Growing up I heard that our grandfather, Edward Vance Standiford, had worked at Walt Disney’s animation studios. The details were vague, but as a kid I never thought to ask him about it. Years after he passed away I asked mom for details. She was very young—maybe three or four—when he worked for Disney, soon after the family moved from Phoenix to Los Angeles in 1939. Her clearest memory was of him sitting at his home drafting table, where he would draw cartoon characters for his two young daughters, but that was after he left the studio. If he did work there, it wasn’t for very long.
As I became interested in ancestry, I could find no evidence that grandpa ever worked at Disney. City directories in the mid-1940s listed him as a truck driver. I started to wonder if perhaps he was an amateur artist who used his talents to amuse his kids with sketches of Bambi, Thumper, and Flower (which mom clearly remembered). Perhaps they had conflated his hobby with a day job. I suspected I’d never know for sure.
But then
in 2015 American Experience broadcast
the documentary Disney. The middle of
the film chronicles a five-week labor strike at the animation studios. Disney had
ordered his cameramen to film the picket lines, and portions of the footage
appeared in the movie. Mom was watching and called later to ask me if I’d seen
grandpa—because she had! I rewatched the strike section in slow motion and
there he was, at the 1:53:12 mark, marching across the screen. How sure are we that it was him? He looks exactly like this in every photo I've ever seen of him, whether he was camping by a river or hanging out in the back yard: white shirt, thin tie, wire-rimmed glasses, hair slicked back.
Edward Vance Standiford walking the picket lines, 1941.
The documentary then described how, after the strike was settled, Walt Disney used the film footage to identify the troublemakers, and over the next few years systematically fired them all. I think it reasonable to assume that grandpa was one of those let go. It would explain his short career, and also why he didn’t talk about it.
During the year(s) grandpa was likely there, Disney produced the following classics: Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942). Given that mom remembers him drawing several characters from Bambi, could he have worked on that film?
Then in 2021 a proposal was submitted to me at Chicago Review Press: The Disney Revolt. It was a history of the 1941 Disney animation strike written by Jake S. Friedman, a historian who appeared in the documentary . . . almost exactly at the point in the film where grandpa appeared. It seemed like a book idea that fit well with our press, (and of course I was interested,) so I brought it to our proposal committee and they approved it.
Friedman had access to the Disney archives on the strike, and looked for grandpa’s name among the files, but they mostly had information on the organizers and leaders, not the rank-and-file participants. Still, he was nice enough to include grandpa in the appendix listing identified strike participants, with a * caveat that he was “* Identified solely from strike footage.”
The Disney Revolt (2022) by Jake Friedman
So what exactly did grandpa do at Disney? Based on what I learned from the book, he probably wasn’t an animator—that wasn’t a job you learned overnight, and there weren’t very many doing that job. My guess was that the was an “inbetweener” who took the animators’ sketches and filled in the illustrated steps between them—24 for each second. This would have given him a lot of practice rendering Disney characters, even though he was not an animator, and it corresponds to Mom’s memory of what he did at home to entertain his daughters.
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