Bob Gurr

Supposedly, Walt didn’t care much about your personal life so long as you got the work done. He wasn’t without his prejudices—boy, could we talk about his prejudices, though certain of them are overblown in the current discourse—but honestly the Disney studios, and from there the parks, were considerably more integrated than a lot of the other studios were during Walt’s lifetime. You don’t have to dig very deep to find women, black people, Hispanics, Asians, and so forth doing notable work for Disney. The fourth class of Legends is the first with women—Julie Andrews and Mary Blair—and X Atencio was in the tenth.

And then there’s Bob Gurr. He studied industrial design and briefly worked at the Ford Motor Company. He moved to Los Angeles, where he set up his own company. Friendship with former classmate Don Iwerks led to his designing the original Autopia cars. He also designed the Matterhorn bobsleds and apparently was the first person to ride them, before the ride officially opened. Somewhere I read that he drove the monorail in its first run, with Richard Nixon on it, but I now can’t find that detail.

In short, when Gurr was made a Disney Legend, he’s one of the people who definitely deserved it. He has windows at both Disneyland and Disney World, both referring to his design of vehicles. But even at Disneyland, he designed more than just vehicles. He helped with Mr. Lincoln, as in “Great Moments With.” Across town at Universal, he helped create their giant King Kong. He did the giant UFO for the Opening Ceremonies at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. For decades, he was one of the biggest names in design in Los Angeles, including helping on the T. rex in Jurassic Park and the Godzilla in the ‘90s American Godzilla.

And, yes, I do have him in the right column. He’s the second person I have this month in “if still alive” territory. As I write, he’s got to live for twenty-three more hours or so and I’ve got my fingers crossed. He worked personally with Walt. The man is 94. He was given a lifetime achievement award from the Themed Entertainment Association over a quarter-century ago, and I feel quite sure that they were hoping they got it in under the wire, because my goodness but the shape of amusement parks is what it is in no small part because of his work.

He refers to having “designed two lives” for himself, which is interesting phrasing. He was married for a while, and he was closeted until after he’d gotten that THEA, but it seems to have been one of those things where some people knew, or at least suspected, but the work he was doing was so consistently good that he was basically irreplaceable. He did the Doom Buggies for the Haunted Mansion and the various vehicles on Main Street. If you’ve been to a Disney park, you’ve almost certainly ridden in a vehicle with Bob Gurr’s imprint on it. Walt kept him around whether he knew Gurr was gay or not.