren't today, signs that say, "Don't throw trash on the ground." But you create an environment and an atmosphere and an ambiance that you feel out of place in doing something wrong if you do throw things on the ground or litter.

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Q. Was there anything about Disneyland that particularly frustrated Walt?

A. Harbor Boulevard, across from Disneyland, frustrated him tremendously and he was very disappointed in the city of Anaheim for not exercising greater control of the development that existed outside the park. Because less than 10 years after Disneyland opened, Harbor Boulevard was used as an example of ugly urban sprawl at its worst, with the telephone poles and the neon signs, and that really bothered and frustrated Walt because people were coming to his place and right at the front door was this ugly development. I think it's one of the reasons he was so determined that in Florida we had the luxury of enough land that that could never happen. That we could and would control the total environment, the total experience of our guests.

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Q. Walt was a brilliant marketer himself, wasn't he?

A. Walt was, intuitively, probably the most brilliant marketing genius who ever existed. And it pre-dates Disneyland in the whole merchandising of Mickey Mouse in the early '30s.

Nobody had ever sold American industry on participation in the theme park until Walt came along. And he understood it, and it provided additional financial dollars for him to continue to build the original Disneyland, and then to grow it. But nobody'd ever thought of that before. It also gave credibility and reality to the park that would not have ever existed. There was a Kodak photo store. It wasn't just a photo store. And there was a Carnation ice cream parlor, names that they could feel comfortable with.

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Q. One last story. Is it true that your son once found Walt to be tasty?

A. We were involved in a little publicity shoot in front of the castle and we needed kids. So several of us in the publicity department, advertising, brought our children in. And I had a two-and-a-half-year-old son who I thought would be perfect for the shoot. So they were in front of the castle and Walt was stooping down, even had one of the kids on his lap, and holding these little kids around him. And all of a sudden he let out this yell and he said, "This kid fanged me!" And I looked and it was mine.

And, you know, Walt said, "Whose kid is this?" So the first thing I said was, "Okay, whose son is that? Get your kid out of there." So Walt never found out who he belonged to. But my son has that picture in his office. And he's my partner in business today and he also spent 15 years with Disney in Tokyo and Paris.

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