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

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."

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'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.

"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.'"